Detour, if you have any particular critiques of the convention comics, please share. I've seen some reviews in various corners, Blood for the Baron, for instance, but part of growing as a writer is listening to reviews, positive and negative alike.
I wish I had some, but I didn't even know it existed up until about halfway through all these subscription figures. In spite of being part of multiple Joe communities.
In fact at some point recently someone described what the Joe club comic/newsletter was like and the comic was not even mentionned.
Any time con sets are discussed, it's all about the toys. Never see any discussion about the comics, and the first time I was even aware a comic had been produced was for the 2009 con set (and even then it was just for a few character scans in a review of the toys), and heard no mention of comics in the following two con sets.
I dunno... I mean, I guess I know now they exist, but unlike the TF fanclub's fiction it seems to be largely ignored by the fandom at large.
The closest thing to a critique of the fiction I'd heard came from Sure Fire's reveal, who criticized Sure Fire's inclusion in said Club fiction as being "a lame mary sue shoehorned in at Lane's insistance".
So.... yeah. Sorry, there's just not much to comment on when I don't even HEAR about the stories. I don't know what else to tell you, I mean you and Siph wrote a lot of killer TF fiction.
Okay, a few things that hopefully clear some things up.
The Joe Club Newsletter, for the most part, did not have a comic. Maybe one snuck in for the last issue, I'd have to double-check. The comics didn't really start until the Joe Club switched over to the same "Magazine" format that the Transformers Club uses. Which was probably just under two years ago.
As for the convention comics, I believe that the 2008 Headhunters comic was the first of those. That story did have Sure Fire in it, but he was constantly being trashed by the other Joes in the comic. The only time he entered anything resembling that "bad-ass Mary Sue" realm was when he shot two Headhunter soldiers that tried to get the drop on him. But really, that was somewhat tame compared to the heroics from the other Joes in the comic. And, well, for GI Joe comics everywhere.
David Lane does work closely with the writers for the GI Joe comics. He is the editor after all. So he does offer suggestions for the story and characters all the time. For this year's Club comics, Dave suggested Sure Fire. Not insisted, but suggested. Since the Dial-Tone story arc featured the Joes from the 2008 Headhunters comic rather heavily, it made sense to have him in the planning/coordinating phase of the mission.