Marvel Comics is bringing Ms Marvel back as a 16-year-old daughter of Pakistani immigrants living in Jersey City.
The character Kamala Khan – among the first to be a series protagonist who is both female and Muslim – is part of Marvel Entertainment’s efforts to reflect a growing diversity among its readers while keeping hold of the contemporary relevance that have underlined its foundation since the creation of Spider-Man and the X-Men in the early 1960s.
Writer Willow Wilson and artist Adrian Alphona, working with editor Sana Amanat, say the series reflects Khan’s vibrant but kinetic world, learning to deal with superpowers, family expectations and adolescence.
Amanat calls the series a “desire to explore the Muslim-American diaspora from an authentic perspective” and what it means to be young and lost amid expectations by others while also telling the story of a teenager coming to grips with having amazing powers.
It’s for all the geek girls out there and everybody else who’s ever looked at life from the fringe
“I wanted Ms Marvel to be true-to-life, something real people could relate to, particularly young women. High school was a very vivid time in my life, so I drew heavily on those experiences - impending adulthood, dealing with school, emotionally charged friendships that are such a huge part of being a teenager,” said Wilson, a convert to Islam whose previous comic work includes the graphic novel Cairo and series Air from Vertigo.
“It’s for all the geek girls out there and everybody else who’s ever looked at life from the fringe. This Marvel can grow and shrink her limbs and her body,” Wilson said, “and ultimately, she will be able to shape shift into other forms”.
DC Comics relaunched its Green Lantern series with Simon Baz, an Arab American and Muslim, last year. The character reflects writer Geoff Johns’s Lebanese ancestry and his upbringing in the Detroit area. There have been a few others. Marvel Comics has Dust, a young Afghan woman whose mutant ability to manipulate sand and dust has been part of the popular X-Men books. DC Comics in late 2010 introduced Nightrunner, a young Muslim hero of Algerian descent reared in Paris.