Yesterday was a monumentous day my friends. Not only did we get a new episode of Kenobi, but we also got the premiere of the Ms. Marvel series on Disney+. This is probably the show I have been most anxiously waiting for because I genuinely love the character of Ms. Marvel. If you have never had a chance to read the original limited series run of the comic, then I highly suggest you do so. On second thought if you are not a comic reader maybe don’t because I have this feeling that the television show will follow it pretty closely. I am going to do my best to praise Ms. Marvel in as spoiler-free a manner as I can because I really want folks to go out and watch this show.
There are some characters in the Marvel universe that act as a stand-in for the public. Deadpool for example is every cynic, the person sitting with their friends cracking jokes as the movie is playing out on the screen. Deadpool is the embodiment of MST3k and Rifftrax, and the fans love them for this fourth wall-breaking nonsense. Kamala Khan is every fan. She is the embodiment of good-natured fan obsession with their heroes and the purveyor of fan fiction surrounding their potential actions. If you ever theorized about improbable connections between heroes and comic book runs, then you have a little Kamala in you. As a result, she has also been a fan favorite for a long while and has some of the more interestingly nuanced stories about how this fan obsession slams straight into a brick wall that is her conservative Pakistani upbringing.
I am legitimately uncertain that there exists a more perfect real-life representation of Kamala Khan than Iman Vellani. There is this joyous exuberance that she has nailed that is key to the character of Ms. Marvel. While we have not seen a ton of it yet, she also seems to be able to nail the comedic timing required for the character. I think part of the reason why I have always loved this character is it reminds me so much of my good friend Rae. Some of you who have been around for a while might know her from the AggroChat podcast or from the original Belghast Chibi character that used to adorn the banner of this site. She gets so extremely wrapped up in her fan obsessions and squirrels out of control into daydream land, planning cosplays and fan art. I think we probably all know a “Kamala” in our lives or might even be one ourselves, and I think that is part of what makes the character so potent.
One of the things that I think the show does phenomenally well is this “doodlemation” style of animatic. This is shown at the very beginning of the episode as we get a glimpse of the Sloth Baby productions Youtube page. I love the use of doodles to represent the vibrant daydream universe of Kamala, and I think it plays out pretty well on screen as well. One of the overriding characteristics of Kamala in pretty much every media is her love of superheroes, and more importantly her fan worship of Captain Marvel… specifically the Carol Danvers version we are familiar with in the MCU. Kamala wants to be Captain Marvel, and in the comics, this manifests into an origin story. So far this version appears to be following a theme more closely related to the Avengers video game variant of the Ms. Marvel origin story.
In the comics, Kamala was part of a wave of Inhuman characters brought in by the terrigen mist. This was all part of a nonsense side plot to create mutants that were tactically different from the mutants that Marvel was a dumdum and sold the exclusive rights to Fox. I say this as a way of illustrating that this origin story was sort of fraught from the start, and really doesn’t have much to do with the core of who Kamala Khan is. In the television series and therefore the MCU, Ms. Marvel seems to have powers stepping from either a mystic or cosmic origin. I think this shift happened for purely financial reasons because it would be extremely costly to create a believable version of “embiggening”. Cosmic crystalline not-human-looking nonsense is way easier and cheaper to animate than photorealistic gigantism. I mean I feel like the Avengers game did a pretty good job with her power and it still looked deeply uncanny valley at times.
Basically, I am asking you to go out and watch this show. There is already a wall of negative hype surrounding it because it is a story that is not featuring a white male in the pilot seat. Just like we saw with Reeva/Third Sister in the Kenobi series, public fandom for these properties has a serious problem with being a little racist. Folks are going to hedge their opinions in all sorts of ways to try and make them sound like they are educated and taking all views into account when in reality it often equates back to “person of color bad in my white show”. Ms. Marvel so far is a phenomenally comic accurate portrayal of this character, and I am hoping that more people will discover the great comic run as a result. This is legitimately maybe one of the most comic-accurate characters in the entire MCU.
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