Welcome to the 788th Armored Division!

My name is Kevin, and I have created this blog to showcase my GI Joe collection. I have been a GI Joe fan since 1982, when I was 6, and I have been actively collecting GI Joe as an adult since the mid 90's.

My collecting interests cover a pretty wide spectrum, from loose complete examples of Action Figures and Vehicles that I have been playing with since my childhood, to collecting the various modern incarnations from Hasbro's GI Joe line that have been sold at retail since 1997, as well as army building, customizing my own figures, vehicles and play sets, and buying many non-toy licensed items that I find interesting. I have also built up a small collection of pre-production artwork, hand made prototypes and assorted test shot VSPs that relate to both the vintage and modern GI Joe eras.

My plan for this blog is to share my collecting efforts, information, displays and dioramas I have created, as well as some current projects that are in the works, with other GI Joe collectors.

Now, there are many great resource and news sites out there who archive and showcase these types of items, like the long running yojoe.com, Joeintel.com, Hisstank.com, Generalsjoes.com, Joedeclassified.com, and others, and while I am very friendly or have even been on staff with many of these sites, I have never been comfortable blindly handing over photos of items in my collection, some of which could be sensitive due to the nature of the items or even the way they were procured, and in many cases, have cost me a lot of money, just to feed some site owner's pockets with hits and clicks and traffic or whatever. Whether it was a big corporate backer gobbling up sites with bandwidth issues, an ego maniacal collector hiding behind some self serving high and mighty community mission statement, or an overly ambitious site owner looking to be the biggest site ever no matter what, none of them felt right for me. (Though, I will say, by far the most selfless and community minded archival site out there is Dan Moore's Joeintel, and I wish more people would go there and discover the resource he has built, almost exclusively out of his own collection and pocket.)

For years I have wanted to do my own thing. Something where my own hard work and hobby enjoyment wasn't being used or exploited by others. I just didn't know what to do, exactly. I'm not a programmer, or a computer guy, and the ones I ask tend to roll their eyes at the idea of something as fleeting as a fan site, or they try to charge me an arm and a leg to set something up. I started blogging for the potentially dead 30pov.com in 2009, and I thought that format was easy enough for me to handle, so here I am.

I am hoping to make this place part archive, part showcase for customs and dioramas, part review and op-ed, part sharing stories from my experience as a collector and dealer, and hopefully fun enough that some people find it and enjoy it, and I can focus on a new aspect of my hobby.

Kevin Watts