Cowboy Bebop Characters

A 27-year-old bounty hunter born on Mars, laid-back between jobs and reckless once a bounty is on. He was once a rising member of the Red Dragon Syndicate and Vicious's partner, until he fell in love with Julia and faked his own death to get out. One of his eyes is artificial, and he tells Faye that one eye sees the past and the other the present, a sign of how firmly his old life still holds him.

A 36-year-old former ISSP officer from Ganymede, known there as the 'Black Dog' because he never let go of a case. He lost his arm when a corrupt partner betrayed him, chose a mechanical replacement as a reminder, and quit the police in disgust. He owns the Bebop, a converted fishing trawler named after the jazz style, and is the crew's cook, mechanic and reluctant father figure, with a soft spot for bonsai trees and Charlie Parker.

She looks barely past twenty but is about 77: after a space shuttle accident she spent 54 years in cryogenic sleep and woke with no memory and a huge medical debt. 'Valentine' is only the name the doctor who woke her gave her. Betrayed by the first people she trusted after waking, she lies, cheats and gambles to get by, yet by the end of the series she sees the Bebop as the only place she can return to.

A hacker prodigy from Earth of about thirteen, famous online as 'Radical Edward', who spent part of her childhood in an orphanage after her father left her there. She is barefoot, easily distracted and fond of silly rhymes, and in the English dub she almost always talks about herself in the third person. She takes over the Bebop's navigation to get herself on board in 'Jamming with Edward', and leaves the ship with Ein in 'Hard Luck Woman' after briefly finding her father.

A Pembroke Welsh Corgi and 'data dog', genetically engineered in a lab to have near-human intelligence. He comes aboard in 'Stray Dog Strut', after Spike and Jet chase the thief who stole him, Abdul Hakim. Over the series he answers the telephone, steers a car, plays shogi and hacks a computer system, though the humans rarely notice, and when Ed leaves the Bebop he goes with her.

Spike's former partner and friend in the Red Dragon Syndicate, now his deadliest enemy: cold, ambitious and ruthless. He fights with a katana even against gunmen, keeps a black cormorant-like bird, and is linked throughout with the image of a venomous snake. He fought in the Titan War, where his testimony helped frame his comrade Gren, and in the final sessions he seizes control of the syndicate, convinced that only he can kill Spike and only Spike can kill him.

A woman from Spike's past: Vicious's girlfriend and a syndicate member, who began an affair with Spike and agreed to run away with him. Vicious found out and told her to kill Spike at their meeting place or be killed with him, so she went into hiding instead, and for years Spike did not know why she never came. She appears only in flashbacks until the last two sessions, when a chance meeting with Faye brings her back to Spike; she is shot and killed soon afterwards.

Grencia Mars Elijah Guo Eckener, a veteran of the Titan War who fought beside Vicious and looked up to him. After the war he was jailed as a spy and heard that Vicious had testified against him; he escaped and now plays saxophone in a bar on Callisto, where he once befriended Julia. In 'Jupiter Jazz' he sets up a deal to lure Vicious out, takes Faye in after rescuing her from a street fight, and, badly wounded, asks Spike to send his ship off towards Titan.

A kind old Native American shaman who lives on Mars in a tent surrounded by discarded technology. Spike visits him for advice in the very first session, and Jet seeks him out in the last one. He has his own names for the crew: Spike is 'Swimming Bird' and Jet is 'Running Rock'. In the film he and a young companion pull Spike out of a river and tend his wounds.

The hosts of Big Shot, a TV show that gives bounty hunters the details of new bounties, though its information is often unreliable. Punch plays an over-the-top cowboy with a fake accent, and Judy plays his excitable co-host; they are named after the traditional English puppet show. Big Shot is cancelled near the end of the series, and Punch, whose real name is Alfredo, moves to Mars to look after his mother.

A rotund assassin, also called Tongpu, produced by a secret experiment to create the perfect killer. It made him almost indestructible but left him with the mind of a child, and after escaping he took revenge on the people behind it and kept on killing. When Spike witnesses one of his murders in 'Pierrot le Fou', Pierrot hunts him down and invites him to a showdown at the Spaceland theme park, where Pierrot is killed during the park's robot parade.

The terrorist in Cowboy Bebop: The Movie, a soldier believed to have died on Titan. He was the only survivor of wartime experiments to make soldiers immune to a lethal nanomachine weapon, and they left him without his memory and troubled by hallucinations. He plans to release the nanomachines at Mars's Halloween parade, and is stopped when Electra, the woman he once loved, shoots him. Watanabe has called Vincent 'nothing more than my dark side'.