At a certain point in the vintage GI Joe line, there came the arrival of certain soldiers whose sole duty was to turn the legions of Cobra troopers into People Pudding, and Backblast was right there with a shoulder full of Kablooey.
Backblast was the Anti-Aircraft Soldier, the guy whose job it was to stare down a Rattler and treat it like he had that Nintendo light gun and was playing the world’s largest game of Duck Hunt. And the Rattler was a duck. And the sky was the 19 inch television set. And I will overexplain this metaphor until you pass out! Pew Pew!
Backblast was a stepping stone in a long line of Joes whose primary function was to become a life support system for an insane amount of kaboom. It started off with Zap, and then moved up the ranks to Bazooka, Fast Draw Backblast and culminating in Salvo, who I’ve already done an article on. Backblast’s meager triple rocket launcher couldn’t compare to Salvo’s quintuple Assblaster 5000, but it’s pretty close. And when it comes down to it, it doesn’t matter, because this is pretty much like if you go to a friend’s birthday party and he says “we’re going to have a water gun fight” and you’re all “hey that’s cool” and you show up with the entire goddamn Atlantic Ocean in a trash bag.
Despite being an Anti-Aircraft Soldier, Backblast took on the occasional HISS tanks and ferrets and whatever, but his real specialty was turning Cobra troopers into Beefaroni. Some Joes would say that a fellow Joe using a missile on one single Cobra Trooper was an egregious waste of military resources, but Backblast didn’t want to take the chance on that trooper getting back up. There were no flesh wounds when Backblast left the combat zone, because there was barely any flesh left. There were just clouds of red dust that might have once been spleens and kidneys.
I love that Backblast’s file card is as batshit crazy as literally everything else about him. Growing up, he lived beside an airport, and the constant sound of planes taking off and landing drove him so insane that all he wanted to do when he grew up was blow up planes. It’s like a kid that grows up on a farm and spends the next fifty decades of his life punching the f##k out of any cow he comes across, dead or alive. The farm version of Backblast goes into McDonald’s, asks for a quarter pounder with cheese, and then punches the burger right out of it’s sesame seed coffin.
Backblast made only a handful of appearances in the increasingly crowded GI joe comic. His initial appearance had him blow a plane out of the sky because he wouldn’t have had it any other way. He popped up again a few issue later, this time with just a regular sized gun, which is kind of like a porn star showing up for work with impotence. Or something. I don’t know, I’m no scientist.
Backblast’s cartoon appearances were apparently limited to a cameo in the initial mini-series that kicked off the DiC era shows. Which I guess makes sense, because you couldn’t have a Joe turning Cobra Troopers into People McNuggets with his gigantic missile launcher on a kid’s cartoon. Somewhere, some old lady would have called her Congressman and freaked out.
No, Backblast was a rampaging engine of kerpow whose exploits were best left to the living room floor. No comic or cartoon could possibly hope to deliver unto kids the pure unadulterated carnage that rocketed out of the business end of his shoulder-mounted missile launcher, nor would they be able to conjure up the mental image of one of those bright red missiles exploderating a hapless Viper into a sticky goo, causing one of his fellow Viper’s to exclaim in a high voice “Oh my god; you killed Kenny! You bastard!”
That was best left up to the toys, and the extraordinarily deranged playtime facilitated by near psychotic, plane-hating, people-pulper Joes like Backblast.