Midgarn's Tales: Recruiting Drive: Battle Plans (Issue #2)

"Battle Plans" happened from the question I left myself in "Convoy": What the heck was on the spy satellite that Cobra wanted GI Joe to access? My first idea was a computer virus, but I discarded that pretty quickly. Maybe Cobra /had/ footage on the video that they didn't want GI Joe to see? Or maybe, Cobra used the idea to substitute video...

"Battle Plans" starts with a memo. The original document looks beautiful, with a seal of the Army letterhead that I created... but I couldn't get the text redaction that I wanted. The memo is the start of my running joke - Psyche-Out is possibly the most-mentioned character in my dio-series, but I still have not come up with a suitable custom of him.

I just couldn't bring myself to do the funny headgear and all the radar dishes.

The memo is really my first major foray into CSS too, which apparently doesn't translate when you copy and paste the pate into Blogger. Feh. So, "Go go gadget Snipping Tool." I did have ideas for a scene three that never got scripted, much less filmed. I had created a custom "Quickstrike" (Think the Army's M1126 Stryker ATV) that was for the Joes' civil engineers, but I couldn't work out what I wanted them to do, or how to shoot the photos.

That, and the "Power Rangers" front-end loader remained an annoying shade of yellow even after being boiled in dye.

Mission personnel for the scene that never was: Zap, Tollbooth, Tripwire, Hard-Drive, Tunnel Rat.

I started introducing other elements and deviations. Side conversations are in a different color to separate them from the main conversation. Spoken dialogue in a non-English language has a different font. Meta digs like Wreckage's facemask. An element that gets explored later is that in my Joe-Verse, Firewall is ~~still~~ back to a Cadet. Production values are still very beginner here, but I'm proud of the shot of Short-Fuze firing the mortar. That one I researched - they toss the mortar down the tube and turn away like that to avoid the blast.

"Battle Plans" was originally published by me on 6/3/2005. GI Joe, Cobra, and all named characters are copyright Hasbro, IDW, etc.