The Four Color Media Monitor

It looks like Marvel's desperately continuing to try and keep themselves relevant, as according to Tennis Baseline, the young player Coco Gauff has an illustration of herself on an issue of Iron Man, where diversity checkbox character Riri Williams' Ironheart makes an appearance:

It's a bird; it's a plane—no, it's Coco Gauff! The American teenager fulfilled a childhood dream last week with the debut of a rare, commemorative comic book cover to celebrate the release of the 'Invincible Iron Man' #7.

The cover features Gauff readying to serve in the foreground in front of the superhero Ironheart, and is part of a rare collectable line curated by the sports and entertainment agency hustl., which describes itself as "a retailer for exclusive Marvel custom comics and variants featuring world-class athletes and entertainers."

Only 3,000 copies of the issue featuring Gauff are available, and she joins other famous names including New York Giants football star Saquon Barkley, and rappers Eminem and Notorious B.I.G. to feature on covers.

Well it's not hard to guess this is yet another variant cover stunt doubtless intended to appeal in particular to speculators with tons of money to spend on something that'll likely be shut away in a vault for years on end, in the quixotic hopes it'll be worth millions someday. What a joke. Wouldn't it work better if a story could be built around a character based on real life figures on the inside of the comic instead? That is, if reliable contributors were involved, and Marvel hasn't had those in a long time.

Ironheart, like Gauff, is also a teenaged prodigy as the superhero identity of Riri Williams, a 15-year-old genius engineering student who attends the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on scholarship. Her storyline begins after she designs a suit of armor similar to that of Iron Man, the alias of Tony Stark, and takes up his legacy.

The character first appeared in the movie Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, which was released last year, and will star in her own Disney+ series, Ironheart, next year.

Ah, is that so? I can't recall any reports clearly stating this, but one must wonder how Marvel's SJWs feel now that the BP sequel didn't do as well as the 1st film, since T'Challa is no longer part of it, and all because Chadwick Boseman, the actor who played the part in live action, recently and sadly passed away too young? Also notice how they obfuscated how exactly Williams first debuted, which I think was in the comics, but here it sounds more like she really did make her first appearance in a movie. Which obscures how she was unfortunately created as a diversity checkbox character meant as little more than replacing an established white character in his role through contrived circumstances, and that's the main reason why taking up Tony Stark's legacy as Shell-Head wasn't organic. And if she's going to be the subject of a Disney production soon, it's another suggestion that's all she was created for, as something for screenwriters to adapt, not to serve as her own agency in the comics proper.

All that aside, these variant cover stunts sure have rendered comics storytelling meaningless, mainly if the real life tennis player only appears on the cover, and not in the story itself.

Labels: Black Panther, Iron Man, marvel comics, msm propaganda, politics