Ironheart creator says you don't have to have seen any Marvel titles to enjoy the Disney Plus show: "I wanted [people] to be able to open the show and flip through it the same way you could a comic book in a store"

Dominique Thorne as Riri Williams in Ironheart

(Image credit: Disney)

"Brand new" to the MCU? No problem, you can still watch Ironheart, claims creator Chinaka Hodge. Admittedly, though, it would help if you're at least a little familiar with her dealings with the Wakandans or who Doctor Strange is...

It's par for the course these days that Marvel titles set up just as much as they spell out, with each movie or TV show establishing storylines that'll either ripple out into the wider franchise, or wind up steering it directly. Ironheart, though, feels surprisingly self-contained – at least in the first of its three episodes.

Starring Dominique Thorne, it centers on Riri Williams, a tech genius who, after one too many workshop disasters, gets booted out of MIT and moves back in to her mother's place in Chicago. There, she joins a criminal gang in order to drum up the dosh needed to complete her Iron Man-esque super suit, a design she hopes could wind up helping first responders travel more speedily around the city. But there's one major problem: said team is run by Parker Robbins (Anthony Ramos) AKA Hood, whose cloak seems to be having some serious detrimental effects to his mental health and grip on reality.

"I tend to work in adaptation a lot, and so I think I wanted to make sure that it felt like the comic book runs that I love, so both Brian Michael Bendis's run and Eve Ewing's runs," Hodge tells GamesRadar+ ahead of the premiere. "I really wanted to make sure that it felt grounded in a way that had access points for people who weren't necessarily already Marvel fans. If a fan isn't used to or hasn't watched all the phases or, you know, is brand new. I wanted them to be able to open the show and sort of flip through it the same way you could flip through a comic book in a store.

"I very much wanted to include a prismatic American Chicago that looks and feels like the Chicago I know. I hate on TV, when I turn on a show and it looks nothing like the city," she continues. "I very much wanted to get some fun and cool Easter eggs in there, which I feel like we were successfully doing. And I wanted to make sure that each of my writers got to hear their words on screen, so I didn't rewrite anybody on the show. We stuck really, really closely with how the scripts came in, which is a true joy of mine. So I'd say, paramount to everything else, I wanted to run a clean, happy, fun writing room where we all left the room really liking each other still, which isn't always the case."