Cult of the Cobra

On May 25, 1953, one of a pair of twins was stolen from a New Delhi hospital by the shadowy Cobra Cult. Twenty-three years later, Jeffrey Burr ruled the cult as Kobra, and had transformed it into an international subversive organization.

In the next few years, his organization would see even greater expansion in Western hemisphere and pose a sufficiently serious threat to American interests that a special task force would be created to deal with them. The unlikely architect of this success was a recent convert to the cause: A former car salesman turned con man and anti-government agitator who would become known as Cobra Commander.

The key to the future Cobra Commander’s success seems to have lain in his ability credibly speak to the desires of angry political fringe of whatever persuasion. He could recruit from the United Freedom Front, Black Spectre, Posse Comitatus or the Sons of the Serpent, or keep things ideologically light and bring in disaffected members of strictly criminal groups. Cobra Commander’s only certain belief personally seems to have been in brokenness of the current system, and in the power of fascist symbols and pageantry. He tossed the snake-scale costumes and robes for a more imposing, paramilitary vision. Given the Commander’s success, Kobra allowed it.
It was quite a rise, but in the end too high and too quick. Kobra would not share the throne. In the mid-eighties, barely a decade into his meteoric rise, Cobra Commander was assassinated at Kobra’s command.