For anyone worried about why a female would call herself Iron Man, feel free to stand down.
When Riri Williams officially takes over for Tony Stark as the star of the Invincible Iron Man comic book series, she won’t actually be called Iron Man. And no, before you ask, she won’t be known as Iron Woman or Iron Girl either.
According to an interview in Wired, Williams will take on the codename Ironheart when the first issue of her volume of the comic goes on sale this fall. Series writer Brian Michael Bendis explained that the name was chosen partly out of logistical considerations but will have an in-story logic to it as well.
"“Iron Woman seemed old fashioned to some. Iron Maiden looked like a legal nightmare. And Ironheart, coined by Joe Quesada, after I told him my planned story for Riri, speaks not only to the soul of the character but to the Iron Man franchise as a whole. Tony first put on the armor to save his heart. Riri puts it on for different reasons altogether but still heart-related.”"
That doesn’t answer the question that fans really want to know, which is whether Williams will still affectionately be called Shellhead, or if that, too, is a thing of the past.
Jokes aside, Williams is the teenage genius who reverse engineered her own suit of Iron Man armor while in college. She had been floating around in the background of the current run of Invincible Iron Man, but circumstances will soon leave her as the Iron Man, er, Ironheart, of the Marvel universe.
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And what of Tony Stark? Comic Book Resources says he will still be around, as both the A.I. portion of the Ironheart armor and maybe in the flesh as well, though that’s less certain. It could be a situation similar to the one playing out in Thor comics, where the original is still around but occupied with something else full time while someone else fills his more familiar duties.
Invincible Iron Man #1 is set to hit stores in November with a story by Bendis and art by Stefano Caselli.