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USA Today interviews Max Brooks about Hearts and Minds

Sometimes it’s good having geeks in the right places…  Brian Truitt at USA Today is an unabashed toy, comic, and media geek, and as such, gets some great opportunities to interview folks connected to those properties and share them with us!
Over on USA Today, Mr. Truitt has posted a great interview with Max Brooks, who  talks quite a bit about G.I. Joe: Hearts and Minds the new limited series he’s writing for IDW.  The interview is littered with great insight and information, and even discusses some characters from Hearts and Minds:

“Some choices have been controversial, he says. At first, Brooks couldn’t use Major Bludd (because he’s starring in a subplot in Chuck Dixon’s G.I. Joe book) or Spirit. “I think they were afraid of coming from a point of view of the standard stereotypical Indian,” Brook says. “That’s actually what piqued my interest, when they said Hasbro doesn’t want to offend people. It was barely passable in the ’80s, and is just not acceptable now.”
In subsequent issues, Brooks has a Blowtorch story that discusses whether using fire is a humane form of warfare, and a tale about explosives expert Tripwire, “who doesn’t have a death wish but is in a situation where he can’t lose — that’s how he looks at it,” Brooks says. “The character of Doc deals with an issue of medical malpractice, which hits very close to home. With Dr. Mindbender, instead of making him the traditional mad scientist, I wanted to deal with the issue of religion vs. science and ethics vs. science.”

The interview also reveals that Max Brooks was a Joe fan as a kid, and that he contributed a short story to a collection of G.I. Joe related prose that is possibly in the works.  Check out the full interview right here, and be sure to add Brian Truitt’s Twitter Page to your favorites and follow him!

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JoeCon 2010 – Where the news at?

I know for it being a JoeCon weekend, GeneralsJoes has been noticably silent, but trust me that’s only because it’s been a very busy few days.  When not taking tours and volunteering for the club, I’m being dragged to restaurants and bars and forced to consume various amounts of food and liquids that are totally alien to me.  Trust me, after one of those sessions, you don’t want to see me typing.
Anyway…  news has been pretty quiet to date.  There’s not a whole lot more to report.  I’ve got photos of the showroom preparing to upload, but most of it is what we’ve seen before.
However…  Hasbro is kicking off their seminar tomorrow, and it promises to be full of new information about G.I. Joe: Renegades, other 2011 plans, and there should be some new product to check out as well.
Eagle eyed picture watchers have hopefully located a new Spirit figure in various diorama pictures already.  But if not…

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Looks like he’s a combination of other parts, but a pretty awesome combination.  I promise more good stuff is coming, it just hasn’t hit yet.