Creation Story
One woman made the first wave, and the comic declined to make an occasion of it.
Her file card reads like a dare. Shana M. O’Hara of Atlanta, Georgia: martial-arts training from the age of nine under a father and three brothers who all taught it, first black belt at fifteen, Advanced Infantry Training, Ranger School, then Covert Ops School, Marine Sniper School, the Special Air Service course and the Marine Tae Kwon Do Symposium. Somewhere in there she graduated summa cum laude and passed the Bar. Hasbro shipped her with a crossbow.
That gap between the résumé and the plastic explains what the file cards were doing. Larry Hama wrote them for G.I. Joe’s first decade out of his own military background. Every figure in the first wave arrived carrying a service record before a reader met the character on a page. Hers runs to two military schools and four specialist courses.
What the comic added was tone. Hama received a run of fan mail for writing “a fully competent female soldier” who was “never treated differently from any of the guys.” The mail is the tell. Readers wrote in about it, which means the treatment was unusual enough in 1982 to rate a stamp, and a licensed toy tie-in was not where anyone expected to find it.
First Appearance: G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero #1
G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero #1 carries a June 1982 cover date and went on sale March 2, 1982. Larry Hama wrote both stories in the issue, Herb Trimpe pencilled the lead and Bob McLeod inked it, with Don Perlin drawing the ”…Hot Potato!” backup and Tom DeFalco editing. The first appearance (1st app) of Scarlett is in the lead story, “Operation: Lady Doomsday.”
The plot is a rescue with a complication. Dr. Adele Burkhart, a nuclear physicist, is at a press conference denouncing the military when Cobra kidnaps her. She has just finished condemning the people who now have to go get her, and General Flagg sends the team anyway, to Cobra’s headquarters on a Caribbean island.
Thirteen Joes work the story, split into two groups. Scarlett goes in with the insertion team, alongside Grunt, Stalker, Short-Fuze, Snake-Eyes, Breaker and Flash. Hawk, Rock ‘n Roll, Clutch, Grand Slam, Steeler and Zap come in behind as the heavy assault. She is the only woman on either list.
Snake-Eyes is on the insertion team beside her. One of her first assignments is training the new team in hand-to-hand combat, and that is where the two of them meet. The hostage in “Silent Interlude” and the burning helicopter of the origin two-parter both grow out of a pairing this issue puts on the same team.
Scarlett’s first appearance shares the issue with the other twelve Joes who work the story. Each of them shipped as a figure that year, and each figure carried a file card with codename, allegiance, specialties, education and background. In 1983 the originals were re-released with swivel-arm battle grip, so a straight-arm Scarlett is the 1982 release.
Scarlett’s figure shipped in the toy line’s first wave in 1982, straight-armed and carded, packed with the XK-1 power crossbow and the file card that gave her the biography above. Every source dates that figure to a year and stops. The comic has a day. The Bronze Age comic is her first appearance, the figure is a 1982 first-wave release, and neither carries a claim about which reached a customer first.