Marvel announced last month that Iron Man would become a black woman in the newest interations of the “Iron Man” comics. But Marvel was wrong. MIT student Riri Williams will not be Iron Man. She will be Ironheart.
In an interview with Wired, writer Brian Michael Bendis credited Marvel’s chief creative officer Joe Quesada with the name, saying, “Iron Woman seemed old fashioned to some. Iron Maiden looked like a legal nightmare. And Ironheart, coined by Joe Quesada … speaks not only to the soul fo the characters but to the Iron Man franchise as a whole.”
Bendis said his time in Chicago helped him make the decision about Tony Stark’s successor after penning his exit at the end of the “Civil War II” storyline. Bendis noticed the “amount of chaos and violence” in Chicago, saying, “… 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.”
Riri won’t officially be Ironheart until November, but she already enrolled at MIT at 15 years old and caught Stark’s attention by reverse-engineering her own suit in her dorm room. Casual.
@shelbielbostedt | sbostedt@redeyechicago.com
