Meet the new iron man!
Today, Marvel Comics has shared some major news, regarding relaunch series of Invincible Iron Man. Following this fall’s upcoming Civil War II comic, Tony Stark will officially hand in his suit – which will result in the birth of Riri Williams taking the reigns as the new Iron Man.
Creator and series writer, Brian Michael Bendis, revealed the new character is a 15-year-old African American science genius girl, that was drawn from a real woman who endured early life struggles to achieve success. After getting Tony’s attention, while building her own suit, he soon takes Riri under his wing and readies her to make change to the world. Below, you can get a glimpse into the Marvel writer’s plans for his comic series, which will not give a spoiler for Starks’ fate.
How did you come up with the character of Riri Williams?
Bendis: One of the things that stuck with me when I was working in Chicago a couple of years ago on a TV show that didn’t end up airing was the amount of chaos and violence. And 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. 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.
[Source]