List of Cowboy Bebop characters

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The following is a list of major and minor characters from the anime series Cowboy Bebop, directed by Shinichiro Watanabe and written by Keiko Nobumoto, its manga series adaptation, written by Kuga Cain and Yutaka Nanten, and its live action adaptation, developed by André Nemec and written by Christopher Yost.

Ein (アイン) is a Pembroke Welsh Corgi brought aboard the Bebop by Spike after a failed attempt to capture a bounty. He often shows heightened awareness of events going on around him. Over the course of the series, Ein answers the telephone, steers a car, uses the SSW, plays shogi, operates the "Brain Dream" gaming device (to hack a supercomputer in a few seconds), and generally performs tasks that an average canine would not be able to accomplish. While the televised series only briefly hints that Ein's brain was somehow enhanced, the manga shows Ed accessing data stored in Ein's brain via a virtual reality type interface with which she has a conversation with a human proprietor. Ein is able to "speak" to other species, as demonstrated in Session 17: "Mushroom Samba" (he speaks to a cow with a subtitled bark of "Thanks", to which the cow has a subtitled moo back of "Oh, it's no problem"). Ein initially takes a shine to Jet, but when Ed joins the crew he comes around to her as well. He follows Ed when she leaves the crew.

An East Asian triad organization led by a group called The Van. The Van are usually seen wearing imperial Manchurian Chinese clothing of the Qing dynasty. The syndicate specializes in assassinations, but are also involved in the trafficking of narcotics, Red Eye in particular. The rules of the syndicate states that members who attempt to leave, or fail to complete tasks, are punished by death. Mao Yenrai served as a captain or Capo to the Elders and was a mentor to both Vicious and Spike. After leaving the Syndicate, Spike considers himself in Mao's "debt", and is motivated to confront Vicious for the first time when Mao is killed by two men in Vicious' employ. It takes place immediately after Mao signs a peace treaty with a rival crime syndicate, the White Tiger, expressing a desire for relief from the hypervigilance of gang warfare. The Van later refers to Mao's death as "bad luck" and decline to pursue the issue when confronting Vicious. The Van is also shown to be indulgent toward Vicious initially, which eventually creates their demise. Vicious kills the Van and becomes the head of the Syndicate.

Annie (アニー) is the owner of a convenience store on Mars, and an old friend of Spike, Julia and Mao Yenrai. Her name is short for "Anastasia". First introduced in "Ballad of Fallen Angels", Annie informs Spike of Mao's assassination by Vicious. She carries a variety of small arms and supplies Spike with a Beretta pistol and a large carton of ammunition. She also chides Spike for seeking to avenge his mentor by picking a fight with Vicious. Annie is fatally wounded prior to Spike and Julia's arrival in "The Real Folk Blues, Part II".

A teenage hacker and Vincent's accomplice, Lee Sampson (リー・サムソン) is very interested in video games from the 20th century (as shown by him playing an alternate version of Pac Man in a car while talking to Vincent). He's later betrayed by Vincent and is killed with the nanoweapons Vincent was using in his plot to eliminate mankind. In an interview with Watanabe, the interviewer referred to Lee Sampson, a character in the film who "unable to distinguish" death in real life and death in a video game, responding to the death of a video game avatar and the death of a security guard in an equally detached manner; when the interviewer asked Watanabe whether he wanted to "question society's desensitization to violence" with a character who "truly feels the pain of death", Watanabe responded by saying that he did not intend to "make it a 'statement', as such". Watanabe added that he does not create films to "particular message" and that films "naturally reflect the way we feel at the time".

Rashid (ラシード) appears during Cowboy Bebop: The Movie. An ethnic Arab with a considerable amount of knowledge of "beans", he is really Doctor Mendelo al Hedia, the man who developed the nano machinery that was to be used as a virus for the military and vaccinated Vincent in attempt to keep it under control. He then apparently escaped from the medical facility and took refuge in Mars' Moroccan street, assuming a new identity. He provides Spike with a sample of the nano machine virus in an attempt to atone for his creating it. After revealing to Spike, in a later scene, the nature of the nanomachine virus and the vaccine given to Vincent, armed men show up and Rashid runs off, followed by the sounds of gunfire. His fate is unclear, though a scene played during the credits of the movie seems to show him alive and well in Moroccan street.