Cinder
30 years ago - Carla Moretti is born in Italy.
22 years ago - 8-year-old Carla's parents & brothers are killed in an explosion. She is placed in a group home.
20 years ago - 10-year-old Carla is taken into the home of a prominent Italian politician, who regularly abuses her.
17 years ago - 13-year-old Carla is assaulted by her foster father. It is covered up and she is shuffled back into the national foster system.
14 years ago - 16-year-old Carla starts perceiving her kinship with fire, but hides it.
12 years ago - 18-year-old Carla Moretti enlists in the army.
9 years ago - 21-year-old Carla is caught in a pyroplastic accident. She is hospitalized and summarily discharged from the army, but discovers that her latent firestarter abilities have been unlocked, and begins training to use them in secret.
8 years ago - 22-year-old Carla begins using her powers to stalk and kill child abusers.
7 years ago - 23-year-old Carla kills her childhood abuser, witnessed by Slade Wilson, who is tracking the same target. Impressed, he agrees to take her on as an apprentice, bringing her into the Ravens.
6 years ago - 24-year-old Carla Moretti is killed in the Quroc bombing.
Building a team of assassins for Deathstroke to lead is an interesting exercise, because we want to fulfill pretty specific archetypes while avoiding others. We don't want to leave Cheshire as the sole woman on the team, because that just feels totally cliché. There are a ton of other characters we could have used, but there was actually a pretty perfect character built in the waning days before DC reset itself that fits the role really well
Cinder's Comic HistoryCinder's first appearance was in a comic called Titans: Villains for Hire Special. It was a book that introduced the Deathstroke lead team of pseudo villains that was about to take over the current ongoing Titans series, but because it happened in 2010, it was an absolute slog of joyless morbidity, setting up the ongoing joyless morbidity that was grinding the entire imprint of DC comics into the ground at the time. In their introductory issue, the team flat-out murders Ryan Choi.
Cinder was a new character that was designed specifically for Deathstroke's Titans. She was a former soldier who was a survivor of childhood abuse, plagued with survivors guilt after the death of her brothers when they were kids, who also carried a pronounced deathwish that she wasn't able to fulfill thanks to her powers rendering her functionally immortal. Again.... 2010. The very next year marked the introduction of the company-wide continuity reset the New 52. New characters like Cinder were lost in the shuffle, but the books at the time were so hopelessly lost in the quagmire of company crossovers and constant deaths that new characters like Cinder never really found the space to find an audience. |
Our Cinder StoryWe need a character like Cinder. We're creating the Ravens, a team of assassins built by Deathstroke, and of the various characters that were members of Deathstroke's Titans, Cinder is the only one that sort-of fits in the role we want to fill. There are plenty of assassin-type characters in DC, but we already have Cheshire, and that makes a lot of them feel pretty stylistically redundant. Cinder doesn't fight with blades; she has honest-to-god superpowers, but not ones that feel ridiculously overpowered. There's already a precedent for her taking up with Deathstroke and joining a team he's leading, so she already fits into the group dynamic.
If anything, we honestly just need to iron out who she even is, because she was given so little development in the comic. The initial characterization seems to be as a gothy former victim lashing out at the world in anger, but the fact that her history specifically references her soldier background actually suggests that she's a little more complex. She SHOULD be dark and gothy, but she should also be very focused on the job at hand, or else she's just not going to fit into this team of no-nonsense killers. She seems like someone that could actually be interesting, if written by the right person who isn't just trying to come up with the angstiest story possible. One thing we DID add was the idea that her powers actually have an inciting accident. We specifically included the word 'pyroplastic' in her origins, because this is the same wording we use to explain the pyrokinetic powers of Fire from the Global Guardians, who actually achieved her powers only a year earlier. |