Why wasn't Riri Williams more popular?

Being a Bendis OC isn’t a good way to start out.

Well the answer goes like this...

Name 5 wholly original superhero characters Bendis created that are good and solid.

'What if Iron Man was a spunky black teen girl super genius' is a shitty,, derivative, pandering idea.

>'What if Green Lantern was a spunky black teen girl super genius' is a shitty,, derivative, pandering idea.

1. Iron Man hasn't been an A-lister in comics since the 80s, so there isn't really much demand or appeal to a legacy character.

2. Tony Stark is Iron Man 100% in the mindset of the general public due to the films and he doesn't have a successor, legacy, or sidekick.

3. She didn't have anything unique about her. She was generic as hell, came right on the heels of another genius young black woman with a connection to Stark (granted there is rumor that Alex Kot burned so many bridges that Lila Rhodes is off the table for writers), and everything that she did have that could be spun into unique motivations and characterization like her nigh-autistic behaviors, her ego, her worryingly supervillainesque mentality, her personal history losing two fathers and a best friend to criminal violence, and the fallout of her original armor being comprised of parts stolen from her university was either downplayed, ignored, or unintentional on the part of Bendis.

4. She lacked an interesting supporting cast or rogues gallery.

By the time Bendis was off the book the character had been more or less crippled by how she was written under his pen. Later writers tried their best to salvage the character but at that point a lot of avenues of development had been cut off. If they had been willing to commit to a hard reset of the character once Bendis left she could have been something interesting, but since they had to follow up on what Bendis did there really wasn't much they could do to help.

Most Iron Man fans didn't even know about Lila Rhodes until after Benis created Riri. Nobody actually read Kot's Iron Patriot book and it only lasted 5 issues.

The problems were that Benis came onto the Iron Man book in 2015 announcing how he wanted to make Tony the flagship character of the comics, the same as he was in the MCU, and within a year he put Tony in a coma to replace him with a character for his daughter to self-insert as.

It was five years after he'd replaced Ultimate Spider-Man with Miles, what he was doing wasn't new and exciting anymore, too many other Marvel books were trying to replace their characters at the same time, Riri didn't stand out or give anyone reason to get excited about the stories, and Benis' work was getting worse and worse, after his Iceman story and Civil War 2 most readers had turned against him, the only people supporting the idea of Riri weren't actually reading Iron Man.

During the same time period we also had
>'What if Moon Boy was a spunky black teen girl super genius'
>'What if April O'Neil was a spunky black teen girl super genius'
And it's not just that they're all a spunky black teen girl super genius', it's that they're the exact same character.

Technically, he doesn't. They just showed up to where he already was.

Bendis really shit the bed, even more so than usual, with Tony. I remember him shit talking Tony's rogues gallery in an interview but his own additions to Tony's villains amounted to "totally not the Hand."

Tony sending what amounts to an AI helpdesk mimicking his personality to some genius kid dabbling in superheroics because he's too busy with his own shit only to be knocked into a coma is a decent enough hook. You could have gotten some decent mileage out of Riri forming a surrogate bond with the Tony hologram only for the real Tony to show up and not only is real Tony a completely different personality, but in comparison the hologram is a fairly one-note facsimile and Riri was doing a lot of projecting onto it and convincing herself of things that weren't there.

Because her name sounds like a chinaman trying to say "lily".

Attached: riri origin story.jpg (2500x1286, 3.16M)

Ok what the fuck are those edits

What edits?

It took other writers in order to make Riri an actual character

Retro Girl
Diamond/Christian Walker
Daisy Johnson
Maria Hill
Layla Miller

Because she was supposed to be a villain

Because she's a poorly thought out token character?

>Maria Hill
>Dumb bitch who started the first civil war, and inadvertantly caused secret empire with the brainwashing villains village thing

If that was Bendis' plan all along then kudos to him. Otherwise Maria Hill is the most incompetent director of shield ever

>what if we took a beloved character and had a random rip off everything about them and add a bad attitude of entitlement
I can't imagine

Why tf her tiddies so big

She got Thanos'd.

did he rape her?

What issue/run?

Moon Girl kind of came into her own in her own title