As I said in the Moon Knight hero
profile, Disney has revealed that they’re going to add several Marvel centric
shows for the Disney+ streaming service. Moon Knight is one, She-Hulk is another,
and one that I’m rather curious to see how it’ll play out is Ms. Marvel.
Originally the codename for Colonel Carol Danvers after her lab accident that
turned her into a Human-Kree superweapon, the name was kind of up for grabs
after she took up the Captain Marvel Mantel. The name has been used by a handful
of ladies of Marvel, but it didn’t find it’s perfect fit until Kamala Khan. Let’s
get to it.
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| Tis a brave person indeed that asks for a selfie with James "Logan" Howlett. |
Kamala Khan is the first-generation
Pakistani-American daughter of Yusuf and Muneeba Khan. For the first decade and
a half of her life, Kamala’s life was largely uneventful. Or as uneventful as
any young person’s is in the Marvel Universe, I imagine that the occasional
alien invasion and entire universe rewrite has given the average citizen of the
Marvel universe a very askew view of normal. As she got older, she became a bit
of a gamer nerd, and developed into a massive fan girl for superheroes, gravitating
towards the notorious X-Men, and above all Carol Danvers, aka Captain Marvel. She
writes fan fiction about them, which feels weird when you think about a fictional
character writing fan stories about other fictional characters that are real to
her. Ugh, I think I went cross eyed for a second, lets move on.
Things didn’t really shake up for
Kamala until she was sixteen and went through that most troubling of teenage phases,
the rebellious phase. Wanting to shake up her public image a bit, she went against
her parents wishes, and best friend Bruno’s advice, and went to a party at the
Jersey Waterfront. While she tried to have fun, most of the other students
continued to tease the nerdy Muslim girl. Yeah know, “you smell like curry,” type
barbs. Bruno tells her she should probably go, as he’s worried that when the
meat heads at the party get drunk things will get bad for her. She walks off in
a huff. She was on her way home from the Party when Jersey City was hit by a Terrigen
Mist cloud.
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| I've heard of growth spurts but this is ridiculous. |
Okay, a bit of background info for
ya to explain this. Around this time, the Mad Titan Thanos had come to Earth
seeking his illegitimate son, a young man named Thane. He discovered that the
boy was of Inhuman stock and came to Attilan to use a semi-secret archive they
had to locate Thane. Black Bolt, king of the Inhumans, faced off against Thanos
and unleased a massive amount of Terrigen Mist to be released across Earth. The
Mist is a vapor that coves off Terrigen Crystals, one of the main power sources
to the Inhumans. Being exposed to the Mists causes Inhumans to mutate and develop
additional powers, but also runs the risk of causing random Atavistic traits.
Example, a member of the Royal Family of the Inhumans, Gorgon, has superhuman strength
but also bull legs. Makes the power boost seem less than ideal, doesn’t it?
Anyway, he did that as a delaying tactic against Thanos, and to trigger Thane’s
latent Inhuman abilities, as the Terrigen Mists are a key component to that. He
just kind of overshot the mark a little.
So yeah, Kamala was hit by the Mist.
Much to her shock, Kamala went through Terrigenesis, the metamorphic process Inhumans
go through that unlocks their powers. Turns out, the Khan’s had Inhuman
ancestry. Who knew? Kamala was wrapped in a cocoon of sorts, and had a vision of
her three favorite heroes, Iron Man and Captain’s America and Marvel, scolding
her for being disobedient and asking her what she wanted out of life. She admitted
she wanted to be more like Carol, beautiful, awesome, butt kicking and less
complicated. Her words. Kamala awoke from her Terrigenesis and was shocked to
discover she’d turned into a young Carol Danvers, Ms. Marvel Costume and all. After
nearly barfing, she partially turns back to normal. After several minutes of
shifting between Classic Ms. Marvel and Ms. Khan, she seems to get her body
back under control. She heads back toward the party when she sees the massive
Terrigen Mist cloud still hanging over it. While trying to avoid a pair of the
popular jerks that mocked her earlier, she discovered that she could also
shrink down to about an inch in size. Day just keeps getting weirder. She takes
on the Ms. Marvel appearance and regrows to normal size in order to save the
bitchy girl of the pair from drowning when the bitchy boy accidently knocks her
into the waterfront. She stretches and enlarges her hand to scoop the girl out
and put her on the dock. She beats a hasty retreat when the other kids start
asking Ms. Marvel for an autograph. She makes it back home, but not before her
parents got a call from a frantic Bruno telling them about how he’d lost track
of her at the party. Whoops. While she’s definitely grounded after that, she
feels hopeful that her new powers will make things… interesting.
She spends the next couple of days
trying to figure out the extent of her new powers, avoiding Bruno whom she is
still mad at, and freaking out about people talking about “Ms. Marvel”
appearing again. Stressful week, me thinks. She discovers that she can grow to
massive size, shapeshift, and stretch her limbs to impossible lengths. All of
which end up being useful when she has to save Bruno from being held up at his
part time job. Or so she thinks. In actuality, the thief is Bruno’s brother Vick.
While he had actually planned on robbing the place, Bruno had swapped shifts with
the guy Vick thought would be on duty, saw through his little brothers disguise
and basically had been chastising him when Kamala walked up. She, still unaware
of the fact that Bruno was in zero danger, grabbed Vick in her supersized hand,
squeezed him and told him to leave the store and not come back. In that
scuffle, however, Vick accidentally shot Kamala in the stomach. Oh no.
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| Denial, thy name is Thomas Alva Edison...'s Cockatiel clone. |
Vick scampers while Bruno calls the
cops, much to a slowly passing out Kamala’s horror. But, to both of their surprise,
she suddenly turns back into her normal self sans the bullet wound in her
stomach. Turns out she can basically instantly heal by reverting to her normal
self. After explaining the gist of things to Bruno and getting the cops off
their backs, Bruno tells her about his brother. Turns out Vick had gotten
wrapped up with some villain calling himself the Inventor and now Bruno needs
to help him out. Kamala offer to help out too, provided that he gives her an
hour to get a costume together. Turns out she can’t shapeshift back into her Carol-form
while she was still recovering from her previous GSW. She runs home and throws together
a ‘burkini,’ the sort of swimsuit you buy when a wetsuit is still a little too
immodest for ya, and a fanny pack and calls it good.
She initially tries to sneak into
the apparently abandoned house to rescue Vick, but quickly “embiggens” as she
likes to call it to wreck stuff up. Unfortunately, Vick’s captors have robots
and lasers on their side and Kamala is forced to beat a hasty retreat. And once
she’s back home, her parent’s find out she snuck out again, she’s
double-grounded, and her father is going to have her talk to their Sheikh (think
the Muslim equivalent to a Rabbi or Priest if the word is unfamiliar). So, kind
of a sucky night. She and Bruno meet up again the next day and start designing
her an actual functional costume. They use an experimental polymer that they’d
created for some Stark or Richards scholarship to create for her a super
elastic costume that will stretch and shrink with her, which will in theory
help her use her powers more effectively. She’s able to bust in, beat up some
goons and get out with Vick again this time. Woo!
The next day, they find a giant
doll of a hanged Ms. Marvel outside the convenience store. Kamala puts on her
costume and gives the crowd of gawkers a rousing speech about Jersey folks not
taking stuff laying down.
Over the next few days, Kamala
continues to break her curfew to disable and destroy robots that the “Inventor”
sends after her across Jersey. She then has to speak with the Sheikh, much to
her own discomfort. But, as it turns out, the old religious leader actually listens
to her and gives her decent advice. Specifically, to seek out a teacher to help
her get better at “helping others” as she put it, to hopefully improve her
skills so she doesn’t have to disobey her folks as much. And thankfully said
teacher appears shortly thereafter. She’s lured into a sewer trap by the Inventor,
who’s revealed to be an abominable horror, a Cockatiel man. Turns out he’s a
clone of Thomas Edison whom had accidentally been spliced with cockatiel DNA
when his creator, a fella named Knox used a contaminated equipment. He decided
to clone a super scientist, and didn’t CLEAN the Petri dishes? Stupid. He has
some crocodiles in a sewer hooked up with cyborg lasers and stuff and wants to
see how Ms. Marvel handles them. The experiment is interrupted by Wolverine. He
was in the area hunting for a runaway from his School for Gifted Youngsters.
Kamala kind of fan girls out at first, as she’s been a huge fan of Wolverine
for a while too. But she gets herself under control.
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| Even for someone like Loki, this has to be one of the most unique introductions to a hero he'll soon be facing. |
The two make their way out of the
sewer, and Wolverine gives her a few pointers on Superhero work. He starts with
some of the basics, work efficiently, a planned fall is better than an
unplanned fall, that sort of thing. And then Kamala learns a somewhat big
secret from Wolverine, that his healing powers are no longer working. He’d been
infected by a virus that was repressing his healing factor a short time back.
Before they can talk more, they’re attacked by a mondo-croc that the Inventor
sicced on them.
They’re able to kill the giant sewer
beast, and make their way out of the sewer. Wolverine gives Ms. Marvel a few
more pointers, namely that trying not to hurt anyone while protecting people usually
means that you’ll get hurt the most, appreciate the powers that you have while
you have them, and that the best abilities are the ones that help you get out
off bed each morning. They almost make it out of the sewer when they’re trapped
in one of those shrinking rooms. They’re able to disable the crushing walls,
and discover that the whole damn place they’ve been exploring was being powered
by Wolverine’s runaway, she was being used as a person-battery. That’s bonkers.
They save the girl and Kamala and Wolverine part ways.
After that, she gets teamed up with
Lockjaw. He’s a massive Inhuman canine with the power of teleportation. Turns
out, ol’ Logan made a call to Captain America, who spoke with the Inhuman Queen
Medusa, whom sent the dog to look after her. She and Lockjaw track down several
more of the Inventor’s machines, discovering that the big ones are all somehow
using Teenagers as batteries. Eventually, the Inventor tracks her to her school
and sends a massive robot to fight her. Kamala puts in her best effort, but her
injuries had been compounding, so she was more or less powerless at that point.
Lockjaw teleports her and Bruno to New Attilan, the Inhuman capital. She gets
healed up and informed that she’s an Inhuman, much to her own shock. Can’t
blame her, the Inhumans have kind of been C-listers for years now. Kamala and
Bruno leave, intent on facing the Inventor again. Using Lockjaw’s teleportation
and Vick’s knowledge, she finally tracked down the Inventor’s lair. She
intended to free the captured teens, but to her shock most of them were there
willingly.
Turns out that the confabulation of
Edison and a bird had been preying on the self-esteem issues that we all faced
in those damnable years between twelve and twenty and convinced these kids that
all their good for is powering his devices. Kamala gives the kids a rousing
speech about how their lives are worth more than being the batteries for an insane
scientist out of time, and rallies them to take back their lives. This causes
the Inventor to flip out and send more robots are her. With the aid of Lockjaw,
the teens and Bruno calling the cops, Kamala is able to defeat the Inventor. He’s
seemingly crushed by the falling debris created by his giant robot. I’m SURE
we’ll never see him again. And it’s only after that that she becomes certain
normality is something she probably won’t have ever again.
Since then, Kamala has gone on to
be one of Marvel’s up and coming heroes. She helped defeat a terrorist named Kaboom
from causing an Inhuman revolt to overthrow Medusa and dominate the Humans. She
also did her best to help keep things together while their Earth was falling
apart due to the Incursions, multiple realities falling in on themselves. She
had just enough time to gather her friends and family in one place, reveal to
her mother that she was Ms. Marvel, and say goodbye before reality was
destroyed. Thankfully, she returned once the Main and Ultimate Marvel Universes
were smoothed out into a new prime Universe. Just before the end of the Incursions
and for a time after she did get to meet and was mentored by Captain Marvel
herself, who gave Kamala a special beacon to call her in if the younger Marvel
needed help. She served alongside many of the new generation of heroes, guys like
Miles Morale’s Spider-Man, Sam Alexander aka Nova, Riri Williams aka Ironheart
(an heir to Iron Man’s legacy), the new Hawkeye Kate Bishop, the Totally Awesome
(gag) Hulk Amadeus Cho, the Vision’s robot daughter Vivian, and a young time displaced
Cyclops. Actually, all of them sans Kate
would form a team they called the Champions. Nice title. She’s also served
along side the Inhumans on a number of occasions. All in a days work for a
teenage hero.
Kamala is a human with some Inhuman
heritage. I don’t really know if that means she had an Inhuman ancestor that
chose to live amongst humans, or if she just had the base genetic code that the
Kree used to create the Inhumans millennia ago. Either way, she reacted to exposure
to the Terrigen Mist and became superhuman. The comics explain that her powers
are morphogenetics, and it gets weirder from that name. Basically, on a
molecular level Kamala shifts her mass to different versions of herself across
time. This allows her to grow “embiggen” and shrink “debiggen” on a pretty
massive scale, stretch her limbs, torso and neck, as well as thin her body to
about the width of a sheet of paper. She can also rapidly heal, but can’t use her
other powers while doing so. Turns out self-regeneration is a little too
draining to work in conjunction with stretching and shrinking. She can also
shapeshift in the classic sense, taking on another’s appearance, but she does
so sparingly as that sort of shifting is draining. She also has a form of bioluminescence,
as she’s shown to glow when using her powers.
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| Kamala learned the subtle but oh so important rule of hero work, Never blindly trust a pretty face. |
Kamala is another of those
characters that seems to violate that earlier rule I stated. You know, the one
that said that if a character or plot is less than ten years it’s highly
unlikely to show up outside the comics. Yeah, she made her debut back in 2014 and
was a pretty smashing success. What a shock, that taking a risk on a character
that is both a woman and an underrepresented non-white character would have a
big impact. I swear, that rule held up for years before the 2010s.
She made a couple of appearances on
the show Avengers Assemble. She had a cameo appearance in the third
season, “The Inhuman Condition,” where she’s shown being captured by Ultron
with the rest of her people. She gets a proper introduction in the next episode
when she and another Inhuman named Inferno help the Avengers deal with Ghost,
an old enemy of Iron Man’s that was using his new Inhuman powers to enhance his
phasing and planned to steal Iron Man’s AI Friday. She’s a recurring character
from then on, appearing in the episodes “Civil War Part 2: The Mighty Avengers,”
“Avengers No More,” “Show Your Work,” “Under the Spell of the Enchantress,” “The
Vibranium Coast,” “Shadow of Atlantis,” and “Mists of Attilan.”
She made an appearance in the
second season of Spider-Man. Interestingly, while this show has a separate
continuity from Avengers Assemble, they both used the same voice actress
for Kamala, Kathreen Khavari. She comes across Peter while the two were both separately
investigating an elite but shady boarding school. Turns out it was a front for
the Advanced Idea Mechanics or AIM and the groups Scientist Supreme had already
kidnapped several heroes like Captain’s America and Marvel, and the Hulk to
experiment on. They team up and kick evil’s butt.
She appeared in the miniseries Marvel
Rising: Initiation, once again voiced by Kathreen Khavari. That gal
is either an amazing voice actress, or was able to negotiate one hell of a
contract. Just saying. She and her friend Squirrel Girl team up to track and capture
Ghost Spider, an arachnid themed hero that had recently gone rogue following
the murder of a young man named Kevin. They track down and battle Ghost Spider a
few times before GS, really Gwen Stacey, (ha, I literally just got that) convinces
them to listen to her side of the story. Kevin had been her best friend from
grade school whom had just recently developed Inhuman powers. She’d found his corpse
in a warehouse and was framed for the Murder. The two heroines let Ghost Spider
go, so she can hopefully clear her name.
She returned in full length animated
movie, Marvel Rising: Secret Warriors. Kamala along with Squirrel Girl,
Inferno, Patriot, Lockjaw, America Chavez, Quake, and Captain Marvel, end up on
a team that defends Earth from a Kree Invasion. Their team, dubbed the Secret
Warriors, maybe tasked with doing some undercover work for Captain America.
She’s appeared in several video games,
including Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3, Marvel: Contest of Champions, and Lego
Marvel Super Heroes 2. These are largely ensemble games, without her doing
much specifically, hence why I’m just mentioning them.
She’s also got an up-and-coming
Disney+ series. I’m curious to see how they’ll have her come up with the Ms.
Marvel ID, as in the MCU continuity, Carol jumped right into being Captain
Marvel. We’ll just have to wait and see.
Kamala is a very fun character. I
read the first dozen or so comics of her initial run, and fell in love with her
on the firsts page. It involved her basically glaring at a sandwich for daring
to have bacon on it, since that food is not halal (Muslim equivalent to kosher).
She’s got a great energy to her. She’s incredibly determined and peppy when she
needs to be, but has also learned to watch where she steps as she’s grown as a
hero. Her powers are also very impressive, being reminiscent of other heroes, like
Mr. Fantastic, Ant Man and so on, but mixed together in a way that is wholly
her own. And the fact that her original nemesis was Thomas Edison that was also
a Cockatiel was just stupid funny. It’s also interesting to see how a child of
immigrants handles that side of her life, as she tries to balance being a good
hero with being a good daughter and a good Muslim. Its clear that while there are
aspects of her faith that bother her, the dietary and gender restrictions being
the most obvious, that she’s still proud of her faith and wants to keep being a
good Muslim. Hey, the majority of heroes that are religious have either expressly
stated or implied to being some variety of Christian, Jewish, or a being of a
mythological pantheon. It’s nice to see more representation is all I’m saying.
I think that in the short time she’s been a hero, she’s met that lofty goal of
being worthy of her namesake and surpassed it by leaps and bounds. So yeah, in
short, she’s fun, unique, and I’m glad she’s caught on as quickly as she has.
Twitter: @BasicsSuperhero
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