Ms. Marvel #3

Kamala Khan isn’t sure she’s enjoying her new superpowers at all. She’s already gotten grounded, and she’s just not sure what they really mean to her. She gets in trouble at Sheikh Abdullah’s weekly youth lecture, she’s fighting with her friends, and she gets in trouble when her shapeshifting powers go haywire and she wrecks up a locker room. And then she stumbles onto a convenience store robbery — which may not actually be a robbery at all — and she gets into the most trouble of all.

Verdict: Thumbs up. I’m really, really enjoying this comic. Kamala is a wonderful character. Love her look, love her attitude, love the way that getting superpowers is completely freaking her out. Love the art — and especially, I love all the funny background bits in the art — the signs on stores, the background characters, you name it.

Lumberjanes #1

Heard enough people talking about this last week, so I figured I should pick it up. Our stars are a bunch of teenaged girls at a Lumberjanes Scout Camp. They’ve gone sneaking out of their cabin late at night after seeing some weird stuff, and they soon find themselves attacked by a bunch of weird three-eyed foxes. And so there’s a tremendous fight sequence! Once the girls run the foxes off, unfortunately, their camp counselor catches them and drags them all off the get lectured by the camp director. But the director is completely cool with it — especially when she hears some of what our heroes experienced.

Verdict: Thumbs up. It’s a cute, funny story, with art that’s both adorable and seriously spooky. Will I keep reading it? I dunno, really — I’ll probably pick up a few issues and give it a chance to grow on me.

Today’s Cool Links:

• Reactions from Comic Book Resources, the Mary Sue, and Comics Alliance make it clear — the comics fanboy community has a serious problem with desperately creepy misogyny. Go read all three, folks — they’ve all got important things to say.
• Did the first emoticon appear in the 1600s?
• I really got no idea why we don’t treat the freaks from Stormfront like the terrorists they are. (For some reason, however, the news networks seem to want me to be terrified of Jay-Z. I wonder what the difference is.)
• Neil deGrasse Tyson is just plain awesome.

Ms. Marvel #2

Kamala Khan has just gotten a lungful of the Terrigen Mists, and it appears she had a trace of Inhuman ancestry, because she’s ended up with weird shapeshifting powers. In fact, she spends a decent chunk of the story looking a lot like a blonde white girl, because she’s obsessed with Carol Danvers and Captain Marvel. She manages finally figure out how her powers work, and she even saves a classmate when she falls in the river, but she soon finds superheroism is a mixed bag — she doesn’t like all the attention, she’s not a fan of the skimpy costume she manifests, and the whole thing is a bit overwhelming. She makes her way back home — but learns that she wasn’t actually very sneaky, and her parents are not happy with her for sneaking out.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Loved this one so very much. Kamala’s powers are seriously weird — like Plastic Man with a much more solid and less cartoony body. I’ve heard some folks worry that the art style is going to look weird, but it’s working out really well — seems like she spends a quarter of the issue with an absurdly giant hand, and it’s weird and hilarious and kinda awesome. It’s also a lot of fun to be inside Kamala’s head while she tries to figure out her new powers, and the brief visit we get to make with her family shows that they’re even more awesome that we thought they were last issue. You’re reading this, right? Come on, we’re just two issues in — go pick it up!

Daredevil #1

Another unnecessary number-one issue, mostly because Marvel is kinda absurd with this stuff. No one wants this crap, Marvel — stop trying to pretend it’s important.

Obviously, though, the story here isn’t at all bad, because it’s Mark Waid and Chris Samnee working on Daredevil again. Matt Murdock is living in San Francisco now, working closely with the cops as he uses his superhuman senses to track down kidnappers. But his big problem is that San Francisco isn’t New York City — Matt had the Big Apple memorized, but Frisco is mostly new territory for him. He doesn’t know where the best places are for superhero acrobatics, so he has his sorta ex-girlfriend Kirsten McDuffie yelling directions and instructions to him over an earpiece. He’s trying to rescue a kidnapped little girl, while her kidnappers chase him in rocketcars. And then he realizes that the kid is ticking — the kidnappers have implanted a bomb inside her! Why would anyone put a bomb inside a little girl? And can Daredevil save her in time? And where the hell is Foggy Nelson?

Verdict: Thumbs up. If you enjoyed the previous Daredevil series, it’s clear that you’ll enjoy this one, too. It’s weird to see Daredevil outside of New York, but this is obviously going to be a nice new challenge to keep the series fresh. Loved Matt’s sensory investigation, the extended chase sequence, the fantastic suspense when Matt discovers the bomb — and the entirely unexpected cliffhanger, which definitely makes you yearn for the next issue.

Ms. Marvel #1

Just doing one review today, but it’s for what I think is probably the most significant pro-diversity comic put out by either of the Big Two in at least five years. I mean, it’s a comic about a teenaged Muslim superheroine, by a big-name writer, and it got a lot of publicity and a very high-profile release. Marvel knew they had something special, and they pulled out the stops to make it happen.

Our lead character, if you haven’t heard already, is a girl named Kamala Khan, a Westernized Muslim high schooler living in Jersey City. She’s got a few friends, including one who’s a bit more strict about her beliefs, and a few non-friends, who mostly seem to think she’s to be pitied because she’s not white. Her parents are fairly strict — not about religion, but about the upbringing of their children — and her brother is trying to be the best, most religious person he can be.

Kamala is obsessed with superheroes and desperately wishes her parents would let her go to parties with other kids from school. They forbid her to go to parties where there are boys, so she sneaks out one night to go to a party on the waterfront. Most of the kids are just not very nice to her and try to get her to drink alcohol. She ends up bailing on the party to go back home — and blunders into a cloud of the Terrigen Mists, which had been released at the end of one of Marvel’s recent crossover events… I really can’t remember which one, because they all blend together these days.

Anyway, the Terrigen Mists are what give the Inhumans their powers. And for the last few thousand years, the Inhumans have been leaving their hidden city of Attilan to breed with normal humans. That means that a certain percentage of the population have an Inhuman heritage, and if they’re exposed to the Terrigen Mists, they can get powers, too. And it looks like Kamala has some Inhuman ancestry.

She has a near-religious vision of Captain Marvel, Captain America, and Iron Man, who inspire her to heroism after she confesses that she’s always wanted to be like Captain Marvel. And then she wakes up trapped inside a cocoon, trying to figure out how to escape — and what she discovers when she gets out is not exactly what she was expecting.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Loved it even more than I was expecting to. And I was expecting to like it a heck of a lot.

I was a little in doubt about Adrian Alphona’s artwork, which looked a little odd in some of the previews, but the full comic definitely won me over. His artwork is quirky and a little cartoonish, but he’s really good with facial expressions and body language, and I think he’s gonna help make this comic a lot of fun.

G. Willow Wilson is the writer, a Muslim convert, best known for writing the World Fantasy Award-winning novel “Alif the Unseen,” as well as the graphic novel “Cairo” and the series “Air.” She brings a ton of personality to all the characters here — not just Kamala, but her family and friends, and even the party-hardy knuckleheads out at the waterfront. There’s not a stereotype in the bunch — not bacon-desiring, fanfic-obsessed Kamala, not her wannabe-holy man brother, not her strict, blustering, hidebound, but still patient and canny parents, not her wants-to-be-more-traditional friend Nakia, not her wants-to-be-her-boyfriend Anglo pal Bruno. They’re all interesting and non-stereotypical, and I’m really looking forward to reading a lot more about all of them.

Not that you wouldn’t expect it from a Muslim writer who’s written books starring Muslim characters, but the grandest thing about this book is probably the lack of stereotypes. Every Muslim character is a little bit different — Kamala doesn’t wear a headscarf or any other traditional Muslim clothing, and she madly desires bacon, which she describes as “delicious, delicious infidel meat.” Nakia wears a scarf, but her parents think she’s just going through a phase. Kamala’s parents are fairly Westernized, but still conservative, and her brother Aamir spends his whole day praying, partly out of devotion, partly because he doesn’t want to get a job. They’re all real people, as different from each other as any group of Christians would be from each other. It’s a wonderful contrast when most forms of entertainment still portray Muslims as fairly cookie-cutter characters.

Lemme go ahead and sum this up — I loved the comic, and I think it’s something you should read, too. Go pick up the first issue and get on board from the beginning.

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s Friday night, and we are in dire need of some appropriately awesome comic book violence to get our weekend started off right. Would you please put your hands together for… FRIDAY NIGHT FIGHTS!

Tonight’s battle comes to us from October 1977’s Marvel Team-Up #62 by Chris Claremont, John Byrne, and Dave Hunt. The Super-Skrull is up to no good, and only Carol Danvers is around to stop him!

Even with a shapeshifting neck, that’s gotta hurt.

It’s been a weirdly excellent week for diversity in the comic book world.

The biggest news has been the announcement that Marvel was introducing a new Ms. Marvel, a shapeshifting Muslim teenager who idolized the current Captain Marvel, Carol Danvers. Kamala Khan made a very brief debut in this week’s issue of “Captain Marvel” and will be appearing in her own comic book in February. She isn’t the first Muslim female character in a comic book, but it’s very likely she’s the first to grab her own starring role in a comic from the Big Two.

As was pointed out to me by a friend, while this is good news, it would be even better news if Marvel hadn’t even felt the need to publicize this — that woulda meant that having characters who were not white straight male Christians was no longer considered shocking or surprising or uncommon — that there was no longer an “other,” just people who had interesting stories we could tell.

Nevertheless, a lot of the excitement about this is because readers are excited that there are new interesting characters to read about and who are happy that the comics world is becoming a more open, less exclusionary place.

Outside of the printed page, there’s a lot of other news about TV shows. DC announced that the CW would bring a new superhero to the screen. No, not Wonder Woman — she’s still considered too weird and obscure and non-penis-endowed for TV. Instead, they’re going with Hourman. Yeah, a little-known Golden Age character who only has powers for an hour at a time after taking a pill. That’s so much more mainstream and cool and sensible than Wonder Woman, isn’t it?

On the other hand, the CW also announced that they’d be producing a new TV show based on Chris Roberson and Michael Allred’s “iZombie,” which of course stars a female character. This sounds like it may be a bit more interesting — the CW’s superhero shows (Well, “Arrow” — more are planned, of course) seem to be oriented around brooding shirtless hunks being angsty. A zombie who solves crimes by snacking on brains sounds like a meatier premise, though still probably pretty angsty, too.

Perhaps more encouraging on the TV front is that Netflix is going to make a number of shows based on Marvel characters, including Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and Iron Fist, and the Defenders. This is pretty exciting news — Marvel has been a lot more successful with superheroes in the mass media, and it means that Marvel stands a very good chance of beating DC to getting a female superhero into a starring role on TV. If there’s anything that could push DC into taking Wonder Woman seriously as a media property, it might be Marvel stealing their thunder again.

(Though on a semi-related note, what’s up with Marvel still not starting up a Black Widow movie? You’ve got one of the most famous, most marketable movie stars on the planet playing backup roles in other people’s movies, guys. For the sake of Croesus, make a Black Widow movie and put Scarlett Johansson’s name above the title.)

And finally, dropping back to comics, former Lubbock artist Rachael Anderson was just spotlighted in Comics Alliance’s new “Hire this Woman” feature! We have our fingers crossed that this will help draw more attention to a really outstanding artist. We’d love to see her name on big-name comics soon.

Does all this big pro-diversity news mean the struggle is over, or even close to over? Obviously not. For one thing, DC Comics still exists, and it’ll be years before they let go of the “Comics are only for white male geeks” paradigm. But any progress forward is good news, and if television success can drag the comics industry a bit closer to the 21st century, I’m all for it.