GI Joe The Cobra Enemy Mug

Cobra Commander first appeared in the Marvel Comics series G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero #1 (June 1982).

While Cobra Commander’s birth name and childhood are unknown, he is believed to be a North American citizen born in the mid-twentieth century. His only known relative, an older brother named Dan, enlisted in the military during the Vietnam War, and volunteered for repeated tours to spare his younger sibling from conscription. During this time, the man who would become Cobra Commander worked as a used car salesman. When Dan returned from Vietnam, he displayed deep psychological trauma, and took to self-destructive behavior, resulting in his death in a car collision with another family. Devastated by the loss of his brother, the future Cobra Commander blamed the family’s survivor: another war veteran, against whom the young Cobra Commander formed an elaborate revenge scheme.

Cobra Commander tracked the former soldier to Japan, where he was training to become a member of the Arashikage ninja clan. The Commander approached the mercenary Firefly to assassinate the soldier, but Firefly referred Cobra Commander to Zartan, another assassin who infiltrated the clan, but ultimately killed the wrong man (the Hard Master). Storm Shadow was blamed for the murder, and his search for his uncle’s killer would eventually lead him to join Cobra, where he would pledge loyalty to Cobra Commander as his personal bodyguard, in order to get close to him and find the real assassin. The soldier left the ninja clan soon after, to live in seclusion in the Sierra Nevada mountains, until enticed to return to service on the G.I. Joe team as Snake Eyes.