Night Creeper (1998)
Bet you didn’t think you’d see another snow ninja after Bushido, New York’s own snow ninja. Well, here we have the Night Creepers snow ninja, a sub group of a specialty trooper. Apparently in the late 90’s, Cobra was so hard up for troopers that they were letting their ninjas sub-contract.
This figure was part of the Cobra Polar Assault team set of 1998, the second year of the Toys R Us exclusive series. The ’98 series in general was an improvement over the previous year’s disappointing offerings. That’s faint praise, but they are quite a bit nicer all around.
The figure is a straight up repaint of the original Night Creeper. The paint job is refreshingly subdued compared to the previous year’s arctic Joe set. There’s no oversprayed faux camo this time out, and the details of the sculpt are picked out nicely in contrasting greys and black.
The file card states that this special clan of Night Creepers are trained to fight in arctic environments and loyal only to Firefly, who was included in the same arctic pack. Interesting, considering Firefly was a ninja Master in the Marvel comics. In the later issues, Firefly even brainwashed the Red Ninjas into following him. I wonder if this pack was a kind of homage to that storyline?
I’m in the camp of fans who prefer Firefly as a saboteur given how ninjas would eventually take over the comic series, but the Night Creepers alone were okay with me. The Red Ninjas introduced earlier (in issue #21) were cooler in my mind, although I can’t argue that the ’98 releases were a definite improvement over the previous year.
I agree about Firefly. The contracted saboteur character is much more interesting to me. It would have been cool to get red ninja figures that looked like the comic version. The comic pack version didn’t do it for me.
I also echo these sentiments. Firefly should never have been dragged into the whole ninja debacle.
As for this figure itself: The orignal Night Creeper is in my top five of favorite Cobra Troopers, and I think this was an acceptable repaint. I like the idea of the Night Creepers being adaptable to different environments.