Profile: Fire

Beatriz Bonilla da Costa, Fire
First appearance: she first appeared in Super-Friends #25, October 1979, and was created by E. Nelson Bridwell and Ramona Fradon. In the pre-Crisis time she was originally created in, she had been the president of Wayne Enterprises’ business branch in Brazil, and got her powers via magicians and mysticism. After the Crisis, her origin was redone, making her a model in Rio de Janeiro as well as an actress and a showgirl who became a special agent for the Brazilian government, and her powers were acquired after she was stuck in pyroplasmic explosion that gave her the power to produce eight-inch bursts of green-colored fire. She was reintroduced in Infinity Inc. #32, November 1986. She first took up the names Green Fury and Green Flame, and later changed it simply to Fire. She became a member of Justice League International for a couple years.

Current status: an agent for the new rendition of Checkmate.

Was subjected to the following act of discrimination: she was badly injured in the battle with Doomsday in 1992 and lost her powers for a while. Years after she’d got them back, during the time of Infinite Crisis, when she became a Checkmate agent, they wrote her into a killer, trained by her father, Colonel Ramon da Costa (aka Corvalho) when she was just a girl.

What’s wrong with how this was done? The steps taken during this new Checkmate are simply atrocious. Bea’s father, Corvalho, was written as an employee of a right-wing military dictatorship, who ordered thousands of innocent deaths in Operation Condor, a South American counter-terrorism mission. The apparently politicized storyline, which demonizes conservatives as not caring about innocents, is disgusting.

Interestingly enough, Bea is also depicted as killing a new Colonel Computron (a minor villain who’d first appeared in The Flash in 1981) after government agent Amanda Waller blackmails her into doing it under threat of exposing her father, whom Bea is later forced to turn in anyway for international war crimes. A perfect way to ruin a very good character for the sake PC-madness.