What a
bonkers volume. Story-wise, it’s all
over the map for one thing – it includes a whopping eight issues of the comic,
with one continuing storyline stuck in the middle of several mostly-disparate
one-shots. A lot of these stories,
especially the main one, are just straight-up weird, trippy and random.
None of this makes it a bad volume, mind you – I had a great time
reading it. Just be warned, this goes everywhere.
What
doesn’t Kamala do here? If I was going
to encapsulate the whole volume into a single theme, it would be a perennial
one for her: the struggles of balancing
her regular life and her superhero life, with each getting in the way of the
other. Whether it’s masked
crime-fighting getting in the way of a sleepover, a city-wide disaster making a
babysitting gig a whole lot harder, or an interdimensional portal opening up in
the freezer of the local convenience store/hangout, our hero has a real time of
it. Meanwhile, in the middle of all
that, Bruno attempts to help Kamala figure out the root of where her powers
stem from, but their experiments coincide with the arrival of a villain who
scrambles Kamala’s abilities but good.
In short,
this volume has everything: sleepovers,
samosas, portals, Rube Goldberg-esque traps, time travel, imagined personal
histories, a holographic Professor X, an RPG-style alternate dimension, a
seaworthy motorized scooter, and an appearance from Miles Morales’s
Spider-Man. Did I miss anything? Goodness gracious, probably. The issues here are jam-packed, and while the
result can pull you every which way, it’s damn entertaining.
I enjoy
all the one-shots, particularly the sleepover issue and the babysitting
issue. In the former, the obstacles
keeping Kamala from a fun, ordinary night with her friends are
comically-overdone, but they also emphasize just how hard it is for Kamala to
simply be normal for a night, and I love how it ends. The latter is mostly a fun action/comedy yarn
in which pretty much everyone gets in on the mayhem (I love the various shots
depicting how each of the characters is dealing with the problem at hand,) but
it also comes around to a few serious moments.
And the
one continuing plot is as intriguing as it is wild. It’s nice to see Kamala and Bruno working
together on something, the problems with Kamala’s powers present some real
challenges for her to deal with in the middle of a high-pressure situation, and
the baddie here, Mr. Shocker, is so much fun.
I love the idea of a supervillain who’s left New York because it’s
simply lousy with superheroes, hoping to instead make a name for himself in Jersey. I get a huge kick out of his speechifying and
his attempts to manufacture an arch-nemesis scenario with Ms. Marvel, and he
also causes all kinds of havoc all over the place.
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