Meet the New Muslim Girl Superhero

On February 5, the new Ms. Marvel series will hit the newsstands, and the lead character will be—drumroll please—Kamala Khan, a 16-year-old Pakistani Muslim girl living in Jersey City.

You can get a little better acquainted with her before February, since she made her debut yesterday in the All-New Marvel NOW! Point-One #1.

Kamala isn’t sexed up—we mean not in the typical comic-book sense as her boobs are not bigger than her head, but she is totally badass, chock-full of ‘tude and here “to take out the trash.” Kamala comes from a family of four, with a tall brother named Aamir, her father Yusuf (who is always drinking tea), and her benevolent but stern mother, Aisha.

Standing in a mountain-high dumpster with her puzzle-patterned rubber boots, she encounters her first obstacle. Her mother calls to yell at Kamala for being late for her cousin’s mendhi.

The comic book is off with strong momentum. Kamala fan art has popped up everywhere from Instagram to fashion sites selling plastic yellow lightning bolt Ms. Marvel earrings. There’s been some negative online chatter: Conan O’Brien who Tweeted: “Marvel Comics is introducing a new Muslim Female superhero. She has so many more special powers than her husband’s other wives,” but deleted it soon after. There has yet to be an apology.

Written by Muslim author G. Willow Wilson, who said the series breaks the rules around super heroics but Kamala isn’t meant to be a full representation of Muslims. “She’s not a poster girl for her religion and she doesn’t fall into any neat little box,” she told Wired. “She’s very much her own quirky, unique, wonderful person.”

The idea came about when Marvel editors Sana Amanat and Steve Wacker spoke about Sana's upbringing as a Muslim-American. They then worked together to help bring that perspective to light with the help of Canadian comic artist, Adrian Alphona.

Kamala already has critics. There has been some backlash since the book was announced last November . “There’s been some hate from people who don’t read comics, which I ignore because in terms of this medium, they are illiterate,” Willow Wilson told Wired. “There’s this sense that [Muslims] shouldn’t even be there because it’s somehow un-American… Especially in comics, because [comics] are seen — by people who don’t read comics—as this wholesome, 100 percent “truth, justice, and the American way” product. They’re not thinking about manga; they’re not thinking about all the changes that have occurred in comics over the last decade or so. They don’t know the history of the medium that well… and the medium has evolved.”

Willow Wilson said there is still apprehension from the Muslim community, whether Kamala is a stereotype “for whitewashing.”

“I think lot of Muslims have gotten fatigued by the way Muslim characters, even “positive” ones, are portrayed in the media,” she said. “But I think that [apprehension] will go away when the book actually comes out, because no one’s actually read it yet! It’s something that we really put our heart and soul into. I’ve spent my entire adult life in Muslim communities of various kinds both abroad and here in the U.S. and these are issues that are really close to my heart. So I hope people will be pleasantly surprised.”

Willow Wilson, who spent time living in Cairo as a journalist, writes on her website that Kamala is a girl living in two different worlds. “She wants to make her parents proud, and at the same time she wants to fit in with her mainstream American peers. That’s a lot for a 16-year-old to handle, especially at a time when there is so much scrutiny and suspicion surrounding the Muslim community in the US.”

A mother of two half-Egyptian children, Willow Wilson worries how they will grow up as Arab-American Muslims “at a time when the world is telling them they can’t—or shouldn’t—be proud of those identities,” she said. “It’s my hope that Kamala will—in some small, entirely symbolic way—help to right those wrongs.”

@nadjasayej