'Ms. Marvel,’ by G. Willow Wilson: review

Ms. Marvel Ms. Marvel Photo: Marvel Photo: Marvel Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close 'Ms. Marvel,’ by G. Willow Wilson: review 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

The new superhero title “Ms. Marvel” would have attracted wide attention even if the stories weren’t so much fun. The character’s new incarnation is a Pakistani American teenager, Kamala Khan, the first Muslim girl hero in mainstream comics, though not the first to practice Islam. (Two earlier Marvel characters had the same super-name; one, Carol Danvers, will get her own movie in 2017.)

Kamala’s creator, G. Willow Wilson, converted to Islam as a college student in Boston, then lived for years in Cairo (she’s now in Seattle). Wilson arrived at this project with fans of her own, from her earlier comics (“Air”; “Vixen”; “Cairo”), her memoir “The Butterfly Mosque,” and her first-rate page-turner of a science-fantasy novel, “Alif the Unseen,” set among tech-savvy youth on the Arabian peninsula.

Fortunately, “Ms. Marvel” is a lot of fun. It’s not just a chance for American Muslims, and the children of Muslim immigrants, to see themselves represented, with patience and sympathy and superpowers. It’s also a beautiful take on teenage dilemmas, and a way to think about why some people need, or cherish, their faith.

That’s not to say its plot breaks wholly new ground. When we meet her, the not-yet-super Kamala is 16, geeky, loyal to her few close friends (the observant Nakia; the chemistry whiz Bruno), and disinclined to rebel against her observant family; she works at a Circle Q convenience store before school, and cherishes a “sad nerd obsession with the Avengers,” writing fan fiction about them, which — of course — her parents can’t understand. Out of place even in her diverse Jersey City high school, where popular white girls rule, Kamala’s fantasies aren’t so much about power as about feeling at home.

When she sneaks out one night to attend a party, Kamala gets engulfed in mysterious mist. There she has visions of her heroes, including Danvers, who endows her with a Ms. Marvel costume and a power she must learn, fitfully, to control. She can make her body or parts of it (hands, feet, arms) larger or smaller, or change her appearance “to look like someone I’m not.” As you’d expect, she must use that power immediately to save people. She stops a robber at the Circle Q; she saves a drowning girl.

Kamala’s power looks awkward — it’s never elegant — and in some ways it’s the key to the rest of the book. It’s literally a power to grow up, and so it works to represent the years when different parts of you grow (or not) at different speeds. It also lets artist Adrian Alphona (known for the teens he drew in “Runaways”) make Kamala at once impressive and embarrassed, scaring a miscreant or towering sheepishly over her peers. That same power also makes her (delightfully) hard to sexualize: She’s not a child, but she never looks or acts like a confidently embodied adult. When she builds her own Ms. Marvel outfit, later on, she starts with a piece of swimwear for observant girls and women called a burkini. It’s the same swimsuit pre-super Kamala disdained.

Believing in superheroes, and gaining superpowers, for Wilson and Alphona, might be like believing in Islam. It might be uncool (it separates you from your peers), it can be exhilarating, it comes with duties, it doesn’t mean what your parents think it means (even if they are people of faith, or comic book fans), and not everybody can do it in just the same way. Like all teenage superhero comics, “Ms. Marvel” describes a journey of self-definition: Kamala must figure out who she wants to be, how she wants to present herself, as a superhero (does she have to sneak out to fight crime?) and as a high school kid who wants to make friends, and as a Muslim (she goes to the mosque with her pious brother, then talks women’s rights to the imam).

Wilson and Alphona know their genre, and they take it just seriously enough (one character wears a T-shirt that says IMABADGUY). Though Alphona can draw robots and mystic battles well enough, most of these pages show non-super Jersey City: storefronts, curbs, classrooms, locker rooms, the mosque, the kitchens of middle-class homes. (Sneaking back home after a crime-fighting misadventure, a frustrated Kamala eats half the food in the fridge.) In these spaces, the plot (slowly) comes together. The not-very-competent stickup artist at the Circle Q turns out to be Bruno’s brother. He also turns out to be working for a shadow supervillain, the Inventor, whose plan we only glimpse so far.

“Ms. Marvel” began with individual issues this spring — the trade paperback collects the first five. As in many superhero series, the first paperback is part one of a larger arc. What matters — so far — is character, incident, dialogue and panel-by-panel feel: Wilson’s dialogue (which recalls Joss Whedon’s) and Alphona’s art get most of it just right. Alphona also gets the unusual opportunity — in a genre that’s often about perfect bodies in combat — to draw a range of body types and expressions for human faces: Kamala, Bruno and the people around them look bemused, nonplussed, excited, exasperated, annoyed.

“Ms. Marvel” feels unusually optimistic, almost lighthearted (compared with other comics with literary ambitions) yet unusually real (compared with other comics with flying robots and Avengers cameos). It also looks like a way to think about trust and faith: in family, in friendships, in a religious heritage, even in an artistic tradition (for example, superhero books). Teens can cherish all these kinds of trust: Adults might ask teens to give any of them up. Kamala wants to keep them all, to get “big enough to have greatness in me”; her adventures keep us on her side.

Stephen Burt, a professor of English at Harvard University, is the author of “Close Calls With Nonsense: Reading New Poetry.” E-mail: books@sfchronicle.com

Ms. Marvel

By G. Willow Wilson; illustrated by Adrian Alphona

(Marvel; 120 pages; $15.99)