Creators: Wes Craig, Jason Wordie
Story: Duke infiltrates a Cobra island facility, quickly taking out Cobra troops. One gets by him and causes him a lot of problems with his mission, almost killing Duke. We discover there is some sort of facility and Duke plans to blow it up. The Cobra trooper returns and Duke is finally able to overpower him but it causes him to delay his escape and he barely makes it out of the explosion but takes some radiation (?) as well but has something for it. He finds a cabin and it seems to have pictures of a man he used to know, who shows up and attacks Duke. He kills the man and gets data from a Cobra laptop before leaving.
Writing: While this is part of the Silent Issue month, I do feel this is one of the weaker stories from the line. Duke just doesn't seem like the "sneak in and take out a facility" guy when the Joe team has characters like Snake-Eyes and Storm Shadow that are stealthy and do those things. There is also a lot of background story going on, with Duke knowing the guy... but how well and why does he have his dog-tags? Then the Cobra trooper (Cobra Feral Berserker Razorclaw) has giant knives on his uniform and instead of stabbing Duke with them he... bear hugs him? And there are just a lot of clichés here. Duke doesn't check to make sure the guy is dead, timers on the bombs are set for only a few minutes and we have a guy falling into a vat of toxic chemicals.
Art: Art is also not the strongest in the series. It doesn't feel as finished and polished as the other issues. Duke has a strange one-page spread after he gets dosed in the toxic chemicals or radiation and it just doesn't seem to really fit. It was nice to see various Cobra troopers but it really didn't help overall.
Overall: Probably one of the weaker contributions in the Silent Issue month, Duke Silent Mission feels like they had an interesting idea for a story but needed to slap Duke into it, though he didn't quite fit into the story. It has a bunch of clichés as well and the art isn't the best. There are some good makings of a decent comic in here but this one just doesn't quite make it.
