Looking at that image, how did DC not just sue Hasbro?

Serpentor is probably "different enough" to avoid it. But that's also like asking why Marvel didn't sue Todd McFarlane when Spawn was just a recolor of Prowler. The laws can be a bit tricky, with a lot of loopholes in them that allow things which you think would not fly.

Of course, Cobra was just a remake of Hydra, and much of what we know of G.I. Joe was Hama taking his proposal for a Marvel team and remaking it. Duke was supposed to be Nick Fury's son, originally. They didn't start knocking off DC's Kobra until Serpentor. Then again, Serpentor is pretty much Copperhead with a cape.... it'd be almost trivial work to customize that figure into Serpentor.

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I use Serpentor as an advanced generation of Mindbender's Bio-viper.

As a kid, I pretty much went with the comic version, but in the late 90s, when I got back into Joe as an adult, I found myself wanting Serpentor to have a more complex origin than the simple "clone" story.

For some background, I had the idea that Dr. Venom was experimenting with all sorts of mind control and memory implantation. The first phase was to be able to capture younger military members, plant some false memories in them in order to change their loyalties and allegiances and get them to join Cobra. This would save Cobra the trouble of having to train it's own recruits.

The second phase was to be able to plant the memories of training into Cobra's own recruits, and thus save them the trouble of having to abduct members of the military.

Lastly, Venom came up with the idea to take the ideas of the greatest military minds in history and implant them into a high ranking member of Cobra to give them a brilliant strategic mind. Of course, Cobra Commander wanted this implanted into himself, but first wanted it tested on someone to see how well such a broad range of memory would be assimilated into the personality.

The guinea pig - Cobra Commander's "son." In my Joeverse, Cobra Commander had long believed that he had sired his son William with a former lover of his, a custom character I named Vixen. At some point, CC discovers that William is in fact not his son, but in fact the son of Destro's right hand man. This of course leads to all sorts of hostility between CC and Destro, and Destro and his second. At this point, William was very skilled, having been trained by Storm Shadow and Firefly in hand to hand combat and practical guerrila warfare, and was fiercely loyal to CC, who he thought to be his father. Since CC no longer cared about William after discovering his true parentage, it was decided that William would be the perfect candidate for the experiment given his loyalty and training.

The experiment proved to be a success. William became a brilliant tactician and led several succesful operations. However, he quickly became more critical of CC's leadership and was asserting himself in ways that no one had ever dared. It was then that William's mother found a way to contact him. She revealed the truth about who his father really was and told him why CC really chose him for the experiment. It is then that William truly went mad, injecting himself with an experimental "Super Soldier" drug that Cobra's new top scientist, Dr. Mindbender, was working on. The drug combined with his insanity stripped him of all vestiges of his former self and he began an active campaign to strip Cobra Commander of the leadership of Cobra. He succeeded for a short time, but was quickly undone by his own impatient ambition.

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You guys have some really interesting takes on the character.

A bit of a side story to Serpentor and being injected with the DNA of history's leaders is that the tactics and knowledge of military operations were compiled together and loaded into a computer program. Mindbender and Destro's plans were to load this data into BATs, but there was too much information for the BAT's CPU to handle, so a new breed of BAT was created, an Advanced Battle Android Trooper with a larger CPU and more durable body with faster reflexes and a heavier weapon. Unfortunately the cost for this ABAT was way too high to be cost effective and mass produced, so it was decided an ABAT would act as a commander to the regular BATs, With one ABAT to a platoon of regular BATs, communicating through different frequencies to guide the BATs in their mission. While the BATs can be dropped out of a plane and left behind to keep the Joes occupied, these ABATs are retrieved after a battle for theircost, but also because they may have witnessed a new tactic used by their opponent and the information gleaned from their memory can be used to create new defensive strategies.

These ABATs are like the flat headed, large chested, 70's disco pants wearing droids from SW:Clone Wars that sort of control the regular Battle Droids. For these ABATs, I use War Machine figures from the Iron Man line, including the green camo versions for use with the Jungle BATs.

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