Marvel Comics' New Iron Man Will Be a Black Girl Named Riri

Marvel’s comics tend to be a lot more progressive than their actual films (case in point, in the comics the new Spiderman is Black and Puerto Rican and in the upcoming film he is white), so we can only hope that this translates to the silver screen, but the new Iron Man in the Marvel comic universe is a black MIT prodigy named Riri Williams. And we are sooooo here for it.

In an exclusive interview with TIME Magazine, Marvel writer Brian Michael Bendis discussed how Riri’s origin story was inspired by Chicago violence.

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.

Riri enrolls in MIT at 15 and catches the attention of Tony Stark when he discovers that she reverse-engineered one of his suits by herself. A confluence of factors leads Stark to leave his Iron Man identity behind, and Williams will step into that role.

Comic book aficianados are known for being very vocal, so of course there has been backlash. But Bendis says that diverse characters recently introduced into the Marvel comic world have paved the way for Riri.

“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.

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.

[TIME Magazine question] Why did it take so long to turn the Avengers from a team of mostly white dudes into a more diverse array of characters?

Talking to any of the older creators, it’s the thing they said they wish they’d done more of—reflecting the world around them. It just wasn’t where the world was at at that time. 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.”

YES! At their heart, superhero tales are about disrupting the powers that be to bring stability and justice. And that is something black women know all too well. So this is perfect