Most Marvel comics are too long-running and sprawling for any MCU offering to be a direct adaptation, and that’s for the best. Direct adaptations can be kind of boring. If a filmmaker or showrunner doesn’t bring new vision and surprises to the source material, then it becomes stale and predictable. Luckily, most directors aren’t afraid to bring new ideas to their projects, and Disney Plus’s new series Ms. Marvel is no exception.
However, Ms. Marvel is also a bit different than other Marvel properties. First off, it’s a newer title—the first issue came out in 2014—so Kamala Khan hasn’t had as much time as other characters to grow, evolve, and occasionally reboot. This means that many fans have a firmer idea in their minds of who Kamala is “supposed” to be. Secondly, Ms. Marvel was groundbreaking in its depiction of a Muslim Pakistani-American girl becoming a superhero, so Marvel had an obligation to stay true to that vision when they adapted it for TV.
With all that in mind, let’s look at what Marvel changed about Ms. Marvel, and what stayed the same!
New Powers, New Origins
First off, a change that was obvious (and controversial!) right from the first trailer: Kamala’s new powers. In the comics, Kamala is an Inhuman, a race of people descended from an ancient experiment that took place in the Kree Empire. Her latent powers get activated when she’s exposed to the Terrigen Mist, after which she has the ability to grow, shrink, stretch, and shapeshift. In the MCU, Kamala finds a bangle in a box of old family relics, and when she puts it on, she gains the power to manipulate cosmic energy.
What’s interesting about the change is that it substitutes one heritage for another. In the comics, the other Inhumans take Kamala in when she gets injured, demonstrating that she’s one of them. In the series, Kamala puts on the bangle because she wants to add a little Pakistani flair to her Captain Marvel costume. You do see a version of the bangle in the comics, but when she puts her first costume together, its presence and significance aren’t explained. In the series, Kamala’s reasons for wearing it are immediately multilayered, with the bangle serving a practical purpose and showing a connection to her family and people.
The circumstances in which Kamala gains her powers are different, too. In the comics, Kamala sneaks out to go to a party on the beach, where she gets exposed to the mist. Zoe, the popular girl, falls in the water and starts to drown, and Kamala uses her powers for the first time by embiggening her hand to scoop Zoe out. In the series, her transformation happens at AvengerCon. The update punches up her origin story a little, tying her powers a little more closely to her love of the Avengers and providing a huge audience to witness her first heroic act.
There’s one more intriguing difference in Kamala’s origin story. In the comics, the very first manifestation of her powers is an accidental transformation into a Carol Danvers lookalike. Kamala literally becomes her idol, and quickly realizes that she hates it. The costume rides up, the hair gets in her face, and she immediately admits that the change isn’t worth it. “Being someone else isn’t liberating,” she muses. “It’s exhausting.”
Finally, it’s worth mentioning the subtle changes to Kamala’s brother Aamir. In the comics, Aamir starts off as a pious thorn in Kamala’s side. In the series, he’s still spiritual, but he’s a little more laid back, and acts as her ally. It’s going to be fun to see Aamir and Kamala’s sibling dynamic unfold throughout the series.
How Does the Series Stay True to the Comics?
One of the most interesting things about Ms. Marvel, in terms of its continuity within the rest of the Marvel universe, is how easily Kamala’s love of the Avengers translates to the screen. At the beginning of the comics, superheroes and the Avengers are just a fact of life for ordinary people. They occupy a weird space between real life and legend, though: it’s not weird (at least, in a really broad sense) for Kamala to be writing Avengers/My Little Pony crossover fan fiction, but it’s also a relatively ordinary occurrence for a superhero to land in front of you and start blasting aliens.
That’s the case in the MCU, too, although the history is compressed into 11 or 12 years. We see a comic that Kamala drew of Iron Man as a kid (remember that she would have been 5 or 6 years old during Loki’s attack on New York), so she’s obviously idolized the Avengers for most of her life. But she’s also living in a world in which first contact with aliens happened within her lifetime, and the Blip happened (I’m assuming) pretty recently. In Kamala’s world is still adjusting to the existence of superheroes, but they’re still living legends. It’s no wonder she wants to be one so badly.
Also, just like in the comics, Kamala feels like she doesn’t quite fit in anywhere. She feels like she’s too American for her conservative Pakistani parents, but she’s still different enough that Zoe makes fun of her for belonging to, in Kamala’s words, “the dumb inferior brown people.” The comic was explicit from the very start about Kamala’s internalized belief that girls of color don’t get to be superheroes, and the show makes reference to this belief, too, when Kamala confides to Bruno that “it’s not really the brown girls from Jersey City who save the world.” The world of the MCU, like American comics in real life, spent far too long failing women of color, and Ms. Marvel is staying true to the vision of the original comics to begin to make that right.
Most importantly, though, the series is staying true to Kamala’s character. The original Kamala is funny, weird, plucky, and immensely lovable, and so far, Iman Vellani’s take on the character is right on point. Even if Vellani’s Kamala has a YouTube channel instead of a fan fiction archive and attends AvengerCon instead of a beachside high school party, she’s still the super geeky superhero that Ms. Marvel fans fell in love with back in 2014. Those of us with our heads in the clouds love her because, even if our cultural backgrounds are different, she’s one of us.
What changes did you notice in the new series? What are you happy that they kept the same? Let us know in the comments!
(image: Marvel)
