Black Superheroes: Silhouette
Sunday, February 28, 2016
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| Short hair, don't care |
First Appearance: New Warriors (vol. 1) #2 (1990)
History: Silhouette Chord, along with her twin brother Aaron, is the result of a decades long scheme to create a new breed of enhanced humans. Their father Andrew Chord, during the Vietnam War, was part of a unit of soldiers who came across a mysterious temple while in Cambodia. Tai, the mysterious matron of the temple, offered each of the men a woman to marry with the promise that the offspring would one day rule the word. Chord married Tai’s daughter Miyami, leading to the birth of the twins. Miyami, not wanting her children to be part of the scheme, faked their deaths leaving both Andrew and Tai in the dark. Years later Sihouette and Aaron have become vigilantes in New York. During this period they meet another young vigilante named Dwayne Taylor (later known as Night Thrasher) and the three became a team. Things ended poorly when Silhouette was shot and crippled by the police in a bust gone wrong. Losing the use of her legs did not stop her crime fighting career, however. Armed with the ability to melt into shadows and teleport short distances, not to mention her enhanced physical traits, Silhouette is still a force to be reckoned with. She also uses high tech crutches and leg braces, designed by Dwayne and built for combat, that carry an assortment of gadgets and weapon that aide her in battle against crime.
Beta Says: She’s basically a female Nightcrawler, as far as superpowers go. They even work basically the same way; they both teleport by briefly jumping through another dimension before landing where they intended. Nightcrawler could also sort of blend into the shadows. Is it coincidence that she was co-created by Fabian Nicieza, a writer famous for writing the X-Men quite a bit during the 90s? (Well, I don’t think he worked on Nightcrawler that much so…maybe?). On the other hand Sil gets these powers from a cult’s generations of selective breeding and manipulation of a mystical force called the “Well of All Things” which is more confusing than Kurt Wanger’s parental origin (though only just barely).
More on this New Warrior after the jump.
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