Hummingbird (comics)

Hummingbird is a fictional character, a superhero that appears in Marvel Comics. She made her first debut in the 2012 Scarlet Spider comic book series written by Christopher Yost.

Publication history

Created by artist Ryan Stegman and writer Christopher Yost, she first appeared in Scarlet Spider vol. 2 #1. She took on the superhero identity of Hummingbird during Scarlet Spider vol. 2 #17.

Along with Kaine, the Scarlet Spider, she joined the New Warriors on the 2014 Volume 5 version of the team.

Fictional character biography

Scarlet Spider vol. 2 #16 (April 2013)

Born as María Aracely Josefina Penalba de las Heras, she is originally from an unspecified location in Mexico. However, she may be the reincarnation of the Aztec God of War Huitzilopochtli and has been labeled as a demigod by the High Evolutionary.^[2]

She has no recollection of her life previous to her arrival to Houston, Texas with the exception of the event that took her there: her forced trafficking at the hands of the Lobo Cartel and the singular circumstances of it.^[3][4][5]

Scarlet Spider

The story of Aracely starts in darkness, among the dead. Buried in a pile of corpses of her fellow passengers and barely alive, she was the only survivor of an horrific ordeal, where they cooked alive inside the metallic container of a truck that smuggled them from Mexico to Houston Harbor. Outside, members of the Lobo Cartel were discussing with another group the last-minute details of the exchange of money for people, ignorant that the human trafficking operation had been botched since it begun. They were interrupted when an assailant began to attack them: Kaine, who initially assumed they were just drug dealers he could steal money from, picks them off one by one.

Upon scaring away the last criminals and collecting the money that was meant to be the payment, Kaine noticed the odor coming from the container. It is then that he discovers what's inside - a scene frighteningly similar to one of his earliest memories and a person who just like him back then, clings to life. Aracely is taken to the Park Plaza Hospital where, after a brief initial violent misunderstanding, she is placed by Kaine to the care of Dr. Donald Meland and police officer Wally Layton is informed of her situation and of the corpses at the harbor.

Powers and abilities

She appears to have some kind of psychic power similar to Madame Web's. Being able to detect other people's feelings, thoughts and locate them wherever they are. However, she is also able to manipulate emotions and cause severe feats of fear and panic in her opponents - even specific kinds of fear (like arachnophobia). She has demonstrated the capacity to project her own thoughts into the minds of others to communicate with them.

In relation to the aforementioned, she possesses some sort of special "connection" with Kaine, being able to read and sense him even from great distances. Practically, no thought of his is hidden from her. The exception being the occasions when Kaine is dominated by the Other and transforms into a spider monster.^[5][6]

She can levitate (or "float"), which she can use to remain far off the ground during battle,^[7] carry team members through obstacles^[8] or going so far as to apparently remain in the air without moving, usually in an upside-down lotus position (even while sleeping).^[5][9][10]

She has once invoked and hurtled sacred fire at an aggressive demon ("The Hand of Chthon") when this one tried to possess Thor, burning him to death. However, she was overcome in that moment by Huitzilopochtli and had no memory of the event after it concluded. Haechi, who observed the whole thing, described it as Hummingbird becoming fire.^[1][11]

Additionally, she appears to be able to learn any language from other people's minds via telepathy. Besides her native Spanish, she has demonstrated fluency in French, Japanese, English (which she apparently didn't know before suddenly start talking it)^[3] and more recently Romanian.^[8]

The full extent of and number of her abilities and powers is unknown at the moment as well as the exact nature behind them, other than they appear to involve magic energies of some kind; according to the High Evolutionary, Hummingbird "reeks of magic".^[7]

References

External links

• María Aracely Penalba (Earth-616) at Marvel Wiki