Profile: Firebird

Firebird
Real name: Bonita Juarez
First appearance: Incredible Hulk #265, August 1981
Creators: Bill Mantlo, Sal Buscema

History: one of the earlist Latina characters in Marvel's universe, Bonita was a social worker who first appeared as a member of the Rangers team that operated in the southwest USA, and her origin was that she'd been taking a stroll through the New Mexico deserts when she encountered a radioactive meteorite fragment that endowed her with superpowers like flame and flight. As a devout Roman Catholic, she considered it a miracle gift, and designed herself a superheroine costume to take up an extra career.

Was subjected to the following act of discrimination: she was one of a bunch of superheroes who were exploited for the sake of the 2007 Civil War crossover, whose only real purpose was to pit superhero against superhero. It makes no difference whether she was part of the team that opposed the Superhero Registration Act, what matters is that the whole point of that comic was to tear down on policies meant to protect the USA by making them sound literally totalitarian, and no genuine room was provided for making any points about why it's vital that the USA's security not be jeopardized.

Juarez was also shoehorned into the Secret Invasion crossover in the late 2000s, another shoddy crossover.

What's wrong with how this was done? If the whole idea was to spotlight a lot of notable superheroing faces in one crossover, Civil War was a very poor way to do so, as it was more for depicting superheroes divided than for depicting them uniting to combat evil and supervillains. And lest we forget the political angle forced into it. Secret Invasion was also an embarrassment.

What's sad about editorially mandated stories like those is how many characters with potential for building stories around were wasted on stuff that was so abysmal and shoddy.