To close out February and Black
History Month, we’ll be talking about one of the newest young African American
heroes, Riri Williams aka Ironheart. The young successor to Iron Man hasn’t had
much of a career as of yet, as she’s only really been doing the superhero thing
for just shy of four years, so this one is going to be on the shorter side of
things. Just so you know. While she hasn’t had the popularity explosion that some
of the other character’s I’ve mentioned this week, (Miles and Static), I think that
this girl will impress you with some of her exploits. Let’s get to it, shall we?
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| Like the design overall, but the OCD part of me can't help but desire a matching symbol on the right side. |
Riri Williams’ early life seems to be kind of
a mixed bag of good and bad. Her father died before she was born. Bad. By the
time she was five years old, she underwent several tests and was determined to
be a super genius. Good. Her extreme intellect, seemingly inevitably, lead to
her being incredibly introverted and slightly socially awkward. Bad. Getting a
scholarship to MIT at eleven. Good. Step-father and best friend getting killed during
a drive-by shooting. Very, very bad. Honestly, given the amount of death in
this girl’s past, is it any wonder that she’d be interested in a suit of
powered armor?
Shortly after the deaths of her stepdad
and best friend, Riri began work on her own Iron Man suit. She was able to
reverse engineer most of Tony Stark’s gadgets and gear from examining one of
Tony’s out of date suits. The model in question was his Mark 41 armor, which
was designed for deep space exploration, so there were a lot of nifty toys for
her to play around with. She then used resources from MIT, mostly stolen, to design
and build her own unique power Armor. She was eventually discovered by Campus security,
at which point she took another leaf out of Tony’s book… get into your untested
suit of powered armor and fly away. Thankfully, her model had significantly
better jets so she didn’t immediately crash into the ground after escaping her
pursuers. She flew cross country for a while, doing her best to figure out her
suit’s flight capabilities on the fly. Pun intended. While soaring over New Mexico,
she intercepted a group of inmates escaping from prison. She flew down and
stopped the truck they were using to get away, which was good. But she severely
damaged her suit in the process, another bad. She eventually trudged her way
back home to Chicago, where she got back to work designing and improving her
suit, much to her mother’s dismay.
Thankfully, Riri’s stunt at MIT and
stopping the prisoners caught the attention of the very person she’d copied her
designs from, Tony Stark. Feeling that he needed to reward such behavior as
Riri’s, he got her what she needed to rebuild and upgrade her new suit and
recruited Riri’s help during the second hero Civil War. Basically, Iron Man and
Captain Marvel were at odds about using an Inhuman Precog to preemptively
tackle disaster, natural and/or manmade. Iron Man was against it, Marvel for. Riri
was recruited and fought along side Iron Man’s faction, with heroes like Iron
Man, both Captain’s America (Rogers and Wilson), Deadpool and Luke Cage. A very
odd assortment of heroes, not going to lie.
The war ended with Tony Stark getting
beaten into a coma by Carol Danvers, and the precog in question peace-outing to
try living life on a higher plan of existence. Lotta human suffering and
friendships shaken to their core to get to that ending, guys. With Iron Man in
stasis, Riri decided to do her best to live up to Tony’s legacy and continue
doing the hero thing. She got her hands on an AI copy of Stark’s mind, uploaded
it into her new armor and took flight as Ironheart. Riri’s first big fight was against
an Inhuman gangster known as Techno Golem and her small army of “Biohack” (Tony’s
name) Ninja. Techno Golem has the power to override and assimilate technology
into her own body, for brief periods of time. Kind of makes it hard for a
powered armor user to face off against her, but Riri got some backup from a re-armored
Rescue (Pepper Potts) and defeated the criminal by tricking Techno Golem into
assimilating an Iron Man armor loaded with a virus.
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| I suppose you could do worse for an AI buddy than a genius, billionaire philanthropist. Just ignore the playboy advice. |
Riri became something of an
overnight celebrity after that run in, as she pretty quickly ended up on SHIELD’s
watch list, got backing form Tony’s mother, got offered reenroll at MIT, and got
offers from the Champions to join their ranks. She later was convinced by
SHIELD to invade Latveria to apprehend war criminal, dictator, and former
professor Lucia von Bardas. Deciding to risk kicking that enormous hornet’s
nest, Riri flew in, defeated Bardas and declared herself Queen of Latveria. I’m
not sure if that’s how that works, but it led to Latveria getting free
elections, so I guess we’re just going to roll with it.
A short time later, HYDRA ended up
taking over the United States. The green suited Nazis had used a fascist doppelganger
of Captain America and several other plots in order to dominate the US of A.
Riri joined the Underground, a collection of heroes and civilian fighters fighting
to end HYDRA’s new empire. She fought along side and officially joined the Champion’s
during this outing. They attempted to defeat Evil Steve Rogers along side Black
Widow, but were defeated and captured. Which is still better off than Natasha,
who was executed by Evil Steve. Riri and her team were eventually freed when
the Underground launched a full assault on HYDRA’s base in DC. She helped the
heroes defeat HYDRA, Evil Steve and saw that the original Steve Rogers was
brought back from cosmic limbo. Not a bad first few years of hero work.
Riri Williams is a super genius and
skilled mechanical engineer. She was able to get accepted into MIT, reverse-engineer
an arc reactor and build her own Iron-Man style powered Armor before she was sixteen.
She’s built a few variations of her powered armor, each with different weapons
and capabilities. But some broad strokes tech they all share is enhancing her physical
strength, flight, and repulsor ray projection.
Riri is a relatively new character
for Marvel, and doesn’t seem to have had the popularity explosion that guys
like Miles Morales or Kamala Khan have had. That being said, she does have at least
one appearance outside of the comics.
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| I wonder how long it was after Riri joined the team before she asked to see Viv's schematic? That sounded less dirty in my head. |
She appears as part of the Marvel
Rising, an online Marvel series focused on the creation and adventures of
the Secret Warriors. It’s a group of diverse young heroes doing the hero thing.
In Heart of Iron, we’re introduced to Riri who is at MIT and attempting
to adjust to college at the age of 15 but failing miserably at it. Her only friend,
kinda, is an AI she programmed dubbed AMI. Riri is forced to do the hero thing
when AMI is stolen by an Accuser (Kree warrior judge) named Hala to use in a
doomsday weapon. Riri quickly assembles her suit of powered armor and joins
with the Secret Warriors to try to save AMI. In the end, she joins the team.
She’s appeared in a few ensemble
Marvel games as well, including Marvel Avengers Academy and as a DLC for
Lego Marvel Super Heroes 2.
Overall, I say I like the concept
of Riri. She’s still relatively new, so it can be hard to judge how much of an
impact she’ll have. Maybe she’ll become a household name like Spider-Man, Captain
America or Iron Man, maybe she’ll fade into obscurity like Hybrid, Cosmo the
space dog, and the Original Human Torch. It’s hard to say. But, I think she’s
got a cool armor design, a respectively tragic backstory, and the gumption to
be a long haul hero. I mean, come on, she flew into Latveria and took over.
While I question the legality of such a coup d’état, I gotta give her a ton of
points for doing something that insane. Also, I’m just a sucker for the
introverted egg head getting to live their dream. Shocking, I know. So yeah,
she’s still pretty early in her career, but I like Ironheart and hope to see
more of her in the future.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/34464050Twitter: @BasicsSuperhero
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