[Lionheart]

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Man as in human.

That only really works in the plural, not the singular. 'Mankind', 'Human', etc. When talking about specific individual; Batman, Superman, Spiderman, Iron Man - it has to refer to the individual in question. So Iron Man has to be a male. However, we don't know whether this girl will take up the mantle but use the suit to pretend to be a 'man' or not.

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I think it's telling that she's young and black, and a she. Is she even a character yet? Random stuff taking over the mantels of actual heroes is a nonsense. It made sense with Falcon becoming Captain America, it made some sense for Jane to become Thor, but this is silly.

I'm old enough to remember when James Rhodes took over the Iron Man identity, it seemed natural and worked well within the story (Stark's alcoholism was quite groundbreaking at the time). He was Iron Man at the time of the original Secret Wars. When new characters take up mantles of established characters out of nowhere, and especially when they seem to have been chosen specifically for how 'opposite' their physical characteristics are, it seems to jar.

Having said that, the Marvel Universe’s continuity has been a mess since the 90’s. All this ‘Earth 616 / Earth 5150’ nonsense was created so that anyone could basically make up anything at all without it affecting any other continuity. It makes everything a kind of spin-off fan fiction, and enables writers like Bendis to pretty much do whatever they want. Sometimes the stories work, often they don’t. But regardless, since nothing really matters it’s harder to really care about any of the characters or stories.

Kind of ironic that something Marvel used to relentlessly trash DC for - a completely incoherent and messy continuity - is now something they seem to have embraced as a solid concept.

Not that it matters anymore. Ever since Disney bought Marvel the comics have been little more than promotional tools for the movies and character properties they own. This was already happening since the Toybiz days when toys were making more money than the comics, but now it seems to be centralised policy.