A marvel on many levels

The new Ms. Marvel, from Marvel Comics.

I’m reading the reboot of Ms. Marvel, Marvel Comics’ modernization of one of its older titles that started running last year and that is now in book form. I’m relatively new to comics — I read them as a kid, but moved away from them, retaining an affinity for superhero movies and graphic work, but not staying current. I started teaching a unit on Comics and Superheroes in one of my composition classes a couple of years ago, however, and that has led me back to the comics.

I’m only a few issues in, but the reboot has quite a lot to offer — a surprisingly complex and nuanced take on teen angst, Islamaphobia and racism, and the difficulties that both teens and immigrants (and immigrant teens more specifically) have fitting into majority culture. Kamala Khan, a Pakistani-American Muslim teen in Jersey City, is disconnected from her white classmates, feels constricted by her religiously conservative parents, is uncomfortable in her skin, so to speak. She idolizes the former Ms. Marvel, the blond and powerful Carol Danvers, who she sees as a more genuine American, one she wants to be more like. She is engulfed in a strange mist and she transforms, becomes the new Ms. Marvel, a shape-shifting teen who has to come to grips with her ability to be pretty much anything.

It is a storyline that contains echoes of everything from The Catcher in the Rye to other coming-of-age tales, to things like Anton Shammas’ novel Arabesques, which explores the sometimes wide canyons that exist within the immigrant mind between their competing cultures, the one they have left behind and the one into which they are trying to assimilate.

The comic’s vision, however, goes beyond this — using its art to make subtle critiques at the margins. Consider this (to the left) subtle jab at corporate capitalism, in the form of product packaging.

This is a portion of a panel early in the third issue (Kamala Khan, the new Ms. Marvel, is eating breakfast the morning after she saves a classmate from drowning. It is not just the cereal’s name — a play on both Cheerios and the GMO debate, but also the disclaimer on the side of the box: “Listen to your gut, not the lawsuits.”

There are other examples of this kind of lampooning throughout, which connects the new series to a cheekier and more subversive strain in American comics and animation — think the original RoboCop film, the first couple of seasons of The Simpsons or Matt Groening’s work, more generally, or the biting Hark, a Vagrant strip, or the work of so many others.

This is no small matter, given that Ms. Marvel is part of the larger and incredibly lucrative Marvel Universe, which is part of the larger entertainment-industrial complex. Vertical integration has become the key monetary driver of profit for most media entities. In this case, you have Marvel, owned by Disney, pushing books AND films and TV shows and animated series and collectibles and other product tie ins, including Marvel-marketed cereals. So, satirizing the cereal industry is an interesting artistic choice that would seem to offer a small glimpse into the mind of the creative team working on the new books — G. Willow Wilson, Adrian Alphona and Ian Herring.

Irony, of course, has become a tool of the advertising and marketing industries, so any praise for this kind of subtle subversion must be tempered by the knowledge that it has the stamp of the larger corporate system that structures modern life. Still, these kinds of (assumed) trivialities, these minutiae, are telling and lend character to a work of art. And make no mistake, taken in its totality — which is how we have to judge any comic or graphic novel — Ms. Marvel qualifies as art.

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