Cobra Commander
| Strength 6d |
Agility 7b |
Intellect 10c |
Willpower 9b |
| Hand Size: Edge: |
5 (30) 3 |
Powers:
(none)
Equipment:
H.I.S.S. Tank, B.T.R. (v2) (i): borrowing the Gi Joe team's B.T.R. process, Cobra has applied it to several of their vehicles, including the old standby, the H.I.S.S. tank. Trying this one out himself, Cobra Commander has been able to showcase how this High Speed Sentry can be reconfigured in the field into a completely different vehicle. The B.T.R. H.I.S.S. Tank is described in its own vehicular entry.
Shotgun (v1, v3) (a): sometimes, when he's feeling particularly sadistic, Cobra Commander has taken it upon himself to carry about a shotgun while in the field, even though he rarely has to use it; oh, sure, he wants to, but he isn't often put at significant risk. He can use this gun as per a +5 weapon against his opponents with every deadly blast. And, of course, the wounds are ugly...
Staff (s): while Cobra Commander's first staff was something merely ornamental, this one is something... more. Intrinsically tied into the Vemomization process, this device stores all kinds of D.N.A. samples for the Commander's use in building his genetic freakshow troops. In addition, he can use it to inflict his Strength +2 in blunt damage, and wield it as a symbol of the Venom troops' leadership.
Submachine Gun (a): while he has a veritable arsenal at his beck and call, Cobra Commander usually prefers to use a submachine gun when he needs to shoot someone - or something. This usually takes the form of a pistol, but if he's on a specific mission, he'll often use a rifle if necessary. Either way, he can use these guns as +4 weapons when firing a single shot, +5 if firing semi-auto.
Hindrances:
(none)
Skills:
Artillery (a): wishing to be proficient in all the weapons that Cobra produces, as well as most of the other stuff out there, Cobra Commander has spent years after years figuring out how to effectively utilize any and all weapon systems out there - even the heavy stuff. When using rocket launchers, mortars, and the like, he does so at one difficulty level lower than is usually required.
Boxing (s): a vital combat skill that the Commander has picked up in his years in charge of Cobra is the essential ability to defend himself should he find himself unarmed - no matter how unlikely that turn of events may be. In unarmed melee, Cobra Commander can divide his pre-cardplay action score between two attacks per exchange, the last of which will occur as a contingent action.
Criminology (i): the flip side of his business dealings, this talent reflects the abject disrespect that Cobra Commander has demonstrated when making money - no matter who gets hurt in the meantime. Telemarketing scams, door to door salesmen, money laundering, and more - if it's not on the up and up, Cobra Commander's is a veritable master in making it happen.
Electronics (i): one of the many skills that he acquired in his descent into criminal despotism, this talent reflects the Cobra Commander's mastery of advanced hardware - either the design or repair of such, since his group needed a technological edge to overcome the forces before it. When building, repairing, or reverse engineering a device, Cobra Commander does so at a reduced difficulty level.
Finance (w): his original claim to fame, the Cobra Commander knows money - and how! Of course, his particular business deals are what one could call shady in nature (pyramid schemes, etc...), but he's the master of financial matters. He has countless contacts in the business world, and can utilize his Willpower score in efforts to make business deals of any stripe.
Manipulation (w): more than anything else, Cobra Commander is an extremely savvy and charismatic man. He knows what makes people tick - especially the criminally minded. Cobra Commander makes the manipulation of such people look like child's play; in fact, one could call him a world class manipulator of people in general (and unscrupulous types in particular).
Marksmanship (a): one of Cobra Commander's hobbies - well, virtually his only hobby, really - is target shooting with automatic pistols. He's done this for years, both for personal enjoyment and to give himself something of an edge should he run into one of his innumerable opponents in the field. This talent allows him to make gun-based attack rolls at a reduced difficulty level.
Military (w): Cobra Commander has never been trained in a proper, military fashion, but he has erected his own, quasi-military structure around him. In a style unique to the Cobra infrastructure, Cobra Commander knows his military protocols like the back of his hand (he did invent them), and can readily lead a body of fighting men into conflict - which he does quite often.
Piloting (a): in order to fully make use of the gear at his organization's disposal, Cobra Commander has been trained in the use of his various kinds of aircraft, from helicopters to fighter jets to even Cobra's experimental spacecraft. When flying any such vehicles, whether he's in combat or not, Cobra Commander makes any flight-based actions at a reduced difficulty level.
Calling:
World Domination: it pretty much goes without saying, but more than anything else, Cobra Commander wants to rule the world. To this end, he's schemed endlessly, plunging countless nations into chaos and - in one of his most brilliant schemes, making his own. However, he sometimes gives various hints that suggest greed as a secondary motivation, as the man loves money. And how!
Costume:
All three uniforms the Commander used this year are variations on his fourteenth. The first includes a long black jacket accessorized with red and gold ribbons and awards, black trousers, black boots, white gloves, white belts and holsters for his gear, a red half-cape, and his distinctive battle helmet. It is a mainly black helmet, with a mirrored face mask that completely obscures his features.
He wore his second at the wheel of his B.T.R. H.I.S.S. Tank. It consists of a long blue jacket accessorized with red and gold ribbons and awards, blue trousers, dark gray boots and gloves, dark gray belts and holsters for his gear, a red half-cape, and his distinctive battle helmet. It is a mainly blue helmet, with a mirrored face mask that completely obscures his features.
His third uniform this year was of different coloration, but otherwise the same. It includes a long dark brown jacket accessorized with gold ribbons and awards, dark brown trousers, dark brown boots and gloves, light brown belts and holsters for his gear, a black half-cape, and his distinctive battle helmet. It is a mainly dark brown helmet, with a mirrored face mask that completely obscures his features.
Personality:
All that matters to Cobra Commander is the acquisition of money and power - all else is irrelevant. After years of heading his own terrorist organization, his sheer criminal genius has been tainted by an infectious paranoia and he has truly bought into his own hype, believing that he is the best new thing since sliced bread. However, he almost always seems to succeed in his conflicts against the Joes.
If not immediately, of course, he'll do so in the long run...
Real Name: unknown, but his last name is known to be exceptionally strange
Occupation: world-wide troublemaker, former used car salesman, former small business owner, former ruler of Cobra Island (while it was a real country)
Legal Status: American citizen wanted by most governments on earth and beyond for a plethora of crimes large and small
Marital Status: divorced
Alias(es), if any: too many to count
Group Affiliation: Cobra
Height: 6'
Hair: brown
Eyes: brown (sometimes appearing blue, possibly due to false-color contact lenses)
Weight: 165 lbs
Other Distinguishing Characteristics: Cobra Commander has a short ponytail, a long, Fu Manchu style moustache, and almost always wears a pair of round-rimmed sunglasses when 'out of costume', artifacts of the 1970s that he retains to this very day.
Story:
The man who would become the one true Cobra Commander didn't start as a world-wide chaos bringer, instead having his roots as a small time businessman. While he was generally unsuccessful in his ventures, either in used car sales or in other shady schemes, the man didn't truly go off the deep end until his brother, Dan, was killed in a car crash.
The fact that Dan was dead drunk when he caused the wreck that killed him, much less took out three innocent people in the process, was irrelevant - the man was compelled to blame someone else for the accident. Turning matters around in his head, the nascent terrorist decided that the last surviving relative of the family Dan wiped out was to blame for all this.
After all, they were going to pick him up from the airport, and if he hadn't been there, Dan wouldn't have hit his family - they wouldn't have been on the road! As his twisted mind dreamed of vengeance, his business collapsed around him, and when his wife confronted him about this, he who would become the Cobra Commander left her, taking his young son Billy with him.
Descending into a wandering life on the road, the future Commander's paranoia grew in staggering leaps, and he came to the conclusion that Big Government and Big Business was out to get the little guy, guys like him, and that something had to be done about this state of affairs. To this end, he began to hold meetings across the country, recruiting local thugs and malcontents into his growing power structure.
Having a band of the disenfranchised, stupid and lazy at his beck and call, the man launched an ambitious pyramid scheme sales program, and used the profits to found an underground organization dedicated to circumventing the system, garnering power through terrorism and extortion. He named this organization Cobra, and renamed himself the Cobra Commander!
Originally, he based Cobra in the quaint town of Springfield, a nice place that had fallen on financially hard times - and was more than ready to accept Cobra's goal of beating the system by disregarding it. Everybody, from the mayor to the police to the small business-folk were under the complete thrall of the Cobra regime, which was just the way the Commander liked it.
During this time, as Cobra really picked up steam, the Commander put his revenge fantasies into motion. He started by contacting the mercenary known as Firefly, who he sent to Japan to track down and kill the man he held responsible for Dan's death, a man known only as Snake-Eyes. However, Firefly found the man to be unreachable, having taken residence within the Arashikage ninja clan.
As such, he recommended another assassin to do the dirty deed, and with that information in hand, Cobra Commander journeyed to Daytona Beach, where he first met the shape-shifter known as Zartan. Tempting the man with the challenge of the kill and the thrill of exceptional remuneration, Cobra Commander convinced the man to take the job - even though it would take him months.
Zartan spent over six months working on the job, but ultimately failed when he accidentally killed the Hard Master, lord of the Arashikage clan, while he demonstrated a technique to imitate another person's body language and sounds - namely, Snake-Eyes. Nonplussed, Cobra Commander simply decided to wait for more competent assassins to make themselves known before attempting to kill Snake-Eyes again.
Horrified by what was going on, Billy, the Commander's son, blanked out most of his childhood, and joined an anti-Cobra resistance movement in Springfield. As he did so, his father embarked on various plots to take over the world - or at the very least, several small portions of it. However, the Commander did not go unopposed in his goals, for a new military unit had been formed to combat groups like Cobra.
It was called Gi Joe - and claimed his imagined nemesis, Snake-Eyes, as one of its members! As such, the Joes got in the way of innumerable schemes devised by the Commander, forcing him to eventually bring in various outside assistants to keep the good fight going. However, adding personalities like Destro, Major Bludd, the Baroness, and more only heightened his paranoia levels.
This put a damper on Cobra's overall success for years, though it turned out that this paranoia wasn't totally unfounded; you see, on one particularly dark day, Major Bludd and the Baroness used Billy in a plot to assassinate the Commander, and thanks to the quick actions of Storm Shadow (his ninja bodyguard, of the Arashikage ninja clan), Cobra Commander was saved at the last minute.
Once this matter was resolved (namely, after Storm Shadow rescued poor Billy from a Cobra dungeon), the Commander embarked on his most ambitious scheme ever - the creation of Cobra Island! He did this by tricking the Joe team into dropping enough ordinance on the ocean floor to trigger a shift in the tectonic plates beneath the Caribbean Sea - thus raising a large chunk of land from the bottom.
Once he'd done that, the Commander moved onto the island and occupied it until his lawyers, acting in the capitol of every nation bordering the Caribbean, could get the island recognized as a legitimate country. This was the single greatest victory against the Joe team he'd achieved to this point, and after moving most of his armed forces to the island, Cobra went legitimate - legally, at least.
While the world now had to tolerate Cobra as a political entity, Cobra Commander launched several other schemes meant to destabilize various hot spots around the earth. However, he made the mistake of allowing one of his newer recruits, one Doctor Mindbender, to perform an experiment that would conceivably create a super-soldier from the DNA of various warriors from days long past.
Curiously his scheme worked, and as the Gi Joe team located and invaded Springfield, Cobra unleashed their newest creation - dubbed Serpentor - on the hapless Joes. Unprepared for the man's sheer military genius, gained through hundreds of years of combat experience, the Joe team was completely befuddled while the rest of the Cobra forces in Springfield evacuated - with nary a trace left behind.
With no evidence, the Joe team had been left with the smoking remains of a small Vermont town in their wake, and as such the group was suspended until things could be sorted out. While this occurred, Serpentor made his way to Cobra Island and, though the Commander figured out that the man would try to take his place, he wasn't quick enough to kill him before he landed.
Having been a hero of Springfield's evacuation, Serpentor exuded his greasy charm all over the ranks of Cobra, and within weeks, had wormed himself into a position to co-rule Cobra with the Commander. This didn't sit well with him, and hoping to regain control of the group, Cobra Commander led an assault on the Joes' base, the second Pit, in order to make himself look better.
Though all the Joes save for Hawk were outside the Pit, the battle didn't go in Cobra's favor, and as Hawk destroyed the underground compound in order to take the majority of the Cobra Command out in one fell swoop, he buried Cobra Commander and Destro under tons of rubble. Luckily for these two villains, the Joes had also left an escape vehicle deep underground, and the duo used this to dig their way free.
Once they had done so, Cobra Commander learned that his son, Billy, wasn't dead; he'd almost been killed after getting caught in the middle of a battle between the Soft Master (tracking the Hard Master's killer) and Scrap-Iron, and was blown up real good. Recovering his son, Cobra Commander vowed to be a better father, and hoping to start in that direction immediately, took him to see Fred VII.
One in a series of look-alike Crimson Guardsmen, Fred VII was a mechanical genius, adept in the creation of robotic technologies. When Cobra Commander came to him, he devised a robotic leg for Billy, who had lost one in the explosion created by Scrap-Iron, and acquired a suit of combat armor made especially for him by his faithful operative. He even tested it out in single combat against the Joes right away.
Once Billy recovered from his coma and later cybernetic grafting, he confronted his father about his villainous ways and, hoping to be there for his son, the Commander decided not to try and regain control of Cobra. Hearing this, Fred VII lost it, feeling that he'd invested years in a sham, and shot the Cobra Commander in the back. With the help of Raptor, he even buried him outside of his Denver auto shop.
While Fred VII got it in his head to take over Cobra, posing as Cobra Commander, the original head of that group was dug up by Fred VIII, who was watching Fred VII's activities (as all the Fred series Guardsmen were instructed secretly to keep tabs on each other), and he took the Commander to a Fred-series doctor to have him fixed up. Once he recovered from his almost death, Cobra Commander started over.
But not the way he originally intended. You see, he built up a brand new criminal empire, with the assistance of the highly motivated workforce that the Crimson Guard represented. Years later, when Doctor Mindbender journeyed to the site where Fred VII buried him, hoping to recover enough genetic material to clone him and replace Fred VII, the original Cobra Commander made his move.
Collecting Mindbender and Raptor (who led him to the burial site), Cobra Commander returned to Cobra Island, where he proceeded to bury those two, Fred VII, his son Billy, Zartan, Firefly, and the corpse of Serpentor (who'd been murdered by Zartan some time back) in the freighter that was land-locked on the island, and then buried it under the inactive volcano in the center of Cobra Island.
Having returned with a vengeance, Cobra Commander then embarked on a new scheme, creating another Springfield out of Millville, a small town in the Midwest that had fallen on hard times similar to those that hit Springfield so long ago. Rather than win the populace over with his charm and economic philosophy, Cobra Commander simply subjected the entire town to Doctor Venom's brainwave scanner.
Now having an industrial town in the Midwest with which to build his arms for cheap, Cobra Commander pulled all kinds of new maneuvers worldwide, hoping to foster unrest and conflict in order to have folks to sell his Cobra gear to. This made him billions, even after he eventually abandoned Cobra Island to Firefly and his ninja cronies; he left them there just in time to be hit by a massive Joe assault.
Though he abandoned his legitimate cover, Cobra Commander immediately found another as the backer of a real, pre-existing nation in eastern Europe, the crumbling Borovia. After doing so, the U.S. government decided that Cobra Commander would have his hands full with this disaster area for years, and as such, they deactivated the force designed to combat Cobra - they shut the Joe team down!
These politicians failed to calculate the sheer, unmitigated evil that Cobra Commander represents, and as such, their erroneous move gave the man free reign to fan the flames of dozens of conflicts worldwide. Unopposed for several years, the man did irreparable damage to world peace, which prompted the government to finally reactivate the Joe team several years later.
Through a variety of schemes, and various ups and downs, Cobra Commander continued his war for earth itself for years. Though momentarily inconvenienced by a seemingly revived Serpentor and the so-called Red Shadows, Cobra Commander has led Cobra on to increasingly bigger conquests, though this finally ended when he put his end game into motion, triggering nothing less than World War III itself!
And it worked, for a time. After his forces took command of every government on earth, Cobra and its Commander enjoyed a very brief period of abject victory, though those meddling Joes managed to steal his thunder one final time, defeating him at long last. Capturing him alive, the Joes made sure he would never rise to threaten the world again, namely by placing him in a prison built just for him.
At the bottom of the sea! Though this undersea prison may in fact hold him for the rest of his life, the sad truth is that the Commander's last words would haunt the world for years to come. Though he'd been taken off the playing board, he'd shown the thugs, hooligans and low-lifes of the world that his way works, and that it was only a matter of time until someone would rise to replace him.
As such, the Joes are working hard to round up those Cobras that escaped when the Commander was captured - pulling out all the stops in their effort to prevent this chain of events from coming to pass. Of course, they may just cut out the middle man and, after finding out where the Joes have stashed their leader, come to rescue him anew. It may've been better to have simply killed the man...
Extra Goodies:
Cobra directories featuring a version of Cobra Commander:
| 1982 | 1984 | 1987 | 1991 | 1993 | 1994 | 1997 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 |
| 2003 | 2004 | 2005 |
* Note: 1991 saw two versions of Cobra Commander (Versions 4 and 5), while 2002 saw three (Versions 11, 12 and 13), 2004 saw two (Versions 14 and 15) 2004 saw three (Versions 16, 17 and 18), and 2005 saw two (Versions 19 and 20).