10 Most Interesting X-Men You've Never Heard Of
6. Thunderbird III
The third man to take the Thunderbird name shares no relation to the Proudstar brothers. He was instead, the first Indian member of the X-Men.
Neal Shaara was born in Kolkata and has the ability to shoot plasma from his hands. Why exactly Marvel decided to name a man with no ties to Native American culture whose powers don't involve electricity, flying or owning a rocket Thunderbird is anyone's guess, especially since his original planned codename Agni (the Hindu god of fire) made way more sense.
Apart from a nonsensical name, Thunderbird was also hampered by his struggles to control his powers and so would constantly try to avoid using them. The only other interesting things about him are that he's a vegan and that he convinced Psylocke to dump Archangel and go out with him instead, only for her to die a few issues later.
Like his X-treme X-Men teammate Sage, the X-Men writers eventually just seemed to forget that Neal existed and he hasn't made an appearance in years. The irony of that is that in a previous story, the time-traveller Bishop told Neal that in his future, out of all the X-Men, Thunderbird was the only one people remembered.