to launch a sneak attack on Shang Tsung. He was a recurring minor character in the 1995 Malibu Comics miniseries Battlewave, which included sharing the cover of the third issue with Jade. He was a hidden assassin of Shao Kahn and was regularly seen with Jade, likely since fans regularly connected them by their hidden-character status in MKII, while he frequently yelled the phrase "Toasty!" He was capable of turning his entire body into smoke and making himself untouchable, though in a scene in which he and Jade attack Jax and Johnny Cage aboard a plane bound for Outworld, Jax disposes of Smoke by opening a hole in the plane that blows him out. He and Jade had beforehand unsuccessfully attempted to kill a hospitalized Jax following a brutal attack by Goro, and their last appearance was in the third and final issue of the 1995 miniseries Rayden & Kano, in which they tried to kill a weakened Raiden but were stopped by Kano. In the 1996 animated series Mortal Kombat: Defenders of the Realm, Smoke appears in the fifth episode ("Old Friends Never Die"), voiced by Jeremy Ratchford. He serves the Lin Kuei clan and is seeking Sub-Zero, and is briefly seen in human form and unmasked in a series of flashbacks, in which he and Sub-Zero develop their bond and then attempt to flee the clan after seeing the transformed Sektor and Cyrax. The Lin Kuei grandmaster, an original character named Oniro, hunts them down in order to return them to the Lin Kuei compound for automation; Sub-Zero manages to escape but Smoke elects to stay behind to buy time for Sub-Zero, and is captured and converted. Sub-Zero attempts to help the robotized Smoke remember their friendship, and in the end, Smoke's human soul was able to overpower his programming. Though he stood by his oath to not fight Sub-Zero in combat, Smoke could no longer honor their friendship since Sub-Zero was now an enemy of the Lin Kuei. In one of the aforementioned flashbacks, shown near the end of the episode as Smoke recalls his past, he is shown lying on an operating table at the start of his offscreen automation process, of which a few seconds is depicted while he is seen only from the neck up as he cries out in anguish. The robotic Smoke appeared in the 1997 film Mortal Kombat: Annihilation and was