Identity, Youth, and the Millennial Hero in G. Willow Wilson's Ms. Marvel

  Fiction, both literary and populist, has always been a window into the soul of the time and place it is produced. The tone of a people's war fiction reveals their feelings about this or that contemporary conflict, a surge in dystopian fiction reveals increasing fears about the power of government and media, and so on. Through superheroes and other icons, a people's ideals and hopes for the future surface. Take the last one hundred years of American comic books for example: in the 1930s and 40s the wholesome Superman charmed the nation with his idealism and Midwestern country values; in the mid-60s the X-Men's struggle for Mutant equality through integration and peace echoed Martin Luther King, Jr's tactics in the Civil Rights Movement; and in the 2008 film Iron Man, arms dealer Tony Stark changes his company's mission from weapon development to promoting peace and developing clean and efficient energy sources. So when, in 2014, G. Willow Wilson's Ms. Marvel #1 printed 50,000 copies, outselling that month's issues of The Avengers, X-Men and even DC's Batman, those sales figures carried weight, signaling a change in what the nation, or at least its youth, wants its icons to look and act like.

  The comic follows Kamala Khan, a sixteen year-old Muslim Pakistani American girl, as she becomes a super-powered vigilante and investigates the disappearance of a number of teenagers in her home town of Jersey City. But in addition to finding the kidnapped, Kamala must also find her own identity and, more importantly, accept her own identity. Identity is everything in Ms. Marvel, and Wilson uses the tropes of the superhero genre and of the Marvel universe, such as costumes, the burden of responsibility, and genetically-granted super powers, to explore the concept in meaningful ways. The result is a comic that is partially about race, but also about feeling useless and out of place in a world that has written off its newest generation as lazy parasites, in many cases leading young people to believe and even fulfill this stereotype. Both the story and its popularity demonstrate the lost and confused nature of the Millennial generation, and the self-reflective and compassionate nature with which Kamala solves Jersey City's problems as well as her own are emblematic of a paradigm shift in what constitutes a hero.

  In an interview at New York Comic Con, G. Willow Wilson said that her priority when writing Kamala was to make her “feel like a real girl. We didn't want to make her sort of a model minority and tell some sort of cardboard cutout story where everybody kind of is confined to type." She accomplishes this in the very first issue by establishing Kamala's interests as things that have nothing to do with her upbringing. She obsesses over and writes fanfiction about her heroes like Captain Marvel and Iron Man, she makes references to Dungeons and Dragons, and she sneaks out to a party filled with boys and alcohol in direct defiance of her family's personal and religious boundaries. She's naïve as well, blind to the casual racism of her classmate Zoe, who Kamala adores, even when Zoe asks Kamala's friend Kiki if her parents pressured her into wearing a headscarf; “Nobody's going to, like, honor kill you? I'm just concerned,” she says.

  A model minority Kamala is not, but Wilson does not fall into “colorblindness,” the idea that race and ethnicity bring nothing to a person's identity, and that race consciousness is the same as racism. On the contrary, Ms. Marvel uses the superhero genre as well as everyday reality to tackle ideas of race, racism, and how these things color Kamala's perception of herself. Zoe's comment about 'honor killings,' for instance, expresses an awareness of the cultural perceptions of Middle Eastern people. She casts Kiki and, by cultural association, Kamala, as outsiders and reminds them of their status as such, and her mention of “honor killing” is a reminder of the specific negative connotations attached to their culture. Even though Kamala is, at the time, enthralled by Zoe and Kiki is merely annoyed with her, the statement is harmful all the same, as it reminds both girls of the way they are seen by others. Kiki's response to Zoe, “my dad wants me to take it off. He thinks it's a phase,” serves as a reminder that culture and cultural decisions are more complicated than Zoe thinks they are, and Kamala's refusal to eat bacon on the previous page shows that although she doesn't wear a headscarf, she isn't necessarily any less devoted to her culture and religion than Kiki is. These are just three examples from the comic's first three pages, and counting them all would be both exhausting and pointless, but everything from Kamala's brother's intense devotion to Islam, to her parents preventing her from spending time with boys, to Zoe giving her alcohol as a prank, serve as constant reminders of cultural identity, one-by-one making their mark on both the macro, global-level understanding that the world has of Pakistan or Islam, and the micro, personal-level understanding that Kamala has of herself.

  This personal understanding is reflected in the way Kamala initially interacts with her powers, which allow her to change her size and shape at will. When Kamala first receives these powers, she uses them against her will and subconsciously shifts into the form of her idol, the blonde-haired, blue-eyed, super-powered Air Force pilot Carol Danvers, also known as Captain Marvel, and proceeds to save Zoe's life while remaining in that form. It could be argued that this transformation is the result of her idolization and not anything deeper, but Kamala dispels this possibility in the comic's third issue when she performs her second act of heroism – stopping an armed robbery; she thinks to herself that Jersey City does not want to be saved by “a sixteen-year-old brown girl” before transforming once again into Captain Marvel. Kamala's status as an outsider is so ingrained that even when she is doing something as noble as saving a life, she feels inadequate to do so wearing her own face. In essence, the questions Kamala is asking are “Can I be accepted as myself?” and “Can I be useful as myself?” The answer to the second question lies in her powers themselves. In addition to changing shape, Kamala can also quickly recover from injury, but only if she isn't currently shape-shifting. In other words, Kamala may be able to fight and draw attention in the form of someone else but in order to recuperate and take care of herself Kamala must be true to herself. This eventually leads Kamala to get over hear fears and wear her own face when doing the bulk of her crime-fighting.

  Though the problems Ms. Marvel deals with are personal, those things are often inextricably tied to macro-level problems, especially when dealing with race and culture. Here, too, the comic makes use of its Marvel Universe setting to tackle complicated issues, in this instance through Kamala's status as an Inhuman, a person who is outwardly “normal,” but who has dormant alien DNA that can be activated by a chemical called Terrigen Mists, granting them super powers. In Ms. Marvel #13, Kamala encounters an Inhuman who calls herself Kaboom, and who is threatening a new world order of sorts in which normal humans submit to Inhuman rule and in which super-powered individuals aren't seen as an “other.” This sparks an unprecedented anger in Kamala: “There's always that one group of people who think they have special permission to terrorize anybody who disagrees with them. And then everybody else who looks like them suffers.” Kamala reacts with uncharacteristic force, badly injuring Kaboom before running away in shame. Though the comic never specifically mentions September 11^th or those responsible, it's clear that Kamala's anger is directed at the attacks and the ensuing Islamophobia, especially considering Inhumans don't necessarily look alike. The reaction is based in the fear that her identity as an Inhuman will be compromised by Kaboom's actions the same way that her identities as Pakistani and Muslim were compromised by the actions of terrorist organizations.

  The comparison between Inhumans and Muslims doesn't end with Kaboom's status as a symbol for Muslim terrorists, but actually functions as a greater metaphor for the experience of being Muslim in America. Being an Inhuman is largely an internal experience; unless their power involves sprouting wings or claws, an Inhuman individual isn't bound to any ethnicity or physical features. Likewise, being a Muslim is an internal experience of a different kind – a religious one – and a Muslim individual cannot be picked out of a crowd without knowing more about the person. And because Inhumans can have dormant powers, it's possible to be one without having super powers, and it's possible to have powers without being an Inhuman; similarly, Islam is typically associated with being Middle Eastern, though it's both possible to be Middle Eastern without being Muslim just as it's possible to be Muslim without being Middle Eastern. Most vitally of all, people like Kaboom use their status as an Inhuman as both a means and an excuse to harm and oppress other people, much as Islamic terrorists claim to use the teachings of their faith to commit terrible acts. Unfortunately, the general public is bad at differentiating those who are harmless from those who deserve their ire, leaving both groups ripe to be targeted by those guilty of ignorance or hate. Kamala is painfully aware of these similarities and the way that being an Inhuman adds another layer to her complex identity. As she puts it, “I'm a Pak-American, part-Alien, morphogenic nerd,” followed by the distressing thought that she is “alone in the universe.”

  Despite her deeply personal awareness of the way others perceive her and her culture, Kamala doesn't allow this to shape her identity; she neither fully embraces the normalized American culture that surrounds her nor fully rejects it in favor of her family's more traditionalist Muslim and Pakistani culture. Her morals come as much from The Avengers as from the mosque, her costume is made from a burqini adorned with the lightning bolt Carol Danvers wore on her own costume until recently, her two closest friends are Bruno – a young white man – and the religiously dedicated Kiki, but nowhere is this synthesis of her various identities more apparent than in her heroic call to action. Kamala sneaks out of her home to attend a party hosted by Zoe, but leaves in anger when Zoe tricks her into drinking alcohol and makes fun of her culture, assuming that by defying her parents Kamala has cast aside her beliefs. When she leaves, a chemical mist blowing through Jersey City awakens her Inhuman DNA, briefly rendering Kamala unconscious and presenting her with hallucinations of Iron Man, Captain America, and Captain Marvel calling themselves “faith” and explaining to Kamala that she is at a crossroads in her life. The first panel of this hallucination is an image of the heroes standing on clouds and surrounded by creatures from Kamala's fanfiction while Captain Marvel recites the Urdu poem “Sakal Bun” by Amir Khusro as Iron Man and Captain America translate it to English. In this surreal image, we see Kamala's entire identity coalesce; her ideology manifests itself in her heroes, her background in the Urdu Carol speaks, the bridge between them in Iron Man and Captain America's translation, and her imagination in the creatures from her writings. The presence of all of these things in the beginning of the next stage of her life – the stage that will see her becoming Ms. Marvel – are no accident. Her journey is all about identity, and here she is seeing it manifested in a strange and abstract way, as if to say that it is up to Kamala to make it real. Of course, she fails in the immediate future, for when she awakens from the hallucination she wears the form of Carol Danvers. But even still, her multi-faceted identity shines through, through the phrase that calls her to action. It isn't something generic, like Spider-Man's “with great power comes great responsibility;” when Kamala sees a drunken Zoe fall into a lake, an ayah from the Quran runs through her head: “'Whoever kills one person, it is as if he has killed all of mankind. . .and whoever saves one person, it is as if he has saved all of mankind.'" It is these words that compel Kamala to action, in yet another instance that combines her idolization of the all-American Carol Danvers with the teachings of Islam. In a sense, even her adoption of Carol's face contains an expression of Kamala's identity, as she doesn't appear in Carol's Captain Marvel costume, but her older costume from back when Carol called herself Ms. Marvel, which Kamala prefers. Although she falters and continues to hide herself for a time, what makes Kamala a hero is her commitment to finding her identity on her own terms rather than letting the prejudice and ignorance of Zoe and America at large define her.

  Others, Kamala learns, may need help being so strong. In her quest to find the missing teenagers of Jersey City, she crosses path with The Inventor, a scientist who appears to be inducting teenagers into a cult of sorts through kidnapping and behavior modification. The kidnapped are being used as a power source for various robots and other machines he uses to act out his schemes. When it finally comes time for Kamala to rescue her peers and end things with The Inventor, she makes a shocking discovery: the teens aren't kidnapped slaves, they're volunteers. If they just let The Inventor use their generation as a power source, one explains, “we wouldn't need to kill each other over oil and fry the planet and melt the ice caps” (Wilson #10, 3), revealing a belief that they must literally sacrifice themselves to make up for the mistakes of the generations before them. Even before this point, Ms. Marvel was a decidedly modern text, indicated by Kamala's interest in fanfiction and the omnipresence of cellphones (even in the mosque), for example. But it is in this story arc, titled “Generation Why” (issues 8-11), that Ms. Marvel really establishes itself as a specifically Millennial text and shifts from being a comic about the racial and cultural problems of identity facing Kamala Khan to being a comic also about the larger sociohistorical problem of identity facing teenagers as a whole in the twenty-first century.

  The very first scene of the arc has Kamala expressing her frustration that no adults are aiding her in her search for her missing peers. “Why are kids like me always being drafted into wars we didn't start?” she asks; “This is the kind of thing you'd think people would notice . . .That's half of heroing. Noticing things." She posits that adults are too wrapped up in their own problems to involve themselves in the problems of teenagers. This communication barrier results in a generational disconnect that is brought up and demonstrated repeatedly throughout Ms. Marvel. Kamala experiences it in her personal life with her family and Sheikh constantly reminding her that she cannot be trusted to handle herself around boys or alcohol, and that the past was “blessed” time, “free from today's scandal and temptation.” The latter idea, that the current generation is somehow lesser than those before it, is also present at a larger scale, represented by a repeatedly-mentioned article that Kamala's classmates must read for school. It's never directly quoted in the text, but when asked to comment on it in class, Kiki says “The writer said teenagers are just parasites addicted to their smart phones, who don't give back to society." With adults repeating these ideas about their generation, it's no wonder that the Millennials of Ms. Marvel express an overwhelming feeling of impotence, imagining themselves as a plague on the world rather than a cure.

  But that's not the only thing going on. Joining the Inventor's cause is about more than just perceived worthlessness. It's also indicative of a need for these teenagers to sacrifice and make a martyr of themselves in order to make up for the sins of the past, and this concept is hardly unique to Ms. Marvel, but rather is a trend found throughout a significant amount of contemporary young adult fiction. The Hunger Games trilogy, the most recent adaptation of which was the second-highest grossing film of 2014, is perhaps the most pervasive example. The series depicts a dystopian society in which the majority of the population lives decadently in the The Capitol at the expense of twelve impoverished and disenfranchised Districts. This inequality is perpetuated in part by The Hunger Games, in which children are forced to kill one another in order to win glory and resources for their District. The hero, Katniss Everdeen, defies The Capitol at every turn and leads a revolution against them, eventually becoming a traitor and pariah in the eyes of those who once lauded her. Though Katniss's gender, politics, and use of media as a weapon may be progressive, her “lone warrior fights the battles others can't” tale is a story as old as stories get. And The Hunger Games is just one example; it's in the company of stories like Harry Potter, Divergent, and Maze Runner, all of which depict the younger generation fighting the battles that the older generation is either unable to or is responsible for, placing themselves in dire, self-sacrificing situations to do so.

  Such novels may be noble and inspiring, but their real-world application looks less like Harry Potter fighting the forces of darkness, and more like the teens of Jersey City giving up on themselves because they think that the only thing their generation is good for is fixing the mistakes that came before them. In Ms. Marvel, the characters doing the sacrificing aren't the heroes, but the victims. What makes Kamala a different, newer category of hero is that her compassion foils the Inventor's plans before her fists do. In response to learning that her peers are sacrificing themselves, she says “This is not saving the world. . .This is saying our generation will never matter. But we have to matter. If we don't, there's no future worth saving” (Wilson #10, 14). She goes on to ask each individual what their hobbies and interests are, and tells them how these things make them useful; the computer whiz can work in cyber security, the guy who makes stuff out of junk is a future engineer, the guy who does the jobs others won't is a future president. Her battle with the Inventor in the subsequent issue may save those already in his clutches, but it's an act of kindness that connects with her peers in a personal, empathetic, and real-world way that ensures that the villain will never have another volunteer again. These traits are also on display in her battle with Kaboom. Kamala's anger was directed not at those who judge her, but at the extremist Inhumans at the root of that judgment; even in her rage Kamala is compassionate and understanding, reinforces her status as a modern hero. She fights not those who would think ill of her or hurt her, but those who would hurt the people who would think ill of her.

  The positive effects of Kamala's compassion extend beyond the pages of her comic and into the real world. In early 2015, the Freedom Defense Initiative, an anti-Islamic extremist group, bought ad space on 50 San Francisco buses, decorating them with images of a Muslim leader consulting with Hitler and a plea to end the aid of Middle Eastern countries. A group of street artists called Bay Area Art Queers Unleashing Power promptly painted over these ads with images of Kamala Khan alongside quotes including “Stamp Out Racism” and “Free Speech Isn’t a License to Spread Hate”. That her message and image are seen as fit to fight real-world bigotry speaks volumes about her impact. Yes, this is just one incident and one group of artists, but for them to choose Kamala over the dozens of more popular heroes or even real Muslim leaders expresses a belief that the character carries weight and can exist as a symbol for positivity and acceptance. Though she may be a successful comic book character, she is as of now a relatively small blip on the radar of popular culture, but her success within her industry and ability to inspire fans is indicative of an audience that wants to see their heroes be as colorful and as diverse as they are, and one that reacts powerfully when they do.

  That alone may be enough to prove that Kamala represents a paradigm shift in the nature of what constitutes a hero, but there's more than that. She's significant and touching not only because she's female, Middle Eastern, and still selling comics, but because she represents the internal struggle of a relatively new generation of children and young adults. In addition to mad scientists, rogue Inhumans, and giant alligators, Kamala's battles are those of the modern world, and her weapons are compassion and understanding, the tools of the modern hero. It isn't enough anymore to beat up a problem and call it done, and G. Willow Wilson seems to know this; the hero must understand villains and their victims, and not merely vanquish the evil, but create a world in which it is more difficult for evil to emerge in the first place.

Ms. Marvel recognizes that finding identity and worth in a world that feels increasingly troubled and overpopulated is difficult, and that the burden of peers and elders can make young people feel torn and useless, but Kamala Khan reminds us that we are never useless. As she says, “giving up on the next generation is like giving up on the future,” and she encourages the young and the old alike to never let that happen.