Ms. Marvel Vol. 1: No Normal

Kamala Khan is a perfectly ordinary American teenager living in Jersey City. She thinks high school is annoying, chafes at the restrictions her parents place on her, writes fan fiction about the Avengers, and wants to go to parties with her friends. Khan is also a Muslim, whose parents made the decision to emigrate from Pakistan to the U.S. in search of a better life for their family, and whose older brother has taken refuge in being the most Muslim her can be. The manner in which these elements are melded together is what makes Ms. Marvel a superior story, as Wilson refuses to make this process simple or cliched. Yes, Kamala's parents are Muslim and by most standards a bit overprotective, but they are not stereotypes raging about the show more immorality of the modern American world. Kamala's father is a banker, who looks and acts pretty much like any other middle-aged banker would look an act. Normally, this sort of observation would be a meaningless trivial detail, but in a story centered on a Muslim family, their almost relentless normality in so many ways is a clear statement, and a powerful one.

At the opening of the story Kamala desperately wants to be "normal", but soon it becomes apparent that she doesn't actually want to be normal - she wants to feel confident and self-assured. She sneaks out of her house to go to a party and hang out with the "cool" kids, but soon discovers that when they aren't performing for an audience, they hold some fairly bigoted views, and are kind of stupidly rude as well. As a writer of Avengers fan fic, Kamala idolizes Carol Danvers, because, it seems, she sees the blond super-hero as the ultimate expression of the kind of perfect American she wants to be - in Kamala's words Danvers is beautiful, awesome, and in possession of a less complicated more "normal" life. And given that this is a super-hero origin story, it is inevitable that Kamala gets the opportunity to become Carol Danvers. Or at least someone who looks like Carol Danvers, and who wears a ten-year out of date Ms. Marvel costume, and who has completely different powers from Ms. Marvel.

Predictably, Kamala's new powers and new appearance don't make her life simpler, and actually makes things a lot more complicated. With her new power, she gets in trouble with her parents, she gets in trouble at school, she gets shot, she makes powerful enemies. In short, having powers doesn't make everything better, although it does make her life more interesting. But this serves to highlight one of the paradoxically interesting things about Kalama (especially given that the subtitle of this volume is No Normal): Just how incredibly normal her life is outside of her acquisition of super-powers. Unlike many other heroes, she has no tragic backstory. She did not see her parents die in an alleyway. Her uncle was not tragically murdered by a person she let run past her. She didn't acquire her powers in a freak nuclear lab accident, or because she was splashed by chemicals falling off the back of a truck, or because lightning hit a shelf of equipment in her laboratory, or as a result of cosmic rays hitting her while on a space voyage. She hasn't made a vow of revenge, or had to pass a test to prove her worthiness. She's just a normal Jersey City teenager who got powers and decided to use them to help people because it was the right thing to do. This normality in a super-hero is downright refreshing.

Ms. Marvel: No Normal does have a few flaws. It is a super-hero origin story with a fairly bland origin to tell. Much of the graphic novel is spent establishing the various characters and positioning them for what seem to be fairly obvious future story lines, but there is relatively little payoff in this volume. Kamala's teen-aged conflict with her parents is more or less at the same place at the end of the book as it was at the beginning. Kamala's extremely observant Muslim brother seems to be a plot hook waiting to happen, but as yet stories involving him are unexplored. The somewhat strained relationship between Kamala as an Americanized teen and the conservative teachings of her community's religious leaders is noted, but not pursued. And so on. Even the putative super-villain known as "the Inventor" is notable mostly for his long absences from the story, and seems to have little character other than having some unknown nefarious scheme and a dislike for Kamala's Ms. Marvel alter ego. In short, beyond the development of Kamala's character and the character of the friends and family who surround her, there is little to this graphic novel other than the origin of a new super-hero.

That said, the character development alone is enough to make this a superior graphic novel. Following along as Kamala turns from feeling the need to be someone other than herself to be someone special, to accepting her own uniqueness is a journey worth taking. The completely mundane nature of her struggles to deal with her family and her high school friends is oddly enjoyable, and is made made all the more so by seeing Kamala's self-confidence grows as the story progresses. Despite the super-hero overlay, this story is, at its heart, about a girl who feels out of place in society finding her place - slowly discarding her Carol Danvers charade and choosing to be a brown-haired, brown-skinned Muslim super-hero from Jersey City - and feeling comfortable being who she is, not who she thinks she should be. Put in simple terms: No Normal is a strong start to what looks to be an exceptional story.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less

The first volume (collecting #1-5) of the latest Ms. Marvel comic book. The new Ms. Marvel is a sixteen year-old Pakistani-American Muslim girl named Kamala Kahn. I can't speak to how the new comic fits into the Marvel universe or how it retells or retools elements of previous Ms. Marvels because this is my first experience with Ms. Marvel, but I loved this. Kamala is immediately vibrant and interesting, her relationship with her family is compelling, and her attempts to figure out who she is--simply as a teenager growing up, as a member of an immigrant family, and as a newly "born" superhero--is fascinating reading. The story is great, and the artwork is wonderful (the jokes in the background are awesome--a fire extinguisher behind a show more store counter has a label that reads "Die Fire Die," a sign listing the hours a store is open reads "All of them," one of Kamala's textbooks is titled "All Sorts of Math"). Exciting artwork, good story, and a diverse heroine? I'm in. show less

Graphic Novel Book Club October 2015:

This was a re-read, but I realized while pulling it up into my Currently Reading that I'd never marked it down before. I, like a lot of the rest of the world, love this series. I love the main character, the culture, and the way they are going about the whole idea of being a superhero while being in a teenage girl caught in the diasporic clash of her two cultures, that she is a hybrid of but of which neither works well in meshing with the other. The reread was lovely, and I spent it grinning at the little hints at things to come.

I can't wait to see what the group thinks tomorrow night.

Very impressive GN character début. The lead character, Kamala Khan, is the Peter Parker of the modern era: teenage, fangirl, flawed, awkward, learning and heroic. The art reaches that deceptively easy-looking balance between realistic and cartoony with enough small-print detail ("Business Hours: All Of Them") to remind one favorably of a Sergio Aragones vibe. Go read it. Now.

Look, I'm not even going to try to deny how much I love this. I'm fangirling over Kamala and her story, and I don't care who knows it! Comics need more female characters. They need women who aren't wrapped in physics-defying costumes, blond and busty. Most of all, comics need main characters who are people of color. Check, check, and CHECK! Ms. Marvel: No Normal absolutely checks all of these things off, and it does it perfectly.

I won't gush TOO much, but these panels are beautiful! If you read through this, slow down and soak it all in. There are funny and cute little additions in the backgrounds of panels that you can only appreciate if you take your time. I love how Adrian Alphona made Kamala so normal. So lovable, a little dorky, a show more little disheveled. She could be any one of us, on any normal day. You know, except with the super powers and all.

Story wise, this is just a perfect introduction to Kamala and her Ms. Marvel beginning! I'm not super familiar with Captain Marvel. I don't know a lot about the Marvel universe in general, in fact. I still felt perfectly comfortable diving into this. I had some giggles, I had some happy sighs, and at the end I just wanted more. show less

I'm not a fan of superhero comics, but I have a lot of friends who are, and I tend to hang out in circles where they're popular, so I manage to pick up a fair amount about them by sheer osmosis. And I'd certainly heard a lot of buzz about this one, mostly centered on the fact that the title character is a Pakistani-American Muslim girl, which is is apparently a first in comics history, and a welcome step in making the superhero scene a little more diverse. Which struck me as a laudable thing, but wasn't enough to make me want to run out and read it. But then I also heard that the main character, Kamala Kahn, was a fun, somewhat geeky, pop-culture-savvy heroine, and that did make me more interested. And then this first collected volume show more just sort of showed up on my doorstep -- this is a thing that happens to me with books -- so of course I had to read it.

And I did enjoy it. Kamala is indeed a likeable, well-realized character, and the way she's written feels very clueful and real. There's some thematic stuff here, too, about the experience of being a child of immigrants, trying to figure out exactly how you fit in and how to be yourself when you're not quite like everybody else around you. It's not necessarily terribly subtle, but it's not clunky Afterschool Special stuff, either, and overall it works. The artwork is very well done, too.

I'm not sure, though, whether I'll continue reading this series or not. This was a pleasant read, and I'm happy enough to have made Kamala's acquaintance, but it hasn't instantly converted me into a fan of superhero comics. show less

This was really great. The protagonist feels like a fully developed, complex character -- neither a one-dimensional stereotype of a Muslim girl, nor a generic superhero whose age, gender, and religion do not appear in the story. It /matters/ who Kamala is - this story could not be about someone else. (And there are several other Muslim characters, who have a range of opinions on things!)

Also nice: the self-centered concern troll character who never listens to anyone else is shown for the asshat she is. "She's only being nice to be mean."