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 sounds exciting, kids! You should really read the Cobra collections out from IDW Publishing in all good comic stores!

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

She was one complicated and murky history that's too long to go into, but she was given a second and a third by Flint. (And, er, had some not-quite-professional relations) Others would still not quite trust her. Behind My Bleeding Back

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 ws a consultant, Chameleon was sent to meet him in Cairo and they bonded over heir experiences with the Faireborns, Flint and Marissa, and his interest in her espoionage experiences. Erika said Flint had given her several chances to change herself. (A disgruntled Marissa pointblank asked her dad if the much younger woman was his girlfriend, which he got overly defensive about.) When Thundercracker joked Buster the dog thought Chameleon was going to steal its food, the spy quietly mentioned she was used to being distrusted. Behind My Bleeding Back

Feel Safe Without Regrets}}

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, which had to be corrected in the New Cybertron trade.

External Links

• Chameleon toy at YoJoe.com