Ms. Marvel Volume One by G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona. Marvel Comics (Disney), 2014.
Muslims are portrayed in American popular media all the time. Any action and intrigue fueled show or movie, especially any with a hint of the spy or military subgenres mixed in, probably has a ton of Muslim characters. They will be men, usually dark of skin, almost always mustachioed, often heard yelling or ululating while firing assault weapons, and always, always, the bad guys. Sometimes they are explicitly identified as Muslim, sometimes it is only strongly implied. But the association is pretty clear, from Homeland to 24 to Iron Man to Person of Interest: Muslims are Bad Guys.
Pretty big bummer if you’re a teenage Pakistani girl living in suburban New Jersey, and all you really want is to fit in at school without abandoning your culture or offending your parents (too much).
And that’s exactly the situation Kamala Khan finds herself in at the beginning of Ms. Marvel, the Marvel series by G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona that debuted earlier this year. In the very first pages of the book, Khan is confronted by ignorance and prejudice of the most irritating variety — people who treat her as a token Muslim, and assume that the few little factoids they know about Islam apply to every adherent, and people who ‘concern troll’ her because they assume that as a Muslim woman, she must be horribly oppressed. Khan is trapped between a bunch of white people who want to exoticize her and a cadre of more strict Muslims who think she has become too Americanized. Like many a Marvel comics superhero before her, she seemingly can’t catch a break.
G. Willow Wilson is the perfect person to write a character like this, because like Kamala Khan, she does not easily fit a stereotype. She is a proud Muslim woman — a proud Muslim white woman from New England who converted to the faith in her college years. She lived in Egypt and wrote incisive journalism about the Middle East for outlets like The Atlantic Montly before venturing into comics with acclaimed series like Cairo and Air. She recently won the World Fantasy Award for best novel with her debut, Alif the Unseen, a recasting of both Hackers and 1,001 Nights in the context of the Arab Spring.
Throughout her work, Wilson has been concerned with portraying the beautiful diversity that exists within the global Islamic community. After all, the Muslim world today extends from suburban Detroit to Morocco to Somalia to Albania to the Levant to Iran to Bangladesh to Indonesia, a billion unique voices spread around the globe. It is absolutely refreshing to open one of Wilson’s comics and see a world in which Islam is not a monoculture. Often times American politicans or people in the media pay lip-service to the idea that Islamic Fundamentalists do not speak for all Muslims just as Christian Fundamentalists don’t speak for all Christians. But Wilson actually digs in and shows that reality on every page: here are the debates about faith and assimilation which exist within Muslim families, here are the class and race divisions that exist on the Arabian Peninsula just as much as in the US or Europe, here are the reasons some women choose to wear the hijab and some don’t, here are young people being both young and people regardless of the color of their skin or their family’s religion.
Besides Wilson’s empathetic and revelatory storytelling, Ms. Marvel features dreamlike art by Adrian Alphona, who previously co-created Runaways with Brian K. Vaughan. Readers of Runaways will remember Alphona’s tight, animation influenced style and his ability to create unique, expressive characters without relying on costumes and special effects to set them apart. This is a wonderful resource on Ms. Marvel, where the supporting cast of non-superheroes, and the non-superhero part of Kamala’s life, are really the focus of the story. Along with Ghost Rider, which does a similarly wonderful job of portraying the rich multi-culture of East L.A., Ms. Marvel has quickly become my favorite Marvel series, and one of the reasons I still read superhero comics at all.
