Chameleon (G.I. Joe)

This article is about the G.I. Joe. For the Autobot, see Chameleon (G1).

Chameleon is a G.I. Joe-aligned human from the IDW portion of the Generation 1 continuity family.

Boy, that sure sounds exciting, kids! You should really pick up a copy of the Cobra collections out from IDW Publishing in all good comic stores and digital marketplaces!

Erika La TaneTene AKA Chameleon is a Euro-Vietnamese farm girl turned super-spy. She used to be a member of Cobra, but she was given a way out when she was recruited by G.I. Joe. Don't ask her about men with ugly shirts.

Fiction

IDW Generation 1 continuity

Erika never knew her father and her mother only kept her around out of spite. Dance Among the Shadows

She had would grow up to have a dark and troubled past before she was offered a second chance by |Flint some years prior to 2017. Their relationship eventually had them engaging in some, ahem, not-quite-professional relations. At some point afterwards, Flint gave her a third chance, yet she still faced distrust from others. Behind My Bleeding Back At one point, she and Flint worked with Tomax Paoli (it went badly!).Strange Visitors

Chameleon was part of Zilong Qian's team, sent to the Matterhorn to secure and study the Junkion ship. A Lonely Pillar on the Plain When the Joes agreed to get Thundercracker as a consultant, Chameleon and Flint were sent to meet him in Cairo. While the latter spoke to Marissa Faireborn, Chameleon spoke to the Seeker about literary tropes and her life story piquing his interest when she mentioned Chuckles leading him to brainstorm a new screenplay based on Chameleon's life. Behind My Bleeding Back On the flight back to Switzerland, Chameleon quizzed Flint about Marissa being his daughter before Thundercracker and Marissa caught up to the two and requested they land. Chameleon caught up with Thundercracker and played with Buster. Dance Among the Shadows

Then Sharkticons began invading before they up and left. Chameleon and Flint were quick to resume their flight back to Switzerland and followed the invaders. Feel Safe Without Regrets

During an interrogation, Tomax sarcastically queried as to Chameleon's well being. Strange Visitors When the President of the United States paid a visit to Autobot City, Chameleon stood guard by her helicopter. What It's Really Like Following Jazz's disastrous television interview, Chameleon remained as the President's security. The Life of Sideswipe

After Marissa Faireborn had been chosen to represent the Cybertronian Council of Worlds, the Space Bridge network went offline in response to the Iron Ring's attack on Cybertron. The |Devisen Slide blamed G.I. Joe for the event prompting Chameleon to wipe out her pistol and pointed out G.I. Joe had lost just 143 members of its staff before commenting that her weapon was useless against a Transformer. Soundwave agreed with her. Both that G.I. Joe was innocent of blame and that her weapon would be ineffective. Primeless, Part 1

After the Iron Ring's invasion, she and Flint were present at the opening of an Ore-13 mine in Kentucky where Flint grumbled about the alien presence on Earth. Surfeit of Primes

Notes

• Chameleon was a minor toy from 2000, a re-released Baroness that (for trademark reasons) claimed she was a Joe spy and the femme fatale's French half-sister, impersonating her to sabotage Cobra operations. Mike Costa made her two major characters in the Cobra series, the first a Joe agent and then having a pre-existing character, La Tene, become Chameleon II (and actually impersonate Baroness in her first job, where it was implied she was indeed a half-sister). She started as an aide to Tomax and Xamot in the first Cobra mini-series before being helped to escape Cobra by Chuckles in Cobra II, before being assigned to Flint's intelligence unit in Cobra vol. 2 and gradually proved herself to G.I. Joe. She disappeared when the unit was shut down in The Cobra Files and vanished for five years in-universe. She was last seen in the final series published before the Joe books went on hiatus, Snake Eyes, Agent of Cobra, in which the titular ninja tracked her down to help him on a mission. Evidently Flint got her back.
• Flint and Chameleon did indeed bump uglies in Cobra. Barber remembers all!
  • Except the correct spelling of her surname when writing Lonely Pillar that is. This was eventually corrected in the New Cybertron trade.

External Links

• Chameleon toy at YoJoe.com