soooo, i just finished #115 (which i had never read before) "Counting Coop"

wait -- I mean "Counting Coup"

wait -- do i trust the cover title, or the splash title, which it's also referred to at the end?

well, assuming the guts of the book are correct, it's "Coup"

but... the guts of the book aren't correct -- case in point:

When the unnamed pilot is given the mission, he is told that his backseat man is Slipstream.
It certainly looks like Slipstream.

but the man is referred to as 'Dogfight' by the pilot -- this is, of course easily explained away by the
fact that Dogfight was the backseat man for Ace in the initial plane landing.

and then Hawk refers to Slipstream as 'Dogfight' while commending them on the mission...

So, ok, i understand everyone makes mistakes -- and, being a reprint, it's only fair to reprint the mistakes, right?


anyway -- who's the pilot?

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The main pilot of the story was Ghostrider, who they could not refer to due to obvious copyright issues. The REO/backseat pilot is Slipstream, mistakenly refered to as Dogfight, but I believe the fabled Marvel No-Prizes were given out to people who said Ghostrider called Slipstream Dogfight as a joke because he forgot Ghostrider's codename.

It's that way in the original comic as well. I was soooo confused.

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I believe a lot of it had to do with the artist trying to keep up with what had become a huge roster of team members, and perhaps a bit of apethy. GI Joe was on it's slow slide into being taken over by Snake Eyes and the vast hordes of Ninjas who dominated most of the rest of the run, so I don;t think people at Marvel were paying as much attention to the book as they used to.

Fortunately, the readers were.

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Well, no it wasn't. This was during the Benzheen war, which was some of the grittiest, most realistic parts of the entire comic line. The ninjas were there, but they weren't excessive.

Slow side? Not hardly.

It was a series of stupid mistakes. The pilots were always hard to tell apart, since most of them lacked personality (except Wild Bill), so the mistakes are completely understandable (though annoying).

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I've always read it as a joke.

Ghost Riders way of f'n with people who can't remember his name.

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Which would work if Ghostrider only referred to Slipstream as "Dogfight" *once*, and only immediately after Slipstream had forgotten his code-name. But he says it twice, with no real irony or smarminess (at least the second time), and then Hawk says the wrong name at the end...

So if Larry had meant it to be a joke, the joke was on him: he actually got the two pilots mixed up in the second half of the book, and R.U.O.T.M.O.M.O. no-prizing aside, it's a mistake that will confuse people picking up that issue with the 2-pack and having no real context to put it in.

exactly. which kinda goes back to my question: why didn't they fix it? they had the opportunity to do so for the reprint (as evidenced by the spelling error on the front cover)

So, part of me wants to believe they did it to honor #115 in all it's warts and glory --

but most of me believes that no one applied any critical thinking to the reprint.

-- did anybody at Hasbro read it?

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does anyone at Hasbro know the difference? These arent the same guys who worked with the original 3 3/4 in line... are they?

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That is a great point. This is the same team that gave us a permanently green faced Zartan because they had no idea that the original Zartan had color change plastic not paint. They probably don't know the difference between two obscure Joe pilots like Slipstream and Dogfight, especially when drawn in a comic book. Of course this doesn't excuse Larry's blunder in the original printing of the book.

The no-prize explanation of Ghostrider messing with Slipstream for forgetting his codename is good enough for me, I guess Hawk somehow got in on the joke too.

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