The 33-year-old founder and president of Amalgam Comics & Coffeehouse, Inc. in Philadelphia and the first black woman comic book store owner will appear on a variant cover of Marvel’s Invincible Iron Man #1.
On the cover, she poses next to Marvel superhero RiRi Williams (who will take over from Tony Stark as Iron Woman or Ironheart). RiRi is a science genius who enrolled at MIT at the age of 15.
Johnson said she owes the collaboration to her colleague Randy Green, whom she said spearheaded the project and conceptualized the cover.
“When the email went out about potential variants for stores, he was really excited and took it upon himself to work out the [details]. It was really his hard work,” she told ABC News. “I knew what it was supposed to look like, but having the actual art in front of you is so much different. It’s really exciting.”
“To think I made it a decade-plus and I had never seen a black, woman superhero is crazy because little white boys have so many [with whom they identify]: ‘I want to be Iron Man!’ ‘I want to be Batman!’ ‘I want to be Superman.’ ‘I want to be Han Solo!’ When you are a person of color, you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel to find someone you can identify with. I always felt like I was watching other people’s adventures,” she explained. “Being introduced to Storm was a pivotal moment for me because had I not come across her, I might have grown out of my love for [comics].”
Such an awesome story!
