“You mean you go to your doctor for a flu shot, tetanus shot–even the booster shots little kids get–and you get souped up with COBRA mind potion number one?”

There are a lot of GI Joe gamebooks by Find Your Fate, but this one came highly recommended, so I decided to snatch it up. It didn’t disappoint, either.  Obviously it’s written for kids around ten years old, but I was surprised by how readable it was for an adult.

Operation Poison Dart puts you in control of a new Joe called Headset, an expert in mind control and hypnotism whose gadget is a special strobe light that instantly hypnotizes people. There are several points throughout the book where you get to use this ability to trick people into doing your bidding, and Headset does prove himself useful during the rare scene when he’s been deprived of his precious gizmo.

Your mission is surprisingly topical: stop Dr Mindbender and COBRA from using a bogus vaccine to control people. I can hear the Google fact check police at my door already! 

Several Joes, including big bad Roadblock and wise-cracking Dusty, join you on your mission to stop Dr Fauci’s diabolical plan, and also hopefully stop an already-brainwashed American general from launching an unauthorized missile strike.

And unlike the cartoon, it turns out people get hurt in these books, which means the gamebooks take their reader base a bit more seriously. It always boggled my impressionable young mind that no one ever got a scratch on ’em in GI Joe despite all the lead flying around, and people always abandoned their exploding vehicles just in the nick of time. The only casualties were the robots, and by Season 2 even the robots weren’t allowed to get hurt! Here I get to see a COBRA stooge go up in smoke with his getaway truck; and apparently the other Joe books have no issues with letting a Joe catch a bullet, or blowing up COBRA stooges by the armful. Young me would’ve loved these books for that.

I’m not saying I was a bloodthirsty little kid, but I was smart enough to know that where there’s gunplay, there’s also flesh wounds. Probably why I appreciated Jonny Quest.

I’ve seen a few excerpts from some of the GI Joe gamebooks, and while they aren’t always great, the Joes usually have decent banter during the exposition scenes. It’s important to have good banter and one-liners in any story that revolves around a military unit, because banter and one-liners are a staple of male bonding. In the opening chapter of Poison Dart, Flint says about Mindbender, “Calling that monster an interrogator is like calling the Spanish Inquisition a public opinion poll.” Not a bad one-liner for a kids’ book.

I don’t know how the other Joe books hold up, but Poison Dart’s plot clips along at double-time, and there’s rarely a dull moment. Some endings are better than others, though: for every explosive finale, there’s also a lame two-paragraph ending in the vein of, “You got brainwashed, and did COBRA’s bidding for a while, but then GI Joe eventually un-brainwashed you and then you won.” There is, however, a neat sequence where you face off one-on-one against Mindbender while he holds you prisoner, which has a bit of a James Bond feel to it. And there’s one particularly grim ending where your whole team is brainwashed while you’re left to die horribly in the desert. Ouch.

But the path where (spoiler alert) I was “brainwashed bananas” and nearly partook in a very enthusiastic team suicide bombing excursion? That was quite frankly hilarious.

The artwork is quite good as well, and has a very comic book feel to it, although I wish the artwork wasn’t so rare. I like the opening shot of Dr Mindbender, and the Joes fighting a losing battle against a tank in Death Valley.

Some gamebook recommendations turn out to be duds for me, but if you want to start reading the GI Joe “Find Your Fate” series, you could do worse than to start with Operation Poison Dart. Lots of forking paths and some fun military action, too.