Ophite

Concept sketch by Gennifer Bone

I did not actively sit down to trigger every single thing I could at once in conceiving and writing my first stories for Ophite, but considering that I didn’t, it’s a fair list

No one joins a “cult”

which spells “Jim Jones”

Cult leader supervillains! Can you get any more evil than that? Not in comics, you can’t. But their cults are strangely vague.

A thousand years more, O Kali

Why do I love him? You have to ask??

You know how “smart” in comics actually means stupid? This time, as they often did in Suicide Squad, John Ostrander and Kim Yale pulled a reversal: a character introduced as a superficial fanatic, never billed as or discussed otherwise, who was smart as a whip. Wikipedia tells me he only appeared in twenty-two comics issues, ever, associated only with this series, but they were solid gold.

Some love for the Naja-Naja

“WIth a bit of a mind-flip …”

I wasn’t a DC reader. The few issues included in the mother-lode I’d inherited from my brothers were obviously sub-par, and my pennies were scarce enough already. But still, I encountered Kobra in his initial appearance, the first three issues of his title comic in 1976. You might not remember or know about these three-comics in clear plastic packs that were sold at the time, either a random set of latest issues or three in a sequence like this one, but it was one of those. I think I got it as a party favor.