Welcome, dear readers, to another week of comics and commentary at Comics! The Blog! We kick things off, as always, by handing out awards for the Best of the Week – beginning with two Award postings, followed closely by the past week’s Best.
A frequent complaint of some superhero comic issues, particularly in their launches, is that there’s not enough superhero-ing. Too little action, too little capital-letter Importance, just character stuff. Ms. Marvel #3 bucks these criticisms by steering into them. Whereas some superhero books might be worse off for not having a focus on action, Ms. Marvel continues its trend of savvy usage on action scenes to punctuate the emotional beats of Kamala Khan’s life while still keeping them the focus.
Because here’s the thing: dudes already know about punches. The superhero genre is full of them. What it’s not full of is voices like Kamala’s, and the book’s team - G. Willow Wilson, Adrian Alphona, Ian Herring, Joe Caramagna and Sana Amanat – knows that it’s the experiences of Kamala away from superheroics, at this specific moment, that make the most compelling narrative, because they’re something we need more of in media. The issue very smartly focuses on the fallout from Kamala’s first superpowered night. Her anger at her best friend for ratting her out to her parents; her anger at her parents for making her feel more acutely different than she already is, and how her family’s culture butts up against the world around it. All this feeds into the fear and confusion Kamala feels, and the combination of that isolation and uncertainty is beautifully mirrored by her newfound abilities as a polymorph. No matter how hard she tries to be the same, she still feels different, and that fear is literalized by her lack of control and the fact that her superhero identity is still someone who looks like someone else. By the end of the issue – a panicked, claustrophobic look at Kamala’s attempt to stop her friend’s brother from robbing the store where he works – all those bubbling teenage feelings explode, with awful results.
Before that final scene, all those emotions are still there. Adrian Alphona‘s gorgeous cartooning expertly combines with Ian Herring‘s subdued colours, that give a subdued haze to Kamala’s life (up until the final scene, when the palette takes on more vivid blues). But despite the hazy colours in Kamala’s perception of her life, there are all this visually unique characters of different shapes and creeds. Kamala’s world looks like nothing else in superhero comics, and it’s kind of fitting that she doesn’t realize it. She’s too busy wishing for something else for herself, even if she doesn’t realize what it is.
My favourite scene in the book is a quick one, right at the beginning, when Kamala and her friend Nakia bail on a Saturday youth lecture at their masjid mid-way through because, well, Sheikh Abdullah can’t see them through the modesty and dignity-”preserving” partition, and doesn’t seem to particularly understand why they’d disagree with the partition in the first place. So they bail to go get junk food without anyone being the wiser – either side. The fact that Kamala and Nakia can’t see the men’s frustration (or, in the case of Kamala’s brother, embarrassed horror), and the men can’t see that they’ve lost some of their audience entirely, encapsulates that perfect teen experience: nobody understands you, you don’t understand them and everything feels confusing and adrift. The fact that Ms. Marvel can convey something so universal in a lived experience so seldom seen in its genre, is really remarkable. Everybody feels different the same way, but how you respond to it is what can make you a superhero.