Mad Pierrot

Under a tall top hat, Tongpu presents as an aging man sporting a light brown beard, his frame wrapped in a round, clownish costume. Whether he grows old at the pace of an ordinary human is never confirmed, a lingering question tied to his artificial origins.

The torment of endless experimentation shattered his mind and dragged him back into the emotional world of a child. He kills with a gleeful, almost playful cruelty, yet a single trigger can unravel him: the sound of a cat. That reaction traces back to a laboratory cat that stared at him during his ordeals, and hearing one meow throws him into blind panic. Pain has the same effect, and the sight of his own blood can collapse him into a wailing tantrum where he cries out for his mother.

Believed to be one clone among many, Tongpu was confined by a medical facility and put through baffling procedures that left him with extraordinary powers, among them flight, greatly boosted strength and speed, and a personal shield capable of turning aside bullets and other high-energy strikes. The project was ruled a failure, so he was locked away in indefinite isolation while the agony steadily eroded his sanity. When his mind finally gave way, he butchered the guards, scientists, and everyone else on hand and fled. Arming himself with an assortment of high-tech weapons, he set out to cheerfully murder the senior ISSP officials who had signed off on his torture, and he hunted down anyone unlucky enough to lay eyes on him. As Jet's friend Bob observed, no one who saw his face lived to speak of it.

Spike first ran into him in an alley after an evening of pool and drinks at C'est la Vie, where the two traded fire. Spike's rounds simply bounced off the magnetic, energy-shielded vest, and Pierrot beat him mercilessly, relenting only when a nearby cat's cry seized him with terror. Spike used the distraction to roll a flammable barrel toward him and set it ablaze, but the clown walked away unscathed, wounding Spike with a knife before Spike escaped into a river and later recovered aboard the Bebop. Learning that Spike had lived, Pierrot lured him to the Space Land amusement park for a lethal game, shooting down Faye's Red Tail when she tried to intervene. A toy cat tumbling from a broken shop window sent him reeling once more, and in the final standoff a flash of light off Spike's eyes evoked the laboratory cat again. Spike hurled a throwing knife into his leg, and as Pierrot dissolved into a screaming, mother-crying fit on the parade route, a towering robotic dog from the carnival procession trod on him and crushed him instantly. His name pays homage to Yellow Magic Orchestra's tracks Mad Pierrot and Tong Poo.