A new character will succeed Tony Stark as Iron Man in Marvel’s Civil War II comic series: a fifteen-year-old African American woman named Riri Williams.

In the story, Williams is a genius who builds a suit of Iron Man armor in her dorm room at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Writer Brian Michael Bendis, who is white, came up with the new protagonist. Riri Williams was first introduced in the Invincible Iron Man #7 comic book, released in March 2016, with a character design created by artist Stefano Caselli.

“One of the things that stuck with me when I was working in Chicago a couple years ago on a TV show that didn’t end up airing was the amount of chaos and violence,” Bendis said in an interview with Time. “And this story of this brilliant, young woman whose life was marred by tragedy that could have easily ended her life—just random street violence—and went off to college was very inspiring to me. I thought that was the most modern version of a superhero or superheroine story I had ever heard. And I sat with it for awhile until I had the right character and the right place.”

The New York Times reports that the development of Williams’s character reflects a changing comics industry making strides “to reflect broader diversity in race, gender, and sexuality.” As an example, author Ta-Nehisi Coates was commissioned to rewrite the Black Panther series.

This development has not been universally praised, however. As Bendis told Time, “There are fans who say, ‘Show us the new stuff,’ and then there are fans who say, ‘Don’t do anything different from when I was a kid.’” And some of the reaction has been racist. Bendis continued: “I’m not saying if you criticize you’re a racist, but if someone writes, ‘Why do we need Riri Williams we already have Miles [Morales, the new Latino Spider-Man]?’ that’s a weird thing to say.”

Despite the appreciation of a black female lead in a comic series, Jamie Broadnax, editor of the pop culture website Black Girl Nerds, told the Times that she was dismayed that the publisher picked a white man to write the character. “[I] really wish the publisher would give black women a chance to write [black female leads],” she said.

Mildred Louis, an illustrator, said on Twitter, “Our lives and experiences aren’t a thought exercise. We don’t exist so you can ‘get better at writing.’”

Image Credit: Jeff Dekal/Marvel.