The G.I. Joe Artwork of Hector Garrido

Cobra C.L.A.W., 1984

I'll never forget being a kid and looking up at toy racks in stores like Woolworths, the now defunct BEST chain, and the out of business KB Toys and trying sooooooo haaaaard to decide which G.I. Joe toy I would momentarily beg, plead, and bargain with my mom to get me!  Without a doubt it was the colorful and exciting packaging that drew me toward those toys.  In my opinion the design of the 1980's G.I. Joe toy line, from the artwork and graphic design of the packaging to the character design and sculpting of the figures (for the first several series there were very few duds!), and the thought put into each character's biography are unsurpassed in the realm of American toys.  All of those physical and intellectual details are what Larry Hama (writer of the file card biographies and the original 155 G.I. Joe comics from Marvel) calls "the little bit of information that triggers the internal fantasy machine to fill in the holes, gloss over the mold lines, forgive the compromises for the realities of manufacturing and creates that wholly personal 'state of play' wherein universes are born."*  

Toys were to me (and still are, let's face it) like a Bowflex home gym for the imagination.  They provided a little information and then you'd tell yourself a story and take your toys for a ride anywhere you wanted and for as long as you felt like (or until you had to go to bed).  As an illustrator I undoubtedly still enjoy the benefits of those moments I spent contemplatively smashing Snake Eyes into Destro and putting the bad guy into a jail made out of sticks jabbed into the dirt.

As I get older and look back more and more to those times under the trees in my yard with my tons of Joe toys (I was a lucky kid to be surrounded by so much plastic) I realise how much of an impact the art and design, especially the packaging art, has had on me as an artist.  And I only recently discovered the name of one of the artists responsible for it:  Hector Garrido.  From what I can tell Garrido is responsible for much of, if not all of, the artwork featured on the packaging of the earlier series runs.  He contributed to everything from action figure and vehicle packaging to game backgrounds and the covers for the G.I. Joe Find Your Fate book series.   I have no idea how long he contributed to the toy line but it is obvious as the series advanced the artwork was being made by someone else, but his were the best.

In my searches online for Hector Garrido's links to G.I. Joe almost  no one on Joe fan sites and message boards mention this guy at all.  A little strange and sort of sad considering that he's probably hugely responsible for a lot of folks appreciation for the toys and even for inspiring other artists.  It's also interesting to think of the impact his renditions of those characters had on the sales of G.I. Joe toys for Hasbro (and still have, for in recent years the company has reissued a lot of characters from the original line with packaging that features Garrido's old artwork but updated to accommodate changes to the figures).  After all, and at the very least, that artwork maybe more than anything else influenced the imagination of all the boys and girls who were standing there in stores just like I was, aiding them in their decision of which figure they wanted most.  Well, the artwork and how many accessories they came with.

Apart from G.I. Joe, Garrido illustrated countless book covers for Gothic romance novels (flickr page

), Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir's 1970's action adventure series "The Destroyer" (which in 1985 became the Fred Ward starring, OKish/crummy action flick Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins [it didn't continue]), Paul Kenyon's espionage series "The Baroness" (no relation to the Joe character), an awesome looking series of horror paperbacks from Avon Books (including Richard Matheson's "A Stir of Echoes"), and Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys adventures, and much, much more.

* From the Foreword of Mark Bellomo's "Ultimate Guide to G.I. Joe 1982-1994" 2nd edition

Anyway, here are some of my favorites:

Cobra Commander, Battle Armor, 1987

Barbecue, 1985

Cobra Soldier, 1983

B.A.T.S.,  1986

Cobra H.I.S.S. 1983

Doc, 1983

Dusty, 1985

Firefly, 1984

Cobra Commander, 1984

Lady Jaye, 1985

Mutt and Junkyard, 1984

Flash, 1982

Storm Shadow, 1988

Cobra Flight Pod, Trubble Bubble, 1985

Zartan's Swamp Skier 1984

Zartan. 1984

Crimson Guard, 1985

Baroness, 1984

Snake Eyes, 1985

Tele-Vipers, 1985

Alpine, 1985

Bazooka, 1985

Beachhead, 1986

Eels, 1985

Scrap Iron, 1984

Torch, 1985

Destro, 1983

Storm Shadow, 1984

Yeah, No.

Having made my first illustration for use in a textile design the best advice I can think to offer is to MAKE SURE YOU CUT STRAIGHT LINES! when you dissect your image.  This a collaborative project I'm working on with artist/designer/speed reader/computer nerd/regular nerd Kati Driscoll for this show to benefit the World Wildlife Fund.  Basically you have to cut your drawing into quarters when you get to a certain stage so that you can fill in the edges of the drawing in order for everything to meet up evenly on each side of the image.  This way your image becomes a repeating pattern.  It seems like a weird magic trick and it's really cool and pretty fun to do.  BUT! make sure make sure make sure you cut straight bloody lines or you're in for some photoshop nightmares.  Anyway, it was tough the first time around and I'm sure if I had a wacom tablet then it would have been much easier to correct my mistakes.  The above images show what the final piece looks like repeated as it would on a large piece of fabric, the letter design that Kati contributed to the piece, a close up of all the dumb gaps I made and had to fix, and an overlay that I had to do on a transparency sheet (complete with dust and cat hair, damn you Stilgar) over the original drawing so that I could fill in areas around the letters that were a little bare. Before I started I found a really helpful artical at Design Sponge, here is how I learned to stop worrying and love making repeating patterns.  I'm also working on a comic book for the show and this is why my next installment of Ovoyyamar will most likely be posted next week instead of this week.  It's weird and disorienting when you've been working all day at your computer only to look up several hours later to realize you're sitting in the dark.

In the Shadows of the Sunlit World

Part 2 of Ovoyyamar is lurking out in the shadows...

Until it strikes I highly recommend staring into the abyss that is Luminism.  There are a lot of amazing 19th century American landscape artists and their works that I have found very inspiring while working on this comic.  I could stare into John Frederick Kensett's 'Lake George' forever I think.  One random day someone will say "Hey, where did Alan go?" Then they'd look into the painting and see me floating off to the far shore before disappearing into the mysterious mountains.  To my mind there is something very quietly ominous concealed in a lot of those paintings.  This is basically what is happening in my head whenever I look at this stuff.  You'll find what you feel I guess.  That's art for you.

OVOYYAMAR: Part One

I've been working hard on my comic and have finally begun to post it! You can check out the first part here: Ovoyyamar.  

G.I. Joe-a-Day

In March I took on another Fun-a-Day project along with Alien-a-Day because I figure why not make things harder for myself. I fell way behind on these guys but finally finished them (does it count as fun-a-day if i did like 15 in one day?)

When I was a kid, going grocery shopping with my mom meant that we might also get to go to Woolworth's (when they were still around), K-mart, or Hera help me, KB Toys. That is if we didn't act up. I tried my best not to because I desperately needed to have a new G.I. Joe toy whenever I would come within 50 feet of a purveyor of the little, plastic soldiers. I would brake out in a sweat and probably drag my mom forward the way my dog pulls me along when he has to go O-U-T.

Toys are great and I was a very lucky kid to be able to have so many (did I appreciate them then?). My brother and I would wake up Christmas mornings when our parents were still together to find He-Man and Skeletor mid battle around Castle Grey Skull. Look over to the left and you'd find Luke Skywalker hanging out of the bottom of an AT-AT Imperial Walker surround by Storm Troopers. My dad had taken all the toys out of their packaging and set them up all around so that it looked like a bunch of toys broke into the house and decided to reenact the Battle of Waterloo on our living room carpet. Dad would go to a dozen stores to make sure he found every single character known to be part of the set as indicated on the back of each figures cardboard packaging. When the smoke cleared and all the toys were put away (which rarely happened), my favorite, hands down, is definitely G.I. Joe. They were just the right size to manipulate with my little kid hands and also stuff into the G.I. Joe fanny pack I wore at all times. They came with me to get pizza, they came with me in the car ride to my grandmom's house, I took them to the dentist office, the beach, the woods, everywhere. I kept them all neatly arranged in a big fishing tackle box. Knives and small arms on the first level, heavy machine guns, special weapons, and helmets on the next, the bottom compartment was filled with Joes and backpacks. I even had little plastic containers, about the size of a roll of quarters (i think they original were some kind of M&M candy pack), that had extra rubber bands, screws, and hip joints, in case I needed to perform any medical triage on the casualties of play. In short, I had a problem.

I still have a bunch of Joes. I don't really do much with them but I think about them a lot. As an artist I really appreciate the character design of my favorite guys and gals. Some designs were rubbish, especially as the toys neared the 1990's, but when they were good, in my opinion I think they were pretty great.

This is a set of 31 G.I. Joe action figure portraits painted from my little collection (4 or 5 of these I actually don't have but were some of my favorites so I included them). Let's start off strong with:

STORM SHADOW - Cobra - Ninja Assassin/Intelligence - 1984

WET SUIT - G.I. Joe - SEAL - 1986

NUNCHUK - G.I. Joe - Nunchaku Ninja - 1992

BIG BEN - G.I. Joe - SAS Trooper - 1991

SNAKE EYES - G.I. Joe - Commando/Hand to Hand Combat Instructor - 1985

SNAKE EYES - G.I. Joe - Commando/Hand to Hand Combat Instructor - 1982

FOOTLOOSE - G.I. Joe - Infantry Trooper - 1985

BUDO - G.I. Joe - Samurai - 1988

SPIRIT - G.I. Joe - Tracker - 1984

FIREFLY - Cobra - Saboteur - 1984

SHOCKWAVE - G.I. Joe - S.W.A.T. Specialist - 1988

FALCON - G.I. Joe - Green Beret/Medic - 1987

STORM SHADOW - G.I. Joe - Ninja - 1988

BEACH HEAD - G.I. Joe - Ranger - 1986

AIRTIGHT - G.I. Joe - Hostile Environment Specialist - 1985

NIGHT VIPER - Cobra - Night Fighter - 1988