Six years ago, a Muslim superheroine headlined the pages of a comic book for the first time. Then around last October, she popped up in a video game trailer at New York Comic Con. And sometime in the near future, that same heroine, a 15-year-old teenager named Kamala Khan--colloquially known as the new Ms. Marvel--will be joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe in a new TV series produced by Disney Plus. While no release date has been announced, rumors have already been swirling around the show’s production and casting.
It’s kind of a big deal.
Unlike comic books, a lot of what goes on in the fictional world of TV helps shape our collective consciousness. Provides a glimpse into a world that may one day be possible. And while no one will ever be able to wrap their arms around a football stadium or grow taller than a two-story building, Ms. Marvel is undoubtedly going to start some new conversations in the favorite superhero debate.
We saw it in the 2017 blockbuster "Black Panther," the first superhero film with a primarily black cast, and one of the few with an extraordinary backstory. A super secret place called Wakanda that poses as a third world country in Africa, but is instead home to the most technologically advanced civilization in the world. Its leader, T’Challa, is much more than a titular character with intriguing powers. He’s also a king.
But "Ms. Marvel" doesn’t take place in Africa. And Kamala is not royalty. She’s a high school student from the predominantly white suburbs of New Jersey. In addition to fighting supervillains, she faces the same challenges as many Muslim Americans, particularly cultural assimilation and issues pertaining to identity. Like Spider-man, this protagonist really hits close to home.
Maybe that was the purpose of creator Sana Amanat, who based the character on her life as she was growing up in a Pakistani family in Jersey and struggling to fit in.
And reading comic books. Comics are more than just picture books. They provide an escape, a distraction from the problems of everyday life. But unlike most young readers who usually dream of being a superhero, Amanat envisioned a superhero being her. Ms. Marvel’s bounciness and elasticity were secondary to Kamala’s hardships and burdens, and the fight for truth and justice was partially overshadowed by the quest for diversity and representation.
It’s a risky dynamic given that race and religion are usually taboo in the superhero movie and television multiverse. The MCU shattered that barrier in the "Black Panther," most notably through the film’s main villain Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan), whose goal of stopping the oppression of blacks around the world mirrored the messaging of several modern activist movements.
The new "Ms. Marvel" series might be even more compelling since latent paranoia concerning Muslims in America is still a very real thing. While there have been positive portrayals of Muslims in TV and film in the post 9/11 era, one has yet to inspire real change on how Islamic culture is perceived by the populace. The aura of patriotism surrounding Ms. Marvel, along with the Peter Parkerish characteristics of Kamala Khan, suggests that Islam may be mainstreamed in a way that hasn’t been seen.
So how should viewers react? They shouldn’t. After all, there have been Jewish superheroes and there have been Christian superheroes. They could all do amazing things which is why we idolized them, though their faith played an important part in their lives when they weren’t wearing a cape. Kamala still lives at home where crime-fighting is restricted because of a curfew, and her lifestyle as a Muslim teenager is something that is continually brought into focus. If watching the MCU has taught us anything, this won’t be much of an issue when it happens on the screen.
Themes have existed in the Marvel universe since before the creation of the Infinity Stones. In "Iron Man," industrialist and weapons manufacturer Tony Stark profited off the war on terror until being taken hostage in Afghanistan started a new career of intergalactic crime-fighting. Years later, "Civil War" picked the Avengers apart when the UN approved national security measures similar to the Patriot Act. And though not part of the MCU, X-Men movies have long illustrated the racial divide in the country from the time of the Civil Rights movement to about 20 years into the dystopian future. Each film had a different message, and each time that message was never pandered.
There’s nothing pandering about portraying something accurately. As noted by Sheraz Farooqi of the Hollywood Reporter, almost half of Muslim Americans were born in the country and over 80 percent speak English well. That’s something we can expect to see in every episode of Ms. Marvel, and hopefully by the end the most offensive stereotypes of Muslims as villains or foreigners will disintegrate like a victim of Thanos’ snap.
For anyone unfamiliar with the story of Kamala Khan, this kid has what it takes to flip the script. At times short as a Lego figure, at others tall as a skyscraper, she’s stretched the limit of her superpowers even farther than her limbs. Her most amazing feats include saving Jersey City from Hydra and actually getting Wolverine to take a selfie. While Mr. Fantastic lived up to his name, Kamala redefined what it meant to be Ms. Marvel.
Now the world awaits who will play her. Whoever it is shouldn’t just be Muslim and a teenager, but every bit as precocious as the character was imagined. Someone worthy in the same way an individual became capable of lifting Mjolnir. Khan’s creators have worried that her shapeshifting abilities might look silly on screen, but that hardly matters when considering Marvel’s pantheon of film heroes. Tobey Maguire, Robert Downey Jr. and Hugh Jackman all played their roles to damn near perfection, and it’ll be up to an unknown to do the same.
This should be expected, since the word “Kamal” means perfect in Arabic.