Copperhead

I found his concept, appearance and characterisation to be really cool back then, and still do. He’s convinced that he’s a mysterious killer vigilante from 1930s pulp  fiction, and he’s bloody dangerous.

Background

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Powers and Abilities

Chesney was a competent marksman.

From one scene it would seem that he designed and built his own equipment. Our game stats assume that he was a competent technologist whose obsession about the Copperhead gave him bonuses to build equipment replicating gear from the novels.

When he wore his armour, he was a remarkable hand-to-hand combatant, and could hit even Daredevil. Being armoured, he could afford to put no effort into defending himself (Schtick (Relentless) in DCH, Power Armour Training in DCA).

Pneumatic pistol

Copperhead’s signature weapon is his needle pistol or “dart gun”. It is a handgun pneumatically shooting flechette -like projectiles called “needle-darts” in the captions. It is a shot like a semi-automatic, and makes but a faint hissing sound.

Darts carry a payload – usually a variety of snake venoms (with a preference for copperhead venom), but sometimes a lethal electrical charge. There is an undocumented mechanism that allows Copperhead to select the payload very quickly – changing ammunition takes no significant time. It might be a sort of revolver action where each chamber contains multiple darts.

Body armour

Chesney is clad in an ominous, coppery, full-body armour suit. This armour is bulletproof and will not budge when hit – even by a strong man swinging a melee weapon. It also includes some sort of exoskeleton  under the metallic plating. The wearer of the Copperhead suit thus enjoys superhuman strength, and can deliver blows with blinding speed as the motors relay his movements.

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Chesney greatly trusts his body armour – with good reason. Unless he thinks an opponent might defeat it he will completely neglect defence and concentrate on offence, making him a redoubtable adversary. Copperhead could engage such formidable fighters as Daredevil, the White Tiger or the Human Fly. In DC Heroes RPG terms he’d spend some Hero Points  on AV about every odd-numbered Phase.

The suit of armour encloses him completely. It has no visible weak point (how he sees through the metal plates covering the eyes is unknown) and is waterproof and quite possibly airtight. It apparently carries a small reserve of air, though that may just be the air enclosed within the armour. It is, however, heavy, long to put on, highly electrically conductive and presumably quite hot.

Reynoldsss

For simplicity’s sake, the second man to wear the Copperhead suit can be assumed to have the same game stats as Chesney, though without the Drawbacks – he was sane and made little effort to protect his dual identity. He also lacked the Expertise with the Copperhead lore.

Reynolds’s province was greed, not fighting crime. He wanted to become a dreaded and very rich master criminal ASAP. He felt his life had short-changed him and he could now strike back with the power of… Copperhead !

Demon jussstice

The exact plan, capabilities and identity of the demon thing that claimed to be Copperhead in 2001 remain unrevealed. It could :

• Shoot bolts of eldritch force.
• Trap several Manhattan blocks into an impenetrable bubble of mystical force.
• Reanimate the dead as zombies.
• Open gates to Hell.
• Heighten and warp emotions of all persons within the bubble, even including very strong mentalities such as Daredevil and Spider-Man.

In DCH terms 12 APs of Sorcery, not serving as their own AV when it comes to non-emotion-based attacks, might be a good approximation. Things were likely more complicated than that, but there’s too little data. In DCA he likely has a long Array where most applications have about 11 Ranks and the Infernal Magic Descriptor.

History

The Copperhead was a pulp vigilante in 1930s dime novels published in the Marvel Universe. He was a sort of loose cross between the Spider and the Shadow. The novels, mainly written by one Walter Kranz, sold very well. The Copperhead was reportedly almost as popular as Doc Savage for a while. However, by the early 1960s it faded into obscurity and specialised used books stores, and the lengthy series was cancelled.

Another person closely associated with the Copperhead from the 1940s to the end was Mr. Chesney, an artist’s model. He posed as the Copperhead for all the covers, presumably using a prop mask and the like. Like Kranz, Chesney devoted a large chunk of his life to the Copperhead pulp mythos but earned little in return, as the publishers were rapacious.

Obsssesssssion

Unlike Kranz, Mr. Chesney suffered from schizophrenia. He came to believe that he really was the Copperhead, and that the stories were novelisations of his actual adventures as a killer vigilante. He kept telling his son Lawrence that he was the real Copperhead, and Lawrence, who had presumably inherited psychiatric problems from his father, believed him.

One person mentioned that Lawrence Chesney worked in a museum to restore antiquities. Presumably that was his salaried career, and his other technical skills were a hobby. Secondary sources have described Lawrence Chesney as an art historian.

When the Copperhead books were cancelled, the elder Mr. Chesney exploded in anger. He started threatening Milton Mexler, the publisher, accusing him of having made a fortune selling accounts of his life as the Copperhead. However, Mr. Chesney never acted on this, and he died in the early 1970s.

Lawrence remained certain that his father had been a great foe of evil whose name had been exploited by profiteers. When he learned that Mexler had sold the rights of Copperhead to be republished in trade paperbacks, he snapped.

Jussstice isss the Copperhead

It was apparently Lawrence Chesney who built fully functional replicas of the equipment used by Copperhead in the books. These included light power armour  and a vicious handgun. Now that the Copperhead was real, Chesney had two objectives – acting as a vigilante killing evil men because that’s what the Copperhead did, and punishing those who had robbed his father.

The Copperhead’s activities as a vigilante were somewhat warped. Unlike the fictional character, he was no detective. What he did was patrol mid-1970s New York City and murder small-time street criminals he caught committing small crimes, such as stealing purses. He occasionally ran into cops, whom he shot with venom-tipped darts putting them asleep to stop them from interfering.

As to his quest for revenge, it was likewise dissociated from reality. Not believing that Kranz had also been paid very little, he shot the impoverished, elderly writer dead for refusing to pay him the vast sums Chesney imagined he had.

Implacable vengeanccccce

Chesney then approached Mexler, who also refused to pay and was shot dead with a dart tipped with copperhead venom. The implacable — if deluded — Copperhead then set his sights on one Martin Foster, who had bought the rights to Copperhead for republishing.

Meanwhile, Daredevil clashed several times with the Copperhead, trying to stop his murders and investigating his background. Daredevil deduced what was going on in time to save Foster, then confront Chesney in the graveyard where he was talking to the tomb of his father.

Chesney, who always had had the upper hand in their fights and twice thought that he had killed the crimson-clad combatant, decided to kill Daredevil once and for all. However, standing in copper-plated equipment in the middle of a storm, Chesney was struck and killed by a lightning bolt.

The ssstolen visssage of the Copperhead

A co-worker of Lawrence, one Reynolds, learned of his colleague’s death and Copperhead identity in the paper. Embittered by his stagnant career, Reynolds had long considered stealing the more valuable objects he was restoring. He saw the revelation about Chesney’s secret life as his golden opportunity.

He raced to Chesney’s apartment before the overworked NYPD could inspect it. As he hoped, he found a spare Copperhead suit and pistol in a hidden closet. He stole those and left.

Reynolds had been scheming for months to steal an enormous ancient urn. But the curator had discovered his scheme and taken over, reserving a large percentage of the sale for himself lest he denounces Reynolds to the police.

Feeling that he now was the one with the power, the new Copperhead killed the curator and launched his plan, but ended up running into the Human Fly, White Tiger and Daredevil. Though none of the heroes could hurt him, he ended up falling in deep water and sinking like a stone. Only the dart-gun was recovered, and Reynolds was never seen again.

The ssstench of demonsss

A quarter-century after Lawrence Chesney’s death, an undead and/or demonic creature claiming to be him resurfaced in New York City. This thing had a plot to plunge the city into chaos, and manipulated and hired three madmen — the Gladiator, the Owl and Stilt-Man — who’d dare start a gang war against Wilson Fisk.

The psychotic Owl was the front man of this “Gang of Four”, whereas the alleged Copperhead would generally stand in the shadows. He did not wear the actual Copperhead costume, but something more akin to the traditional Doctor Fate togs over at the Distinguished Competition .

The undead’s plan was to use the gang war as a human mass sacrific, plus the depravity allegedly to be found in New York City, to conjure the Devil and negotiate his redemption in exchange for souls. The fighting and his magics did kill dozens, and trapped several blocks in a bubble of impenetrable mystic force within which emotions were warped and heightened.

Greatly amplifying Daredevil’s sense of guilt, the undead was about to make him kill himself when the Owl turned against “Copperhead”. He threw himself and the undead through a gate to Hell.

Whether this creature was Lawrence Chesney remains undetermined, though secondary sources follow the stance that it was.

Description

The mask of the Copperhead suit apparently includes equipment that distorts his voice, making it sssinister and sssibilant but still recognisssable (Reynolds and Chesney’s voices were similarly altered). Since he usually wears a trenchcoat, a hat and the like, it is easy to assume that he’s just a big guy with a mask, and bruise one’s hand hitting solid metal under the trenchcoat.

The Copperhead’s striking visage, sssinister voice and stony demeneanour combine to make quite an impression.

Personality

Chesney genuinely believes that he’s a pulps vigilante, and that everything he does is a justified fight against capital-e Evil. As often, “Evil” is defined as anybody whom he doesn’t like or who opposes him. After all, since jussstice isss Copperhead, anybody who opposes Copperhead must surely be a card-carrying evil-doer.

Copperhead always uses deadly force, no matter how small the — real or imagined — crime is. He sees all criminals as a monolithic block of evil.

Copperhead talks a lot, and almost solely to deliver pulps-ish lines like those in the quotes. Use the selection provided and continue with that theme, since Chesney is nothing if not monomaniacal.

He probably has pages and pages of Copperhead monologues memorised (including some phrases that were winks toward famous catchphrases of pulps heroes in the real world). Sometimes, instead of rambling, he chooses to be ominously silent.

Another intimidation tactic is to just stand there and ignore the blows and shots of his opponent for 20-30 seconds, then start fighting.

Chesney imitates the morbid calling card of the pulps Copperhead – leaving copper pennies on the eyes of the persons he killed.

Quotes

“Chessster Chino, your hour of reckoning isss at hand ! You have ssstolen, Chessster Chino – committed a crime ! Thusss you owe a debt to sssociety… a debt that ssshall be collected by…. the Copperhead !”

“You are going nowhere, foolsss. For your crimesss, you mussst pay — with your livesss !”

“I am the Copperhead ! Archenemy of crime ! Dessstroyer of evil !”

“But you have forsssaken jussstice’s path… to walk the brimssstone road to Hell ! To paraphrassse the poetesss, my foolish one — ’In yonder death he liesss, wih penniesss on hisss eyessss !‘ Ha ha ha !”

“For crime isss a bitter pill — which mussst never be ssswallowed !”

“Vengeance belongsss to jussstice… and jussstice isss the Copperhead !”

“Gaze upon my visssage, villain. Ssstare at the power that isss… Copperhead !”

By Sébastien Andrivet.

Source of Character: Marvel Universe.

Helper(s): Darci.

Writeup completed on the 10^th of May, 2011.