Jo Yoe!

Hoi,

As talked about earlier I have been away from my keyboard for some time. This is mainly due to quite a lot of regular work and renovating parts of the house. This does not mean I have been totally idle on the hobby-front. Some spare time was found and used to paint some stuff here and there amongst which is a new project which has me pretty much excited.

Both my brother and yours truly are children from the late eighties/ early nineties and as such have witnessed a lot of strange changes in our recent history like the ascendancy of the Television and the WWW. We went from 2 black and white Dutch governmental channels to 3 Dutch, 2 Belgian, 3 German and the British Armed Forces Channel through to the plethora of Channels we have now. Eventually a lot of American television programs and series came on screen. During the days that the first commercial networks appeared, the ones we could actually receive over here were two German commercial networks. Now I understand German pretty well (I can make myself moderately understood, but my written German is flawed to say the least) but in Germany most American series were provided with a German language voice-over. So series like the A-team, Knightrider, Airwolf and the Dukes of Hazzard were watched with German texts, it doesn't really do it for me to be honest! "BA gebe mir dein GUNN und dann BOOST ich ihn weg!" Anyway eventually Dutch television caught on and American cartoon series appeared on our channels, I loved Dinoriders, Transformers, MASK, D&D and most specially the Sunbow GI JOE Series. With the series the action figures blew over, years after they had appeared in stores in the US and they were labelled as in the US not converted to Action Force or something else. As kids we saved up to buy these kind of toys: I bought plastic soldiers, my brother collected the original 3, 3/4 Joe action figures.

This is still pretty much the case: I collect wargames, figures brother-dear still collects Joes. For some time I have been looking to combine those interests in order to find some suitable figures to transform into America's Daring and Highly trained Special Missions Force and their Enemy. It seems that for the moment at least my search has ended. I have been lucky enough to find some left over mini's from someone's private commission which are not available commercially. It is not an exhaustive collection in that all characters and troop builders are done but rather the ones the initiator liked the best. That suits me fine since he appears to be liking the same figures as I did from the series and comics.

The first figure I have painted up has just Stalked up the screen of your PC and here he is!

More will follow in this project over time but for now enjoy!

Cheers Sander