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Originally Posted by Raven
It's not a case of Cobra being the only enemy, more of a case of Cobra representing all of America's enemies.
The early Cobra figures had a very regal soviet look because the US was still in the cold war.
Come the late 80's and 90's, America had started making enemies with the middle east, and as a result we got figures like the Night Creepers with Sinbad-swords and Turbans.
When the Ghetto culture was peaking, we suddenly had Headman and his drug rings.
When people suddenly became hippies, CESSPOOL made an appearance!
So Cobra is the only enemy in the sense that it is all of their enemies teamed up (like some lame-o Marvel crossover set)
Nowdays though, this has completely changed. It's politicaly incorrect to have such real-world connections in a toyline, and so all the characters are just made as generic badguys.
Modern politics and conspiracies may have a large impact on my future stories, as there is just so much going on right now, it's pretty scary.
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My perception of Cobra, as with all 'enemies' of the US, is that it represents the power struggle over capital in this 'new world order' (Bush, G.H.W., 1991). In my dio, Cobra is Al Qaeda and vice-versa because they have gripes with US control of the world's capital(google "Iran's oil bourse a threat to the petrodollar" and you'll see some of the future history book footnotes to our coming war with Iran-and, ironically, some of the footnotes to why we are in Iraq). Even though the different sects of Islam are not on speaking terms, the 'common enemy theory' places them closer to each other than we can ever be and it seems we are drawing a line in the sand and pushing them towards each other no matter the perils that may exist.
As in the 80's, the struggle between capitalism and communism was often represented, either subtley or overtly, in the Joe storylines. The contemporary representations of this struggle for power is the struggle between capitalism and the 'faceless'(read: Cobra) others that capitalism shuns or exploits. These faceless individuals are the backbone of the resistance to the current world power- the US. We do truly live in mighty uncertain times. The 80's were a very complicated time growing up with the red scare, the Korean airliner being shot down, and the precursors to modern global conflicts- Pan am over Lockerbie, Libya, Beirut etc. In essence, the 92 bombing of the trade centers, the bombing of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the 99 bombing of the USS Cole and September 11th were the first shots in a very long, prolonged battle for the supremacy of the planet.
As an American with young children, I can only hope that the drama of the current world stage of politics, economy, and religion plays out so that the ficticious Cobra arsenal in my dio does not manifest into reality threatening the future of innocents. My fear is that because holy warriors "measure time by the century," this global war for supremacy of resources, hearts, minds, capital and control is but beginning to surface.
Sometimes art reflects reality and sometimes reality reflects art- hopefully, for the sake of many, my 'silent' dio story stays somewhere in the realm of fiction...