Ms. Marvel vols. 1 & 2

Six printings of the first issue.  Sales that remain consistent (and even go up).  Near-universal acclaim across the internet.  These are the things that can be used to describe “Ms. Marvel,” one of the most successful new characters that has come out of Marvel in quite some time.  With Carol Danvers now “Captain Marvel,” the newest character to hold the “Ms. Marvel” moniker is Pakistani-American Muslim Kamala Kahn and in the hands of writer G. Willow Wilson she proves to be utterly winning in the role.  Add in some stellar art from returning Marvel superhero veteran Adrian Alphona and you wind up with a title whose hype is justified.

We’re first introduced to Kamala lusting after the bacon in a BLT sandwich at the Circle Q where her friend Bruno works before she heads home to work on her latest work of epic superhero fanfiction.  While her life might seem fun and carefree at first, teenage drama rears its ugly head at dinner when she asks for permission to attend a party by the waterfront and is promptly shot down by her parents.  Sneaking out anyway, Kamala gets more than she bargained for when the mists from the terrigen bomb — set off by Black Bolt in the course of “Infinity” — spread throughout New York and send her into a cocoon that activates her latent Inhuman powers.  Now gifted with the ability to shape-shift, embiggen parts of her body, and transitional healing, she works to help those who need saving and the villains that would take advantage of them.  Starting with the cockatiel-gene-spliced clone of Thomas Edison known as the Inventor.

While this series has been praised for featuring a female protagonist of an ethnic group that isn’t always shown in a positive light (if it’s being shown at all), it really draws strength from the fact that Kamala isn’t made out be any kind of paragon.  She’s not meant to be an ambassador of female empowerment and racial/religious tolerance, but she achieves these things simply by being her own goofy, fallible self.  They aren’t her first words in this series, but her statement of  “Delicious, delicious infidel meat” in regards to the above-mentioned BLTs is endearing in its silliness.  

Of course, she also proves to be a capable superhero herself.  Starting out small by rescuing a drowning friend, but then working her way up to bigger things like freeing a bunch of indentured and brainwashed teens from the Inventor (and that shouldn’t be a spoiler).  Along the way we get to see her work out the various ways her powers can be utilized as well as their limits, get to know her friends and family, and watch her team up with the likes of Wolverine and Lockjaw.  The way it all plays out is reminiscent of the first arc of “Ultimate Spider-Man” in the way Bendis took a decompressed approach to Peter Parker’s origin and made something old and familiar seem fresh again.

Wilson’s approach here is even more ambitious as the eleven issues contained in the first two volumes tell one overarching story, with several little ones mixed in.  It’s a lot like how comics used to be paced, but it doesn’t read any worse for the trade.  There’s a lot of dialogue, action, and character packed into each issue yet it never comes off as overbearing.  You start reading and find yourself sucked in by Kamala’s adventures wanting to know “What’s going to happen in the next issue!”  It’s great comics writing with a sense of fun and excitement that you get from seeing something new.

Well, maybe not as fresh as everyone wants it to be.  For as great of a protagonist as Kamala is, and as entertained as I was by her first adventure, there are a few things that don’t work as well as they should.  The constant drama between Kamala and her parents as she tries to keep her superhero exploits secret is old hat despite Wilson’s efforts to freshen it up via metaphor.  It’s clear that from the way her parents fret about the things their daughter is keeping from them and the dangers and temptations of this country, that her superheroism is meant as a metaphor for cultural assimilation.  Kamala’s parents want her to be true to the traditions of their country and religion, but these superpowers from the new world are going to change her no matter how her parents wish that she’d stay the same.  It’s clever, to be sure, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s basically the same kind of drama I’ve been reading about in the adventures of the aforementioned Peter Parker over the years.

There’s also the fact that as an Inhuman, Kamala is still tied to this “Inhumanity” business that Marvel wants to push on us.  The efforts to acknowledge it here are mixed at best.  Medusa’s entreaty that Kamala is now one of “their people” is just given lip service before our heroine ducks out of New Attilan to get back to the plot.  On the other hand, Lockjaw gets to be a member of the supporting cast!  He’s a big, goofy-looking dog (even before you consider the tuning fork in his head) whose excitability eclipses even Kamala’s.  His presence is welcomed, though the whole book does make me feel that its status as “Marvel’s ‘Hitman’” — the one good book from a misguided attempt to create a new wave of superheroes — is well-deserved.

After his tenure on “Runaways,” I was expecting Adrian Alphona to go on to bigger and better things at Marvel, but he just seemed to drop out of the industry for a while.  He resurfaced a little while ago with a more elaborate style on the post-Remender “Uncanny X-Force” and further refines it to great effect here.  I have fun just admiring all the little details he puts into each page, but the intricacy of his style gives us not only a memorable protagonist, but a distinctive supporting cast as well.  Including the humanoid cockatiel.  The action scenes are also a treat to observe, as we see Kamala’s size-changing powers put to many different uses.  Alphona also shows that he’s got drawing patchwork robotic monstrosities down to a science, so whatever Kamala’s next opponent is, it should be impressive-looking on the page.

Jake Wyatt — best known around here for slipping in characters from “Evangelion” and “Ghost in the Shell” into Gerard Way’s issue of “Edge of Spider-Verse” — illustrates the Wolverine team-up issues in the second volume.  He’s got a distinctive style too, though one that isn’t as intricately detailed as Alphona’s.  The man is good with action and even if his work isn’t heavy on the detail, it’s still quite expressive.

It took me a while to finally check this series out, but I’m glad I finally did.  I got them at a great discount on Amazon after all!  …Yeah, that was terrible and I still have to pick up vol. 3.  I can assure you this will happen sooner rather than later, even with my gigantic Comic-Con led backlog.  If you’re still on the fence about this series, get off of it and check out these volumes or the hardcover collection of them that comes out next month.  “Ms. Marvel” deserves the success it’s enjoying right now.