For those that did not know, Marvel has introduced a new character to the Iron Man family. Riri Williams is an MIT student who appeared in Invincible Iron Man #7 and used stolen materials to build an Iron Man type armor.

I am all for creating new characters, especially minority characters, but it’s not always the answer to bringing in new readership.   I hope that Marvel markets her right so that she isn’t a throw away character who readers will be asking “Who was she again?” in 2 years.  With the push that Spider-Gwen and Silk got, I am hoping they do the same with Riri, but I won’t hold my breath.

My only issue is, if what is being reported is true, it’s going to be a rocky start.  Speculation from Newsarama is that Riri’s armor is reminiscent to the now deceased James Rhodes’ War Machine armor and that she may become the 2^nd to don the name.

If this is true, which I hope it isn’t, it’s a bad idea.  It’s bad because it’s too soon.  Marvel has already caught enough flak around killing a character of color in a pantheon where not only are they so few active in the books but even fewer with solo titles.  So, how in the world when one character is killed off, there is seemingly an immediate move to fill the armor with another?

I get that Marvel claims they are listening to fans by diversifying their characters, but again, if this holds true, it would be better to have Riri Williams don the armor as her own character with a new name.  Given that James Rhodes and War Machine hasn’t held a solo title since 2010, his apparent death means that it’s probably  going to be a long time before we see him again, if ever.  Marvel, how many times are you going to beat Rhodes  down?  In the movies, he gets paralyzed, and now in the comics he gets killed and why?  He died for emotional impact.  Tom Brevoort stated:

In terms of Rhodey, we were not unaware that killing Rhodey meant we’d have a story where an African American character dies, which is something that happens prevalent in our medium. That’s a conversation that we had. In our particular retreat where we talked about this, Ta’Nehisi Coates was in the retreat for the first time. He heard all of this, and afterwards, he sent a long missive to myself and Axel, which we forwarded to Brian and we all spoke about, in terms of what he thought the reaction would be and what the ramifications would be, that we had to consider that from all sides. And we have.

But the thing that makes Rhodey the only choice to be that character is that Rhodey is the one player who has a specific relationship with Tony, and a specific relationship with Carol. He stands firmly in favor of “predictive justice”, and chooses to act on Ulysses’ visions. Even though it costs him his life, it’s a choice he would make again, given the opportunity. His death serves to galvanize them in both of their trajectories in the way the death of any other character just wouldn’t. It was not necessarily a popular choice, knowing we’d get that response – and justifiably so. It seems like it’s always the black hero who dies in these kind of stories. But at least in this instance I feel like we stand on decent ground saying if there had to be a death, it should be Rhodey because of his relationship with the characters, not because of the color of his skin or his lack of prominence in the Marvel Universe.

I don’t want to deviate from Riri as there is an adequately worded piece from Charles Pulliam Moore about why killing Rhodes is tone deaf in relation to minority readers and readers in general.

Also, let’s be frank, you can’t have a big event comic without someone dying because it won’t make you big bucks.  However, this is not the way to do it.  But one can’t ignore the fact that given this information regarding this possible replacement, Marvel looks to be hastily trying to make up for this. One could almost say that Marvel is trying to appease (Read: pander) minority readers by taking away one and replacing with another.  In many ways, it makes me feel like it’s a no-win situation as a comic reader.  I was just getting used to having a good Black Panther comic being written and drawn by a great Black creative team and then this happens. Let’s be honest, even with the minority characters that are already on the table, Marvel (and DC as well) barely knows how to write and sustain the ones they already have.

I can’t state enough that we reserve judgement until we adequately hear from Marvel how true or untrue this news is regarding Riri Williams becoming the new War Machine. The bottom line is, you can’t interchange one character with another simply because they are of the same skin tone.  it’s not appeasing the fans, but turning us away.   I sincerely hope that the heads at Marvel thinks this through before dropping the War Machine moniker on Riri.  Then again, I am talking about the same company that somehow thought that killing off Bill Foster was a great idea.