Captain America’s Now Black and Winged, Iron Man May Turn Heel

Announced last night on The Colbert Report – presumably because the in-character host is always insisting that he doesn’t see color (“People tell me I’m white, and I believe them”) – the new identity of Captain America is official. It’s Sam Wilson, a.k.a. Falcon…and he’s keeping the wings (since he’s not getting the super-serum, we can’t blame him). This seems like a reasonable reaction to the popularity of Anthony Mackie’s onscreen portrayal of Wilson – though Joe Quesada stressed that this is just for the comics and not, at this point anyway, the movies.

Meanwhile, Iron Man will be getting what Axel Alonso refers to as a “Genius Bar costume” that looks like a shiny white Apple product, and a new nickname as “the Superior Iron Man,” which brings to mind the recent Doc Ock Spidey. “Like the Superior Spider-Man, Superior Iron Man is a character that’s hard to root for,” says Alonso in Entertainment Weekly. Again, this may be in anticipation of movie trends – the new cinematic Ultron is a Stark-programmed robot who takes on the worst aspects of Tony’s personality without the redeeming qualities – but officially, on-record is just for the comics.

And by next year, it’ll all be undone again somehow, I’m sure. In the meantime, some of you cosplayers better hurry and get at least one of these outfits done by next week.