G.I. Joe

Now hear this, soldier. Cobra is on the move again — a private army with a serpent for a flag and the whole world for a target — and the only thing standing in its way is a hand-picked strike team that answers to a single codename. This is G.I. Joe: the elite counter-terror unit and the sprawl of adventures built around it, where Snake Eyes, Duke, Scarlett and the rest run missions against Destro's weapons cartels and the Cobra Commander's schemes for global takeover. The catalog holds the tie-in fiction that grew out of the toy line, cartoon and comics — action-adventure aimed squarely at younger readers, organized into a few distinct lines. The Find Your Fate gamebooks put the second-person YOU in the field: branch by branch you choose the infiltration route, the target, the extraction, and live or die by the call — several of them written by R. L. Stine before Goosebumps made his name. Alongside them run straight-ahead adventure novels (the 1988 line) and, later, the movie-era books: novelizations and young-reader chapter stories under The Rise of Cobra and G.I. Joe vs. Cobra, with Barbara Siegel, Kathryn Lance and Megan Stine among the hands. Expect brisk operations, gadget-heavy hardware, clean lines between the Joes and Cobra, and the franchise's signature note — every mission ends knowing more than you did going in. There's no campaign order to memorize; each book is a self-contained sortie. Newcomers who want the real hook should scramble a Find Your Fate title and take command; those after a plain story can drop into a Rise of Cobra novelization cold. Yo, Joe.