Team America the Beautiful Thursday!

I meant to start this one on Independence Day, but you saw how that turned out.

When you think of Team America, you might think of the 2004 puppet movie from the South Park guys, which I never bothered to see and don't plan to. Nothing personal, I just don't think they're that funny when they don't have boundaries to push.

So, like a good comic book nerd, when I think of Team America, I think of this:


Yup. Three guys on dirt bikes. And you thought U.S.1 had potential!

Team America was based on a line of toys from Ideal back in the 1970's, and you know how good comics based on merchandise always are. Still, it was written by Jim Shooter, so it was probably better than it should have been. Which isn't to say it was good.

The problem, of course, is that when you are dealing with characters based on little plastic men, you can only have them do so much. So, they jumped around:


And they jumped around:



And they wore terrible outfits. You see, when you are making little plastic men, it helps to have the same basic design so you don't have to pay for extra plastic molds. So, the only thing that made them distinguishable from one another when they were wearing helmets was the color of their outfits. This of course, made being the colorist on Team America the worst job in the industry. Check out the confusion here, where the character of Honcho suddenly appears dressed as Reddy:


See? Honcho is driving in the first panel, but then Reddy is dressed as Honcho while he talks to Wolf. Honcho then shows up dressed as Reddy and yells at Reddy, who then gets into the race dressed correctly. Wolf gets colored correctly because he has a really big mustache. And just think, this is only the first issue!

Did I mention they jump around a lot? I did? Well, one more time:



See you tomorrow!