Sunfire (comics)
Sunfire (Shiro Yoshida) is a superhero appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. Sunfire is a mutant and sometime member of the X-Men. Sunfire is a Japanese mutant who can generate superheated plasma and fly. Not suited for teamwork due to his temperament and arrogance, Sunfire was briefly a member of the X-Men and has kept limited ties to the team since. Roy Thomas recalled that, during his first run on X-Men,I wanted to add a young Japanese or Japanese-American whose mother had been at Hiroshima or Nagasaki as a corresponding character to the X-Men, whose parents were, at that time, assumed to have been at the Manhattan Project. Stan [Lee, X-Men editor/co-creator] didn't give me any good reason [for rejecting the character]—he just didn't want to, I think... I didn't bring it up again, but when I came back to the book, with Neal Adams, I created Sunfire, who is pretty much the character I had wanted to do some years earlier. I didn't make him an X-Man right away. By that time, Stan gave me a little more free . In fact, he was included in Giant Size X-Men #1, along with Banshee, precisely because I had gone around creating some 'international mutants,' with the goal of expanding the team at some time. I thought the X-Men shouldn't all be white Americans. Thomas later commented on the character's costume "I had Don Heck design the character from my verbal suggestion of a costume that was an embodiment of the imperial Japanese Rising Sun flag, as Japanese or Japanese-American. In a future interview Thomas noted the unique mask of the character "Don Heck gave him that mask — kind of a weird dragony kind of mask — it wasn't just a standard mask." Created by writer Roy Thomas and artist Don Heck, Sunfire first appeared in X-Men #64 (January 1970). In 1998, Marvel published the miniseries Sunfire and Big Hero Six, presenting Sunfire's brief membership in a new superhero team sanctioned by the Japanese government. Writer Rick Remender included Sunfire as a member of the Uncanny Avengers, starting with issue #5.