Fans of Marvel’s the Invincible Iron Man will be getting a new character inside the iconic superhero suit. Meet Riri Williams, a science genius who enrolls at MIT at the age of 15. Oh, and she just happens to be black. Avid readers of the Iron Man series are already familiar with Ms. Williams as she comes to the attention of Tony Stark (aka Iron Man) when she builds her own Iron Man suit in her dorm.
This is another move by Marvel to make comic book characters more diverse and representative of the modern world. In an exclusive interview with Time, Iron Man creator and writer Brian Michael Bendis shared his thoughts on the inspiration for Riri:
One of the things that stuck with me when I was working in Chicago…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.
In the interview Bendis also talks about the diversity we are currently witnessing among the Marvel 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.
Iron Man fans can relax, Riri doesn’t mean the end of Tony Stark or that you know what will happen at the conclusion of Civil War II. You’ll have to keep reading.
Kudos to Marvel and Bendis for moving these characters into a more modern world. If we are going to continue to tell stories that originated sixty or seventy years ago and update everything around them. The characters themselves, should also reflect the modern world. Who knows, a byproduct of showing a more diverse set of comic book characters might lead to a more diverse workforce in the world of comic books.