A brief thought on a recent Believer piece than I’m only writing here because boy, do I need to post.
In his otherwise very thoughtful and persuasive essay “The Military-Toy-Industrial Complex” from the October 2008 issue of The Believer, Jason Boog cites Tom Engelhardt (author of The End of Victory Culture) as saying of the Hasbro-employed brains behind the 1980s revamp of G.I. Joe, “They were on to terrorism before Paul Wolfowitz and the other neocons. If you think about Cobra, it’s an amporphous terrorism organization. It’s not state-bound; it’s a superhero terrorist organization. I don’t want to claim that they saw the future literally, but in essence these guys did grasp the future—there wasn’t any money in the Russians.”
I don’t want to knock the creative genius of the folks at Hasbro, nor do I want to deny the originality and vision of comics vet Larry Hama, who was so instrumental in creating the Joes and their nemeses; but the notion that Cobra was something new under the sun is a bit off base. A better grounding in adventure genre fiction would have been useful to Englehardt (and Boog). Just to name a few obvious Cobra predecessors: SPECTRE (from the James Bond movies) was a non-ideological terror group, and they’ve been around since the early 1960s; SPECTRE was clearly an inspiration for Marvel Comics’s HYDRA (Nazi roots but in practice just world-conquerors) and AIM, also from the 1960s.
In fact, it occurs to me that while Boog is placing the 1980s Joes in the context of the evolution of war-related toys, what they really represent is not merely an extension of the classic toy solider but something new: A militarization of the superhero. The Joes use code names that might as well be superhero names, they live in a secret headquarters, they each have a distinctive “power,” they each have a distinctive “costume.” (Hell, one of them is even named “Flash.”) What GI Joe did was not just to make being a professional soldier look cool*, it was, perhaps more persuasively, to blur the line between being a soldier and being a superhero.
*Although, as Boog notes, the Hama-penned comics often did not stray away from depicting the more horrible and terrifying aspects of a soldier’s life as well.
[edited to remove something that came off sounding mean-spirited even though I didn’t mean it to.]
Unrelated: This great essay at Thought Balloonists on panel form and function in Casanova #14.
Not to forget (to blur mediums): KAOS, SD6 / Alliance of 12, & THRUSH (nope, not the disease…).
“Cobra,” by the by, was the name of an amazing John Zorn piece (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_(Zorn)).
At the moment when soldier & superhero blur, is it in part because the soldier becomes stateless? Or…able to leap tall nationalism at a single bound? (Defending “Democracy” instead of a country?)
Ah, GI Joe … the only comic book I ever bought.
Nice work, Prof.
Been missing your posts lately.
KAOS! How could I have forgotten? Laura, your comment about nationalism is interesting in light of the forthcoming live-action GI Joe movie; my understanding is that, since big action movies make lots of their money abroad and maybe American militarism isn’t enjoying it’s highest popularity right now, they’re making the Joes an international force rather than a strictly American one.
Stevo, thanks for the sentiment; I’ve been consumed with moving house and then working on a conference paper. Hoping to return to more regular (for me) posting now . . .
Thanks for this close reading of my piece, I really appreciate your thoughts. I wish I had considered adventure genre fiction and comic book bad guy organizations in my overall argument—they undoubtedly compose a large part of Cobra’s DNA. I’m thinking of SPECTRE, especially. As a kid, I was utterly fascinated with their cavernous, computer-filled, and oddly cozy secret bases.
To Tom Engelhardt’s credit, I kept our conversation constrained to G.I. Joe’s real-world influences. By focusing on admittedly scattered references to Vietnam, Afghani freedom fighters, Central American revolutionaries, and Russians, my piece skipped most of the pulpy and non-ideological forerunners to Cobra. I admit I skimped on that side of the argument, and I completely agree that those popular culture influences played a large role in shaping G.I. Joe comics and cartoons.
Finally, I was intrigued by the new movie’s shift from 1980s nationalism to a stateless force as well. Sadly, there just wasn’t enough room for everything. Your excellent ideas about global consumption of G.I. Joe, SPECTRE, and the militarization of the superhero could easily float another essay. Thanks again for reading.
Thanks for stopping by, Jason! My nitpick aside, I did enjoy the piece.
I love author comments!
See the release dates here for the orginal cartoon series:
Sept. 12, 1983
imdb.com/title/tt0231626/releaseinfo
This series was titled “The MASS Device”
) I’m not sure if I would prefer Weapons of MASS Destruction instead 
Sept. 10, 1984
imdb.com/title/tt0231627/releaseinfo
This series was called The Revenge of Cobra and portrayed Cobra’s latest plot to conquer the world using a device that can control the weather.
haarp.net/haarpoverview.htm
Sept. 12, 10? They were missing Sept. 11th as a release date…. oh n/m, they covered that one too
I just found this on YouTube as well:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC39ZjAMmtM
Certainly this is all just coincidence, I’m sure
So, this brings up a question I had about the new Bond movie. Is “Quantum,” the new supersecret association of evil, just a revamped version of SPECTRE? If so, that would be incredibly cool. But, then again, why not just call it SPECTRE? Too 1960s?