Ms. Marvel, Vol. 1: No Normal (2014)

I first heard about the current incarnation of Ms. Marvel through The Mary Sue, and she sounded terrific.  I’ve recently been trying to expand my comic horizons by bits and pieces, and this title seemed like a natural choice.  No Normal covers the first five issues of Ms. Marvel (a few spoilers.)

Kamala Khan doesn’t seem to fit anywhere.  That’s a natural enough feeling for any teenage girl, but that doesn’t make it any less difficult.  Her peers at her Jersey City school see her as “the Muslim girl” from a very specific lens:  intrinsically foreign, sheltered/innocent, and very possibly oppressed.  Meanwhile, her Pakistan-born parents see her as too americanized, prioritizing frivolous and/or inappropriate Western concerns over important things like God or family.  Now, suddenly gaining superpowers (in a terrigen mist?  Pretty sure she’s an Inhuman) doesn’t exactly help on the “fitting in” front, but it certainly gives her a whole different set of issues to sort through!

Because Kamala is a polymorph/shapeshifter, and because she acquires her powers under extreme, fairly trippy circumstances, her abilities are initially used for some pretty cool ruminations on the character.  Her powers come at a time when she’s sick of being the “weird” Muslim girl and thinks life would be so much easier if she were more like her hero, the blond/flawless Captain Marvel.  As such, she first discovers her powers by unconsciously shapeshifting into Captain Marvel.  Obviously, this is a pretty impactful experience, particularly for a brown girl.  Kamala’s early hero activities are performed in this guise, and while it’s in part to maintain the cover she established with that unintentional transformation the first time around, it’s also because there’s a part of her that feels that’s what a hero is supposed to look like.  A big part of her character journey in these first five issues is about learning how to be her kind of hero, and I really like that.

All-around, Kamala is a pretty great character.  I like that she’s a bit of a nerd and a total Avengers fangirl (she writes Avengers fanfic – love it.)  She’s smart and funny, with a bravery-loyalty combination that tends to outweigh her sense of self-preservation, but she can also to impulsive, insecure, and reactive.  It takes her a while to get a handle on her powers, which feels realistic, especially considering how closely powers can be tied to emotions.  I love the scene of Kamala hiding in the girls’ locker room with one hand enlarged so big her wrist can hardly hold it up, desperately trying to will it back to normal size before anyone sees her.

At least in this first volume, though, I’m not quite a fan of how the comic deals with her religion.  There’s a sense that Kamala’s feelings about being Muslim are mostly negative – she feels stifled by limitations and laments being the girl at school with the “weird food rules.”  I get that she starts out the story in a pretty insecure place, and I get that she feels like she’s stuck in the middle between American and Pakistani culture, but it seems like she views her religion and her culture as being more of a stumbling block to fitting in than anything else.  Not much of anything about what Islam truly means to her, and personally, I think the portrayal of her family feels a little stereotypical.  I really enjoy the comic, but I hope that subsequent volumes do better on this front.