Ms. Marvel #1

This week Marvel released another batch of issue #1s, including Black Knight and Spider-Woman. But those aren’t the heavy hitters. Respectfully, those are second and third tier books, the ones that will be great or terrible or anything in between but not sure sellers. No, you can feel when Marvel has an A-List title on their hands. This is the week that the newest volume of The Mighty Thor hits the shelves…

And this little Pakistani girl from Jersey City is every bit as A-List as that.

It is insane to think that two years ago there was no Kamala Khan, but it’s true. And while I’m not thrilled to be reviewing another Ms. Marvel issue #1 for this site, it’s wonderful to have another issue of Ms. Marvel.

Eight Months has passed since the Incursion and Ms. Marvel is growing by the day. She’s an Avenger now and between homework, a tenacious giant frog problem, and post-battle gyros with Iron Man, Kamala is booked solid! With that kind of schedule it would be hard to pay attention to what’s going on. It would almost be like if you just went away for…I donno, let’s say eight-months.

It’s very clever.

But while Kamala is having a little trouble keeping up with all her responsibilities, she hasn’t let stardom change her. This still feels like Ms. Marvel, even if this is a decidedly dense issue of Ms. Marvel. If anything, G. Willow Wilson has kind of turned the Ms. Marvel up on Ms. Marvel.

…Ms. Marvel.

One of the things that I think a lot of people have come to love about this series is the character of Jersey City. At first it just seemed like a mixture of Adrian Alphona’s sense of humor and Kamala’s weird way of seeing the world, but over time its become apparent that it would have been weirder if someone in Marvel’s Jersey City hadn’t thrown on a domino mask and started stretching themselves around the downtown area. All of that goodness is back and even more in the spotlight as the bad guys hit Kamala Khan where it hurts, in her community and in her lunch meats.

Wilson hasn’t lost her sense of humor and she makes this issue feel like coming home to the place that you wish you had lived in middle school – to be honest, the place you still wish you lived. With a sinister development corporation moving in on downtown and the teachers equipped with Stark Industries Pointer 5000 super lasers©, I hope that Wilson goes all out and turns Jersey City into a permanent landmark of the Marvel Universe, like Symkaria or the Savage Land.

But don’t mistake the excellent sense of setting for a lack of character, there’s plenty of drama with the main cast. Though I’m a little disappointed that we don’t get any update on Aamir’s condition or what Disha Khan thinks of her little girl being an Avenger, Wilson  does a great job of reintroducing the school-based cast.

Wilson does a masterful job of reacquainting us with Nakia, succeeding in the unenviable task of walking the line between playful teasing, bland support, and outright toxicity that almost always dooms fictional friendships. Likewise, Zoe seems to have transitioned into a main character position. I think it’s great that we’re actually going to see just how well she manages to live up to her big promises at the end of the last series, but, despite ditching the false concern, she still plays an interesting role. Afterall, Zoe and Kamala both apologized to Nakia in the last issue, but it seems only one of them is making good on their promise to change…

Still the biggest change is for Bruno, who… well there’s no point summarizing it, but suffice it to say that Wilson manages to wring some emotional truth out of the pair’s relationship, despite leaving them in a very traditional ‘Spider-Man’ place.

That said, I don’t think that any of these relationships are all that unique. We’ve seen all of this many, many times before, and there is a tug of fatigue at times, even if the pieces are fit together a little differently and given a new coat of paint.

Overall it comes down to execution and, while some will wish things had taken a slightly more novel direction, I think that most readers will be happy with how Wilson handles her story. Wilson may not know the hip jive all the young cats are usin’ these days but she proves adept at writing the teenage experience. The dialogue neither runs from how vapid or predictable teenagers can be nor judges them for it. I mean, are you telling me that you don’t make the same few canned observations when somebody brings up Return of the King?

There’s also an impressive subtlety to how the characters have changed over this eight-month span. Some, like Zoe, are obvious, but Bruno has grown up in quieter ways. My favorite is Kamala, whose increased confidence practically radiates off of her. Kamala feels so much more mature than when we left her and much more sure of herself. Sometimes that self-knowledge can even be a detriment and she’ll speak her mind without being afraid of what someone will say. It even extends to her fashion, courtesy of Takeshi Miyazawa.

The one thing that does need to be mentioned is the pacing, because there are a lot of problems there. There’s just a little too much going on and not enough breathing room. There’s some catching up with the Avengers and there’s some school and there’s some friend drama and there’s some community drama and then there’s some drama drama. It all comes one after the other, with characters popping in and out. It’s not a bad thing, per say, but it’s hard to keep up with that level of energy at times. While all of these plot lines serve a purpose in the story, some are somewhat tenuous in that connection and the story likely would have benefitted from a tighter focus. This issue also has a problem with endings, which is unfortunate, as it has two of them.

You see, twenty pages, or one issue worth of comic, in the story shifts and takes an entirely different turn. Based on the page counts and sudden shift in artist, it seems like this was and/or is intended to be a backup story, but the balance is about a half a page off and one story just kind of melts into the other. There’s no finality to Kamala’s story and the final page of the backup isn’t terribly climactic either.

The choice to treat this as part of the main story also undercuts its validity. I think this is a lovely story, but when Kamala just ran for her life and Jersey City is in danger, it just doesn’t feel important enough to stop and deal with this, even if I believe the characters just might.

As the first series’ second most common artist, it makes perfect sense for Takeshi Miyazawa to be the one who welcomes us back to the world of Ms. Marvel. Miyazawa retains all of what made him a natural fit for the character, mixing intensely youthful energy with moments of gorgeous drama, all wrapped in a pleasantly stylized package.

Miyazawa also does a great job of giving the teen drama of this issue a splash of realism, if one that is still filtered through the finely dressed lens of Hollywood. You can really feel the subtle changes in these characters purely through changes in clothing or hair. Miyazawa really elevates the depth of the characterization in this opening installment. There aren’t as many little easter eggs scattered around as in an Adrian Alphona issue, but there are a few and the madcap energy of Wilson’s golem-guarded, laserpointer-obsessed, corned beef bahn mi-craving, Jersey City is omnipresent.

If there’s one criticism I have of Miyazawa’s work on this issue, it’s that it wears its manga influences much more openly than his previous issues. That’s not inherently bad but it is an off-putting inconsistency and I just don’t think it works as well for this story.

Adrian Alphona, never to be too far from Ms. Marvel, also comes back to handle the pseudo-backup story. This section is pretty dialogue driven and Alphona doesn’t really do anything to reassert himself, but it’s kind of nice to see that he was confident enough to just let the story speak for itself. As ever, Alphona does really nice work that is both distinct and clear. He’s a better fit for this bit than Miyazawa, it seems. Though Miyazawa is great at capturing a wide range of subjects, all of it has an air of performance about it. All the romance looks like a teen drama and all the action looks like an awesome anime. Alphona has a style that’s more grounded and unafraid to show the weird and the flawed and that’s perfect for a story like this that’s centered around the little human things that define the honeymoon period.

All throughout, Ian Herring is a hero to this book. I’m as tired of orange and blue palettes as anyone, but the color in this issue is so vibrant and so calming that it’s really hard not to love it.

Herring shows off an impressive range over the course of this issue, using bold primary colors for Ms. Marvel’s adventures, orange and yellow for Kamala’s story, and restrained blue-tints to compliment Alphona’s work. There’s also some really beautiful iridescent effects in Herring’s work with light. It probably should have been explicitly said long before now, but for those who might have missed it, Ian Herring is a huge part of why Ms. Marvel has been as big a hit as it is.

A Thought:

Di-Did Tony Stark just drop a sixteen-year-old girl on a crowded street corner? Does that not garner attention?