The New Iron Man Is a Black Woman

Look out! There's a new Iron Man in town and her name is Riri Williams!

Riri is a 15-year-old genius who impresses Tony Stark so much that he ask her to be the new Iron Man.

TIME magazine asked Iron Man writer Brian Michael Bendis about the creation 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.

Cute, but I need for Marvel to get more diverse writers as well.