The new Iron Man will be a black woman, according to Time’s latest exclusive interview with current writer Brian Michael Bendis.
And by “black woman” I mean “black girl,” and by “black girl” I mean “black girl genius.” Riri Williams is a 15-year-old student at MIT who attracts Tony’s attention when she builds an Iron Man suit in her dorm room. In fact, the seeds are already planted for Riri’s glorious entrance. Bendis states:
“In the latest issue of Iron Man, Tony is in a lab talking to himself, and he’s already aware that there’s some student at M.I.T. that’s reverse-engineered one of his old armors all by herself in her dorm room. He’s aware of her immediately.”
Bendis was inspired to create the new Iron Man by his time in Chicago, where the “chaos and violence” set his mind to thinking. “This story of this brilliant, young woman whose life was marred by tragedy that could have easily ended her life—just random street violence—and went off to college was very inspiring to me. I thought that was the most modern version of a superhero or superheroine story I had ever heard,” Bendis said. “And I sat with it for awhile until I had the right character and the right place.”
Williams comes as part of Marvel’s push to make their superheros resemble the real world more closely. She, along with Miles Morales as Spiderman and Kamala Khan as Ms. Marvel, help a whole new crop of readers see themselves in superhero stories.
“Now, when you have a young woman come up to you at a signing and say how happy she is to be represented in his universe, you know you’re moving in the right direction,” said Bendis.
While the ending of Civil War II results in Tony stepping away from the Iron Man Suit, Bendis is adamant that this doesn’t constitute a significant spoiler for the comic book event series.
“More people are going to be upset that they think they know the ending to Civil War II now than anything we just talked about. But I can tell you just because we’re hearing what we’re saying doesn’t know you mean how Civil War II ends. We’re not telling you the end, at all,” said Bendis.
