Who's This? The head of the Assassination Bureau.
The facts: Breathtaker is the big bad behind the aforementioned Assassination Bureau and appears in all of three issues of Firestorm, #29 to 31, and then never again, aside from this issue of Who's Who. So they must have thought he'd appear again. He didn't.
How you could have heard of him: The name was reused for a Titans villain who was later incarnated by Luisa D'Oliveira on Supergirl. You might even be thinking of a non-DCU mini-series by Mark Wheatley and Marc Hempel. Either way, none of these are related to the first Breathtaker.
Example story: The Fury of Firestorm #31 (January 1985) "A Mind of Her Own..." by Gerry Conway, George Tuska and Alex Nino
Firestorm is really going up against third-hand villains in this storyline because, get this, the 2000 Committee has hired the Assassination Bureau to kill the Nuclear Man, and Breathtaker is sending lower-level threats just to tease Firestorm, including Mindboggler who takes the cover (and is REALLY not suited to Tuska's style, oof, I'm just gonna skip over her). If Conway had just cut out the middle man, you and I could have avoided spending time on this article.
So Firestorm has just defeated Mindboggler and asks "What else?". Helpfully, the Professor suggests "The Breathtaker?". "You got it", Ronnie answers. They're in the Bureau base, after all. Might as well nip this one in the bud. Whoever this Breathtaker is, he's 1) really cocky and 2) pedantic AF
Well, maybe he's right. I mean, there's gotta be something to that moniker of his.
Can't Firestorm just manufacture oxygen? Does he even NEED to breathe? Firestorm tweaks to the notion that the indestructible was just an illusion and that it ALL is, and...
Well, I'm not sure I buy the idea that Breathtaker somehow has the same powers as Mindboggler, and neither does the Who's Who entry. The simplest solution is that BT closes the door (the room must be sealed, he says) and sucks all the air out of the room. His exoskeleton would have an air supply creating the illusion (in the old-fashioned sense) of having this power. That's just not how it plays. So a big "Huh?!" from THIS reader.
As the Bureau explodes, Ronnie takes Breathtaker and Mindboggler to jail where the latter shows disgust for the "small man" who used her on behalf of the 2000 Committee. She joins Firestorm and Firehawk on a mission to put a stop to them. Breathtaker becomes a footnote not even worthy of getting killed on a Suicide Squad mission.
Who's Next? The martial artist who's somehow not been in a Suicide Squad movie yet.
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