It should come as no surprise that Marvel is relaunching Iron Man next fall as part of its Marvel NOW! initiative. But this will definitely be a shock: Tony Stark is no longer Iron Man. And in his place is Riri Williams, a teenage girl who has barely made any appearances in the comic!
Marvel made the announcement at Time that writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Stefano Caselli will be at the helm of Invincible Iron, which will put Riri in the lead role as the new Iron Man. Riri recently debuted in the comics as a 15-year-old M.I.T. student who recreated Stark’s armor in her dorm room. Many fans assumed that she would be a member of Iron Man’s supporting cast, but this was completely unexpected.
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“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,” explained Bendis. “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.”
It should be said that comic book fans do not like change, and this is the kind of change that tends to get rejected out of hand even before an issue of the title has been released. So let’s just say, “don’t freak out.” If you automatically hate the new status quo, your dollars will say more than your angry tweets ever will. And this is superhero comics. Does anyone really think that Tony Stark won’t be back as Iron Man eventually?
What do you think about Iron Man’s new direction? Let us know in the comment section below!
