Credit: change.org

A grassroots campaign is underway to have Eve Ewing, the poet and sociologist who tweets as Wikipedia Brown, hired as the new writer of Marvel’s Invincible Iron Man comic after longtime creator Brian Michael Bendis left the publisher earlier this week for archrival DC.

A Twitter campaign began on Tuesday to suggest a new writer for Riri Williams, aka IronHeart, a 15-year-old engineering genius and one of the few black girls in comics. Ewing was on board almost as soon as she was suggested.

She noted her qualifications as a writer and also her physical similarity to Riri.

Naturally, it soon had its own hashtag.


A change.org petition started by music writer Tirhakah Love has already gotten nearly 1,500 signatures since it was launched on Wednesday.

“One need not look too far for reasons why Ewing is the perfect fit for Riri’s evolving character,” Love wrote in the petition.

Her latest book, Electric Arches, is a wonderfully considerate trip through Chicago filled with poems, stories, and Ewing’s own visual art acting as guided tour. But even more, Ewing captures the feel of Black girlhood in a city’s whose representation has never quite fit its real character. Her narrative versatility leaps from ruminating on Black people’s unanswerable questions of survival in an
anti-Black world to flexing her memory muscles retelling first engagements: with Prince or a steadily gentrifying Chi-town; all written in striking detail.

Electric Arches itself contains a few stories in which Ewing imagines herself suddenly endowed with superhero powers that allow her to fight racism. If Ewing were to write Invincible Iron Man, it would be fighting another form of racism.