This was pretty well known info from (probably) 1998-2002. There were very few JOe discussion boards but when DD opened their's up in 2001, a lot of guys were there. And a lot of stuff came to light. When Brian Savage Peterson jumped ship and created SavageSoundoffs.com, a lot of people jumped ship. Savage eventually left and SS became JBL. Then it went to Ring of Collectors and then it went back to it's own entity as JoeBattlelines.

Now here's the kicker. EEJ and Justin have explained this to me many times but I'm not sure how much I can remember accurately.

There are rights (copyrights) for all sorts of names.

The concept of Spirit, let's say, needs rights to
1. The Name
2. The likeness of the character in toy form.
3. the likeness of the character in print form.
4. the likeness of the character in cartoon/onscreen visual form.

You lose one of those and things can get messy. Someone like Hawk lost his names to Lanard (in fact, I believe Lanard grabbed all the names they could as quickly as possible cuz they are Walmart's army soldier toy division). There is, most likely, a HAWK figure under their toyline, Corps. So for JvC, Hasbro used General Tomahawk. Later on, it became General Abernathy. A lot of the characters suddenly had "-" around their codenames. That's how Hasbro got around a lot of the problems. Look for Hawk over on Yojoe.com and see how far you get. And then look up General Abernathy.

The only group that can do a canonized history would be Hasbro itself. You want history, read the filecards and make the history up yourself. People like to think that Hama's universe is canon but he's even said it interviews that he's telling the story of what he thinks GI Joe is. And the fact that it catered to SE and Scar and CC in the end, that was his story.

In the 80s, did any of us NEED the comic or cartoon to push a figure to want it? Not usually. I had Falcon and Tunnel Rat before I ever saw them in the movie and they were my fave. Flash was my 1st fave Joe in 82 and the comic had nothing to do with that.