Just A Small Little Thing: Cottonmouth's Name

Canon immigration due to synergy can be a strange thing. Introducing a new character or concept to make the comics more like the new adaptation or to promote said adaptation makes sense, but it doesn't always look like that. They're not all Aqualad or Aya. Sometimes they're a small detail that most people won't even register. Cottonmouth is a great example of that.

Cottonmouth is a Luke Cage villain that first appeared in Luke Cage, Power Man #19 (April 1974) after being mentioned in the previous issue. He's a drug kingpin who tries to hire Luke as muscle, which Luke accepts as a way to get evidence that Willis Stryker framed him for the crime that sent him to jail. Cottonmouth was obviously involved as well. Despite sounding like a villain name or a street name, and despite having connections to Stryker, aka Diamondback, it is implied that "Cottonmouth" is simply Cornell Cottonmouth's last name.

Cottonmouth is a pretty minor character even though he has ties to a superhero's origin, only appearing a total of 7 times (until recently), and two of those were in an alternate universe. So some may find it strange that he was featured so prominently in the Luke Cage tv series (September 2016). But featured prominently he was, and if anything good can be said about that series, it's that it did a great job at humanizing its villains. So Cornell Cottonmouth became Cornell "Cottonmouth" Stokes, a shady club owner and gun runner. In the MCU, "Cottonmouth" was a nickname he picked up as a kid when he got some teeth knocked out. He hates it and people use it mainly to make him mad.

Of course, one of the great things about adaptations is they can raise the prominence of characters. Most people only know Luke Cage through the Netflix shows, so suddenly Cage's biggest villains are Cottonmouth, Diamondback, Black Mariah, Shades, and Bushmaster, even though they've only had a handful of appearances each. And that means when Luke Cage gets a new series - Power Man and Iron Fist - because of the show, those characters definitely get their share of the spotlight. Thus, we get Power Man and Iron Fist #10 (November 2016), where we not only get Cottonmouth and Mariah working together (along with Piranha Jones, who isn't a villain in the show, and Tombstone and Mr. Fish, who aren't in the show at all), but we see Cottonmouth's full name:

It's a small detail, but honestly, it makes more sense this way.