Articles with the Tag Ms. Marvel

Ms. Marvel — Best Graphic Story Hugo

Comix, Fandom, Fantastika
Published on Leave a comment on Ms. Marvel — Best Graphic Story Hugo

Ms. Marvel talks smack

I already looked at Ms Marvel back in February:

Put it all together and you have a comic that is a decent, well crafted superhero comic that puts its focus firmly on what Marvel has always done better than anybody else, showing their heroes’ complicated home lifes inbetween the battle royales. But the main significance of Ms. Marvel is who she is and that Marvel is comfortable publishing a Muslim written comic starring a Muslim superhero, that’s respectable about the culture Kamala Khan comes from and represents, but not afraid to show conflict either. It doesn’t devolve into cliches about oppression and Islam and all that while still showing a teenager chafing at the rules laid on her by authority figures — parents, teachers, religious leaders. It is essential Marvel teen hero stuff, reinvented for the 21st century.

If you don’t mind classifying a superhero comic as science fiction, this is the best of the lot, a 21st reinvention of Spider-Man and the Marvel teen hero. Remember, the original Marvel series from Fantastic Four #1 onwards were rooted in a spirit of rebellion, from the moment Reed set out to steal that moon rocket despite the authorities warning him about it. Then of course there was Spider-Man, hated and feared by the people he saves, branded an outlaw by The Daily Bugle and still doing what is right because “with great power comes great responsibility”. Marvel heroes have always had a bit of a tense relationship with official authorities, not entirely in opposition but not blindly trusting them either, not in that godawful libertarian sense that outsiders might want to spin it as, but with a healthy dose of skepticism and faith in their own judgment.

Ms Marvel used to deface Islamophobic bus ads in San Francisco

That sort of disappeared after 2000, in the Bush era, as Marvel allowed itself to be swept up in the War on Terror hysteria and a new generation of writers bought into that semi-fascist view of superheroes as enforcers of the status quo, unfettered by due process, culminating in the hideous Civil War crossover which saw Iron Man run his own Abu Ghraib style gulag in the Negative Zone and in which Captain America lost because he didn’t know about Myspace. Suddenly every superhero was now part of SHIELD or similar paramilitary organisations and it went against everything Marvel used to stand for.

Kamala Khan and family at dinner

Ms. Marvel is a refutation of all that idiocy, somebody whose background gives her good reasons to be skeptical of authority even before gaining superpowers, who chafes at the restrictions her parents and culture put upon her but who also is keenly aware that her family loves and cares for her. She’s a teenager growing up and testing her boundaries, but like Peter Parker before her, she has a good head on her shoulders and knows her right from wrong.

Now for the most part I don’t think superhero comics should be nominated for the Hugos, as I consider superheroes to be a separate genre from either fantasy or science fiction. But since it has been nominated, I’ll vote for it and put it first on my ballot, as of the four entries it’s the best and most important for its own story and for what this series says about Marvel in 2014/15. G. Willow Wilson is a great writer, a non-traditional writer for Marvel and Adrian Alphona is a brilliant artist for a series whose hero has mighty morphin powers.

Friday Funnies: Ms. Marvel

Comix
Published on Leave a comment on Friday Funnies: Ms. Marvel

Ms Marvel used to deface Islamophobic bus ads in San Francisco

The buzz around Marvel’s new Ms. Marvel series, now a year old, from the start has been as much about what it represents as about the comic itself. Kamela Khan is after all the first American-Muslim superhero to get her own series and a decade and a half into the War on Terror this still matters. How much it matters you can see from the photo above, showing one of Pam Geller’s attempts to spread hate defaced with Kamela Khan’s likeness, spreading the opposite. If there ever was a comic designed to become part of the floating online culture wars, this was it.

And with its success and that of its Marvel stablemates, quirky titles like Hawkeye and Young Avengers, comes imitation, as DC has just announced its plans to make its line more diverse. (Which is a bit ironic, considering how much effort they put in purging it from any trace of diversity in the past five years or so…) Tom Ewing called this chasing the Tumblr audience, new, younger, more diverse comics fans lured into fandom by the movies or online culture:

It’s a question where the obvious answer is the right one – new audiences live there. Just as Tumblr is more diverse than the Internet as a whole, so comics fandom on Tumblr is more diverse than comics fandom on IGN or CBR or Newsarama. It’s younger, queerer, more racially diverse and most obviously a lot more female – and those voices lead the conversation, they don’t constantly have to fight to win a place on it. It’s also – perhaps anecdotally, perhaps not – newer to comics. I argued after the end of Young Avengers’ precursor series, Journey Into Mystery, that Marvel’s original strength was built on leapfrogging the kids to attract a new, smart, post-teenage audience back in the 60s, and that now they needed to do the same thing in reverse: leapfrog the long-term fans to win that same audience back. But that new audience looks very different now.

And if you buy into the cliche of Tumblr being all about “social justice and feels”, then Ms. Marvel fits that bill perfectly. Social justice, because in the post-9/11 political climate, even now, just having a superhero comic about a Pakistani Muslim-American is social justice, a political act. Her writer, G. Willow Wilson, is of course herself a Muslim convert, something again that many can’t help but see as a political act. Feels, because so much of the first volume at least is about Kamela and her family, what it feels like to be the only Muslim in the village so to speak, but also about her feelings about superheroes. She’s a geek, a superhero nerd whose favourite hero is Captain Marvel/Carol Danvers, which is why she takes Ms. Marvel as her own superhero name.

Kamala Khan first outing

So what we have now therefore is a spinoff of what was originally herself a spinoff of a male hero, the original Marvel Captain Marvel, if not the original Captain Marvel (it’s a long story). There’s no real reason why Kamala should’ve taken this name but brand recognition, but it is sort of fitting, plays to Marvel’s seventies history of extending who can be a superhero through creating distaff counterparts of male heroes (She-Hulk, Spider-Woman, Ms Marvel etc).

comparing the first pages of Ms Marvel v1 and Ms Marvel v3

It’s interesting to compare that first Ms. Marvel series with the current one. That series started off in media res, with two of Marvel’s most dependable Bronze Age creators working on it, Gerry Conway and John Buscema. Ms Marvel flies in from the left as a robbery is in progress; there’s almost as much text here on one page as there is in any single issue of the new series. G. Willow Wilson on the other hand starts the series as mundanely as possible, at a corner store somewhere in a Jersey City neighbourhood. In this it reminds me of that other Marvel series about an misunderstood teenager becoming a superhero, but Spider-Man only needed one issue of Amazing Fantasy to have his origin, first adventure and fight his first crook. It takes Kamala five issues. This is very much a product of the decompressed era of superhero comics storytelling.

Kamala Khan meets Captain Marvel sort off

I don’t very much like decompressed storytelling or anything else that’s a cheap imitation of cinema or an attempt to make comics look more grownup, but here it works because the focus isn’t on the action, it’s on Kamala’s interaction with her family, friends and wider environment. Even the big climax of the first issue, when she gets her powers and “meets” Captain Marvel, Iron Man and Captain America, they end up talking about her family.

Kamala Khan and family at dinner

Adrian Alphona’s artwork fits the storytelling perfectly. His people are caricatures, not at all realistic, all elongated or squat in a way that codes cartoony. It gives his characters an expressiveness that even in quiet moments works well, far better than with a more “realistic” art style. It also helps with depicting Ms Marvel’s powers, all based in body deforming.

Kamala Khan and family at dinner

Put it all together and you have a comic that is a decent, well crafted superhero comic that puts its focus firmly on what Marvel has always done better than anybody else, showing their heroes’ complicated home lifes inbetween the battle royales. But the main significance of Ms. Marvel is who she is and that Marvel is comfortable publishing a Muslim written comic starring a Muslim superhero, that’s respectable about the culture Kamala Khan comes from and represents, but not afraid to show conflict either. It doesn’t devolve into cliches about oppression and Islam and all that while still showing a teenager chafing at the rules laid on her by authority figures — parents, teachers, religious leaders. It is essential Marvel teen hero stuff, reinvented for the 21st century.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 18: Ms Marvel Vol. 01

books and books review, Comix
Published on

cover of Essential Ms Marvel 01


Essential Ms Marvel 01
Gerry Conway, Chris Claremont, Jim Mooney and friends
Reprints: Ms. Marvel 1-23 and more (January 1977 – April 1979)
Get this for: seventies feminist superheroics — Four stars

Now for a complete change of pace, from the heart of the Silver Age taking a giant leap forward into the Bronze Age, long after the people who had laid the foundations of the Marvel Universe had left (and had come back and left again) and some of the creativity and magic had gone out of it. The mid to late seventies were a rough patch for both Marvel and DC, as the old newsstand distribution networks were in upheaval, inflation and economic depression made comics expensive and there was little room to experiment with new titles. So what you get is attempts to play it safe, through either cashing in on some trend or by creating a spinoff — Ms. Marvel is a combination of both: a spinoff of Captain Marvel and an attempt to cash in on the resurgence of second wave feminism, as seen through a comics prism. Despite this the title would last barely two years, being canceled with #23 and with the last two issues, already prepared only seeing print two decades later, in the early nineties Marvel Super-Heroes Magazine.

I don’t know why M.s Marvel failed the first time around: perhaps it could never find an audience out on the newsstands, or people didn’t buy it because it featured a girl (Marvel never having had much luck with female headliners) or just because not enough newsstands stocked it. But one thing I know, quality couldn’t have been the issue. True, it took a couple of issues for Ms. Marvel to find its feet, but once Chris Claremont comes onboard with issue 3 it settled into a nice rhythm. I’ve certainly read much worse titles from that time which were much more succesful.

Ms. Marvel is Carol Danvers, an old supporting character from the sixties Marvel Captain Marvel series, reintroduced in Ms. Marvel as the eponymous superheroine, in the first three issues suffering from amnesia and not knowing she’s Carol. Carol meanwhile gets a job as the editor of Now Magazine, Jolly Jonah Jameson’s woman’s magazine. He wants the traditional subjects: cooking, fashion, gossip, she wants it to make a hardhitting, proper news magazine: soap opera gold, though as per usual with superhero jobs it plays second fiddle to Carol’s other career and its complications.

The whole amnesia/two people angle doesn’t really work and is quickly abandoned once Claremont takes over the writing. He does keep the conflict between Carol and Ms. Marvel however, each with a distinctive personality and not always liking the other that much. Personally I never like this sort of forced conflict or handicap so I’m glad to see this slowly disappearing over time here.

On the supervillain side of things, Conway introduces A.I.M. as a recurring foil and Claremont keeps them around, as well as adding MODOK to the mix. Other established villains, including the Scorpion, obscure X-Men foe Grotesk as well as a couple of badniks from the old Living Mummy series from Supernatural Thrillers also appear. Claremont had a knack for getting tough, physical threats for Ms. Marvel to actually beat with her fists like any other strong male hero would do, rather than the usual non-physical threats reserved for superheroines. There are few original creations here, with Deathbird introduced in #9 and Mystique from #16 the most significant, Claremont using both of them in Uncanny X-Men later on. For the most part however Ms. Marvel is mutant free.

But Claremont was leading Ms. Marvel into that territory though, through the long running subplot of some unknown enemy (which turned out to be Mystique) targeting both Carol Danvers and Ms. Marvel. However Ms. Marvel before that subplot reached fruition and it took Avengers Annual #10 two years later to tie up these loose ends. That one starts with Carol being thrown off the Golden Gate Bridge, rescued by Spider-Woman (who Claremont was also writing) and brought to Prof Xavier to be examined mentally. Meanwhile the Brotherhood of Evil, led by Mystique attack the Avengers and its newest member Rogue turns out to have stolen Carol’s powers.

Apart from housecleaning however and revealing the final fate of Ms. Marvel Claremont had an ulterior motive for writing this annual. Between the end of her own series and the annual Ms. Marvel had been a member of the Avengers and in a particularly bad storyline had been raped and impregnated (all off panel), gone through the full pregnancy and given birth in a day to a boy who turned out to be her rapist, using her to be able to live on Earth, but when this fails he takes her with her to Limbo, where they live happily ever after, or so the Avengers think, never having spent a minute to think things through. Claremont had done this, had gotten offended and used the final part of the story to spell it all out. It’s one of the best “fuck you” moments in comics I’ve read.

Claremont would return to Ms. Marvel even later, in the early nineties in the anthology title Marvel Super-Heroes, which reprinted both the final finished but never published issue, as well as a followup bridging the gap between her series and Avengers Annual #10. Here they’re presented in chronological order, before the annual.

The final verdict is that this was a perfectly enjoyable series, nothing much out of the ordinary, but never bad either. The art, first by John Buscema, followed by Jim Mooney, Keith Pollard, Sal Buscema, Carmine Infantino, Dave Cockrum and finally Mike Vosburg is decent to good, but with so many artists in such a relatively short period it’s hard to create a real style for Ms. Marvel. Essential Ms. Marvel vol 1 is a nice view of what a lesser title of the seventies looked like.