Brenda Del Vechio
17 years ago - Brenda Del Vechio is born in El Paso, Texas
9 years ago - 8-year-old Brenda Del Vechio's mom dies after a long illness, leaving her in the care of her father.
6 years ago - 11-year-old Brenda Del Vechio begins learning Aikido.
2 years ago - 15-year-old Brenda Del Vechio's friend Jamie Reyes becomes the Blue Beetle. She and Paco Testas help him navigate becoming a superhero.
1 year ago - 16-year-old Brenda Del Vechio & Paco Testas are abducted by the Reach with Jamie Reyes. When they return she learns that her father has died of a heart attack.. She goes to live with her tia Amparo Cardenas.
now - 17-year-old Brenda Del Vechio gets a full scholarship to the University of Texas
It is really hard to express what is SO great about the characters in Jaime Reyes' El Paso, unless you've read the Blue Beetle series yourself. The characters all seem at first like they will play into one stereotype or another but they all quickly and gloriously sidestep that pitfall and reveal just wonderful, unexpected, and delightful personalities that it made the series a joy to read. This is specifically the original series; while there have been attempts to reclaim the magic there, you're definitely best off going to the source.
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Brenda's StoryBrenda debuted in the pages of 2006's Infinite Crisis, but only because Jaime Reyes was being set up there to launch into his own title. Brenda was one Jaime's two best friends, along with Paco Testas, a trio of Latine high school kids from El Paso Texas. They all had really original voices and characterizations, making the book incredibly fun.
At first, Brenda seemed like she might wind up as the rational one, the way a lot of other 'the only girl' characters tend to be while the boys are irresponsible and have all the fun, but it became pretty clear pretty early on that that absolutely wasn't the case. She was probably the toughest of the three of them, and She and Paco basically traded off as both good and bad influences on Jaime, acting like actual people who were as capable of making bad decisions as they were of making good ones. As the series begins, we learn that she had been living with her abusive dad, but he had apparently died, and now was living with her Tia, the wealthy Amparo Cardenas, who would later be revealed as one of Jaime's main antagonists. |