Today, Suzanne and Shelby are discussing Ms. Marvel 3, originally released April 16th, 2014.
Suzanne: Let me just come out and say it — as a Muslim, I’m equal parts thrilled and reluctant to embrace a comic that represents someone from my faith. Overall, I like when writers incorporate details like ethnicity or religion as part of a whole character. This goes across the board — from Kitty Pryde being Jewish to Daredevil being Catholic. I’m signed on as long as the writing doesn’t divert into tokenism or pandering to a specific group.
In Ms. Marvel #3, G. Willow Wilson expands beyond Kamala Khan’s perspective to critically examine hot-button issues like the partition/barrier in the mosque. Issues that most of the readership probably doesn’t know exist. Have you ever walked into your place of worship and had to pray behind an ugly yellow curtain? Or listened to a sermon in a basement room without ever seeing the speaker? I could go on but let’s just say that these are routine problems in the Muslim community. The image of Kamala sitting in the women’s section looking unengaged is not atypical. How can anyone be expected to listen to the sound of someone’s voice for an hour?
Kamala spends the issue recovering from her heroics as a Captain Marvel look-alike. Understandably, she’s a little freaked out by her morphing powers along with making the local news as Zoe Zimmer’s mystery hero. Plus, being grounded and restricted to school and a lecture at the local mosque doesn’t help the situation.
Kamala stands out at the mosque when she interrupts the sheikh (Islamic scholar) during his lecture and complains about the partition to her brother’s disapproval. She bails on the lecture and tries talking to her friend, Nakia, but doesn’t feel like she can really confide in her. And don’t forget that she’s hiding from Bruno since he ratted her out last issue. What could be more awkward than actively avoiding one of your best friends? Try morphing into your mother’s image in the girl’s locker room. Even Kamala admits that’s a little too Freudian for her comfort. After getting detention for her antics, Kamala goes back to talk with Bruno and finds what appears to be Circle Q getting held up. Does this signal a return for our young hero?
Ms. Marvel is unique in that it has a supporting cast that I care about as much as the protagonist. I missed Kamala’s parents in this issue! Her brother, Aamir, serves as a great foil for her with his religious conservatism and more traditional outlook. Plus, characters like Nakia and Bruno feel well-developed and have some fun interactions with Kamala. Like good friends, they can sense that something is off with her erratic behavior lately.
Kamala’s power set is distinctive for a female superhero — she has more in common with Reed Richards than with Sue Storm. Her ability to transform is almost stress-induced so far; like a nasty migraine that comes on after a difficult exam at school. She struggles with controlling her powers and, like Peter Parker, has to juggle her secret identity with school, friends and family. In one of the best panels of this issue, Kamala desperately tries not to morph in front of everyone during her free period. Adrian Alphona perfectly captures her expression — one that reminds me of that dream where you wake up at school wearing only your underwear. Kamala is a teenager first and foremost — why wouldn’t her power set reflect the insecurity typical of her age group?
That being said, Kamala is still growing into her role as a hero. It’s fun to be able to watch her journey from teenage misfit to full-on superhero. In some ways, I prefer just experiencing her transition and struggle with her identity as an Inhuman. There are enough books about serious superheroes who have world-ending battles with epic villains (yawn). Shelby, what did you think of Kamala’s choice to morph into Captain Marvel and save the day? Do you feel there’s a great conversation about race that should happen here or am I reading too much into this?
Shelby: Absolutely not, there’s definitely a great conversation about race to be had in this book. I know one of our big concerns with issue one of this title was the way a Pakistani-American, Muslim girl was going to be the hero, and she changed into a blonde, white woman. But I really like the way Wilson is addressing this with Kamala’s powers triggered by stress. She originally changed herself to look like Carol Danvers because she was tired of being different from everyone else. It’s a very normal feeling for a teen girl to have, just compounded because Kamala is both a minority and a Muslim. Issue 2 found her coming to the conclusion that she felt just as awkward and uncomfortable in the skin of another as she did in her own. This issue, though, finds Kamala forced to be another person because that is what the world expect of her. She can’t be herself whether she wanted to or not because the world won’t accept her that way.
I think we find ourselves diverging from the typical teen-girl self-image issues and into Kamala’s religion and ethnicity. As a teen, I’m sure we all felt we needed to be the way the world wanted us to be, instead of the way we wanted to be. I would hope that a lot of you all were able to grow out of that, and realize the only thing you need to be is yourself, and the world can deal with it or no. Unfortunately for Kamala, she lives in a world where probably a sizable number of people want her to be something she’s not. It’s a heavy concept, and I love to see it explored in the context not of growing up as a minority, but as figuring out how to make your new superpowers work.
The biggest question now is how is Kamala going to deal with accidentally getting shot stopping a robbery at the Circle Q?
I really like the way Alphona captured this moment. The single shell *tnk*ing on the ground makes the whole thing feel like slow motion, and is a perfect enhancement for the next panel of Kamala in shock. In a moment like that, tiny details like the sound of the casing hitting the linoleum of the Circle Q are the sort of things you would notice. Not, you know, the fact that you were just shot. How is Kamala going to keep her secret now? More importantly, she is just a kid! How is she going to deal with this situation, period? If something like that happened to me, heaven forbid, I don’t think I’d know what to do, and I’m a grown-ass adult. Wilson is exploring a lot of complicated concepts concerning identity and privilege in this day and age, all while delivering a fun, comic book adventure with some very scary consequence; it’s an impressive balancing act, one that I can’t wait to continue to enjoy.
For a complete list of what we’re reading, head on over to our Pull List page. Whenever possible, buy your comics from your local mom and pop comic bookstore. If you want to rock digital copies, head on over to Comixology and download issues there. There’s no need to pirate, right?
Retcon Punch 
Suzanne brings up an interesting point about Kamala’s power set being similar to Reed Richards’. I still think Marvel is setting up inhumans to be a catch-all solution for the various legal obstacles to using all of their characters in the cinematic universes. One such obstacle is the Fantastic Four, which is also kind of an old-fashioned group of boring white dudes to begin with. So far, we’ve been introduced to Kamala, with stretchy powers and Dante, with human torch powers. Mark my words: we will see an invisible inhuman and a rocky-craggy inhuman SOON, and none of them will be white dudes.
That’s an interesting theory. Marvel likes the FF’s powers but doesn’t have movie rights to them, so they’re recreating them as Inhumans (which they haven’t sold off) and will then be able to have a Fantastic Four of movie types. Plus, they’ll all be different colors and races to be more social/world friendly!
That’s quite the conspiracy theory.
Alphona’s got kind of a anti-authoritarian streak, right? The box of cereal on the first page is a box of GM-O’s, with the tagline “listen to your gut, not the lawsuits.” I don’t know what to make of that, and maybe it’s just a side joke or something, but it does feel like the whole team is actively trying to embrace cultures other than what we normally see depicted in comics.
I actually tweeted that gag it’s so good.
There were a lot of great background gags in this one, though. Check out the newspaper clippings on Kamala’s bulletin board on page four; they’re all about the mist, but one paper is called “The Fluffington Post” with bunnies on the top, and another paper features the article “High school cannibalism experiment proves disastrous.” There’s a sign advertising “Homemade meat” on the Vietnamese grocery store, and a sign in the window advertising Roundhouse Cola, and signs for bands called “Aunties and Androids” and “Fair & Pastey” in the window of the store next door. Even the hours sign at the Circle Q is a joke (Business Hours: All of them). There’s a very grumpy looking lady decal on the door of the girls’ locker room, and one of the students in detention has a sign taped to his back reading “Mock me, I cheated on Mr. DeLucas’ Math Exam.” On the way to the Circle Q Kamala passes a store called “Books an’ ting, ting an’ books”, and an ad in the book store’s window is advertising a book called “The Ur-Do’s and Ur-Don’t’s of Chillin in Pakistan”. The sizes for the “Smushie” machine at the Circle Q are advertised as “this” and “that.”
Alphona was on FIRE this issue just from the background gags alone. I love his sense of humor.
What do you guys make all of the pop cultural references scattered throughout? The Circle Q doesn’t serve Slushees, it serves Squishies (which is what they’re called at the Kwiky Mart in The Simpsons) and someone utters “strange things are afoot at the Circle Q, an obvious Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure reference. I think Wilson and Alphona might be explicitly trying to engaging in as much American culture as possible to make the Kamala’s “otherness” not so strange.
It’s actually a pretty effective way of ingratiating this series to nerds. Kamala gets a lot of attention for the way she adds representation of her faith, race, even gender to comics, but she’s also representing pop culture geeks in a way we don’t always see in comics. She’s representing everyone that recognizes a good Simpsons reference, which makes her audience pretty large.
Also, how adorable is it that Kamala uses reading glasses? Is this the first we’ve seen of that?
I think so. So cute!
That last page was legitimately horrifying. I think I’m going to have a hard time when Kamala starts actually fighting crime, and not just because I’m enjoying the more “hang out” tone of this series so far; Kamala’s such a realistic teenager that it’s a little upsetting to see her in any sort of danger. Ending an issue of almost any other superhero book with this cliffhanger would feel hackneyed at worst, and at best, I’d just be curious about how they get out of it, but with Ms. Marvel I legitimately feel concerned about the character and her safety. That’s the sign of a well-written book.