Iron Man is a Black Woman…WTF?

Just when you thought DC had the monopoly on STUPID Marvel does them one better.

Iron Man will soon be a Black woman.

Let me run that by you again. Iron Man will be a Black Woman.

Good Gravy.

Over at Marvel, Tony Stark is Out as Iron Man after Civil War II. And replacing him will be RiRi Williams a 15-year old prodigy who built her own suit of Iron Man armor.

Mary Sue anyone?

I know there’s a need for diversity, but this is ridiculous. How does a kid get access to the specs to make her own Iron man Armor?

Oh wait, BENDIS.  

Does anyone do research on continuity anymore? Back in the First Armor Wars of the late 1980s Tony Stark had Abe Zimmer create a tapeworm go around the world which took his tech off the grid. So how did this kid get the specs for the Iron Man armor?

Oh wait, she’s a Mary Sue, the distant cousin of Wesley Crusher, the kid who could practically do anything the Enterprise crew could despite being a teenager who never trained  a day at Starfleet Academy.

Clearly Bendis hasn’t read the past runs from David Michieline and Bob Layton or Len Kaminiski and Kevin Hopgood. If they read those runs they’d understand the foundations for this RiRi Williams character are RIDICULOUS.

First Jim Rhodes gets killed off in Civil War II doing something as dumb as trying to fight Thanos. Then we get this Affirmative action hire put in his place.

Damn. Just Damn.

Yeah, I know War Machine is a LAME. But putting this diversity hire Mary Sue in his place doesn’t help Marvel long-term. All they’re doing is replacing one LAME character with another. 

Natasha Irons this ain’t. At least she worked right alongside John Henry Irons when he was designing the Steel armor and learned from him. This chick? She’s so smart she can make her own Iron man suit in her dorm room. Seriously, most dorm rooms at college are the size of a walk-in closet.  How would she have space for the suit and the tools to make it in a dorm room?

When I look at this RiRi Williams I see every mistake DC Comics made with Damian Wayne all over again. A know it all who has all the knowledge and skills of Tony Stark but none of the characterization and development. Not to mention life experience. A cipher for Brian Michael Bendis to project his views of the Marvel Universe.

Seriously, does anyone know how to write characters anymore?  A good character with strengths, weaknesses, a personality, a “Voice”. Not to mention a plausible background that makes sense.

First we had Female Thor. Teen Nova. Black Captain America/Falcon. Female Wolverine. Asian Hulk. And Now Black Female Iron Man. And Spider Gwen/Deadpool/whatever character she wants to be at the moment. 

Yeah, it’s time to stop buying Marvel comics. The publishing division is doing a wonderful job of squandering all that goodwill from the box-office success of Captain America: Civil War. In between Nazi Cap and Black Female Iron Man, you just wonder WTF are they smoking at the house of STUPID ideas.

I’m really getting tired of these gender bent Affirmative action diversity characters. Yeah, I know we need more characters of color in comics, but the way Marvel and DC are doing things aren’t helping. Knock-offs of White heroes in a different color and ethnicity isn’t diversity. It’s just tokenism in a brand new box.

In some ways I think these pitiful attempts at diversity at Marvel and DC are passive aggressive attempts at sabotaging any serious efforts at adding characters of color at the big two. They take the absolute WORST ideas for characters of color and publish them as stories. Then when fans complain they say “we tried to create diversity in comics but no one wanted it.”

When in actuality they were FULL OF SHIT.

You know what would really promote diversity at Marvel NEW ORIGINAL HEROES OF COLOR. Characters with their own powers, their own backstories, and their own rogues galleries. But no one in comics today has the backbone or the stones to risk launching a new character.

As a writer who creates Black heroines I’m really offended by this latest genderbent hero over at Marvel. It’s an insult to make a Black woman Iron Man. Black women are constantly presented as masculine in media like Leslie Jones in Ghostbusters 2016. And to call RiRi Wiliams Iron Man just perpetuates the stereotypes like the about masculine Black women even further.

 If Marvel wanted to make a tech based Black female heroine, just create a tech based heroine with her own name, her own backstory, and build up her own rogues gallery. Don’t cop out and give a woman the title of a man.