Marvel Comics shocked readers by creating an all-new Iron Man, who is actually a black female teen girl named Riri Williams.
Riri was first introduced in Invincible Iron Man #7. She is student at MIT who is possibly even smarter than Tony Stark. At the age of 15, she developed her own Iron Man suit with only the resources she had at hand. She decided to use the suit to become a hero, which eventually got Stark's attention.
Brian Michael Bendis, writer of Invincible Iron Man, found inspiration for the character from real life after watching a story about a similar young woman whose life was affected by random street violence.
"I thought that was the most modern version of a superhero or superheroine story I had ever heard," Bendis said to Time. "And I sat with it for awhile until I had the right character and the right place. As we've been slowly and hopefully very organically adding all these new characters to the Marvel Universe, it just seemed that sort of violence inspiring a young hero to rise up and act, and using her science acumen, her natural-born abilities that are still raw but so ahead of where even Tony Stark was at that age, was very exciting to me."
But perhaps the most important question to ask is: what will Riri's costume as Iron Man (or will that become Iron Girl?) look like?
Comic Book Resources received a sneak peek of the armor, courtesy of Marvel, and shared Iron Man's new look.
For starters, the new suit isn't a huge departure from the old one. It's still the same metal red and gold outfit. But one thing is missing: the arc reactor. That's because Riri doesn't need it to stay alive like Tony Stark does.
Of course, making Iron Man a young black female still doesn't sit right with some fans, which is odd considering how many superheroes have historically had multiple alter-egos. But Bendis does feel like attitudes are slowly changing.
"But increasingly we see less and less of that. Once Miles hit, and Kamala Khan hit and female Thor hit - there was a part of an audience crawling through the desert looking for an oasis when it came to representation, and now that it's here, you'll go online and be greeted with this wave of love," Bendis said. "I think what's most important is that the character is created in an organic setting. We never had a meeting saying, 'We need to create this character.' It's inspired by the world around me and not seeing that represented enough in popular culture."
