What Does Ms. Marvel Have in Common With Spider-Girl, Runaways and Transmetropolitan?

In every Look Back, we examine a comic book issue from 10/25/50/75 years ago (plus a wild card every month with a fifth week in it). This time around, we head back to February 2014 to see the debut of Kamala Khan’s Ms. Marvel ongoing series.

A natural aspect of comic book publishing is that comic book companies frequently try out new publishing initiatives from time to time. Often, readers won’t even necessarily NOTICE that that is what is happening, like when DC leaned into its Silver Age superhero revamps in the late 1950s/early 1960s by transitioning The Brave and the Bold to a “try-out” format, and pairing it with Showcase to launch a number of new superhero concepts (like Hawkman, Justice League of America, Metamorpho, Metal Men and more). Other times, though, the initiave is quite blatant, like when a new comic book imprint is launched.

As I’ve written about before, a fascinating aspect of some of these imprint launches is when the imprint OVERALL fails, but there is one title WITHIN the imprint that succeeds. Notable examples of this include Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson’s Transmetropolitan being the lone survivor of DC’s Helix imprint, Tom DeFalco and Pat Olliffe’s Spider-Girl being the lone survivor of Marvel’s MC2 imprint, and Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphona’s Runaways being the lone survivor of Marvel’s Tsunami imprint. Today, we look back to February 2014, and see how Ms. Marvel #1 (by G. Willow Wilson, Adrian Alphona, Ian Herring and Joe Caramagna) was also sort of the lone survivor of Marvel’s Inhumanity publishing initiative.

What was Inhumanity, and how did Ms. Marvel play a part in it?

During the 2013 crossover event, Infinity, Thanos and Black Bolt had a battle in the Inhuman city of Attilan, as Thanos was looking for his long-lost part-Inhuman son, Thane. During their battle, Black Bolt set off a Terrigen Bomb, which wrecked Attilan, and then released the Terrigen Mists (exposure to which is what gives Inhumans their powers) into the Earths’ atmosphere, which would result in any human who had Inhuman ancestry (and since the Inhumans had intermixed with humans thousands of years earlier, there were a lot of humans out there with Inhuman DNA) gaining Inhuman superpowers.

This launched the publishing initiative known as Inhumanity, which was based around the idea that there would be now “normal” humans who suddenly discovered their Inhuman ancestry, and obviously, the rest of the world would turn on these people. The whole thing was clearly intended as an attempt to come up with a substitute for mutants, as Marvel did not have the movie rights to the X-Men at the time, so this was an attempt to take the concepts of the mutant story in Marvel comics (the idea of a minority group that has to use their powers to defend a world that hates and fears them) and transfer them to a group of characters that Marvel DID have the movie and TV rights to, the Inhumans.

And sure enough, in Ms. Marvel #1, Kamala Khan is exposed to the Terrigen Mists, and learns that she is one of those humans with Inhuman DNA…

The Inhumanity publishing initiative didn’t really go anywhere, but Kamala Khan, of course, became a major superhero, and she was the one successful part of the initiative. However, just like with the other examples I noted, when you’re the sole survivor of an initiative, the connection between the failed concept is often downplayed, and recently, Marvel has decided to reveal Ms. Marvel was ALSO a mutant, so that she could be part of the X-Men (now that Marvel owns the film rights to the X-Men again).

As I noted last month, Marvel did a one-shot that first introduced us to Kamala AS Ms. Marvel, with a story set AFTER the events of this first story arc in the series that shows how Kamala became Ms. Marvel. However, this first issue still gave us a lot of insight into the cast, especially, of course, Kamala Khan.

We see her interact with her best friends, Bruno and Nakia, as well as their classmate, Zoe, which very quickly establishes the social dynamic between them all…

We then see her writing Avengers fanfic, quickly establishing her love for superheroes (and her offbeat sense of humor)…

This leads us to see her interact with her family, quickly establishing all of THOSE dynamics…

It’s truly shocking just HOW economical Wilson is with this story. In just a few short pages, she has introduced SO MANY characters, while developing all of their personalities really well.

Naturally, Kamala sneaks out of the house to attend the party she was forbidden from attending. She is then exposed to the Terrigen Mists, at which point she enters into a cocoon, and hallucinates the Avengers talking to her…

And at the end of the issue, we see a cliffhanger of Kamala seemingly transformed INTO Carol Danvers as Ms. Marvel!

Of course, next issue we discover that Kamala just has shapeshifting powers, and did not actually BECOME Carol Danvers, but it’s still a wonderful cliffhanger that kicked off a great first issue.

If you folks have any suggestions for March (or any other later months) 2014, 1999, 1974 and 1949 comic books for me to spotlight, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com! Here is the guide, though, for the cover dates of books so that you can make suggestions for books that actually came out in the correct month. Generally speaking, the traditional amount of time between the cover date and the release date of a comic book throughout most of comic history has been two months (it was three months at times, but not during the times we’re discussing here). So the comic books will have a cover date that is two months ahead of the actual release date (so October for a book that came out in August). Obviously, it is easier to tell when a book from 10 years ago was released, since there was internet coverage of books back then.