Ms. Marvel, Vol. 10: Time and Time Again (2019)

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.