Ms. Marvel 6 review

Soule’s She Hulk as my favourite comic of the week with today’s Ms. Marvel 6. This issue is simply delightful.

With Kamala Khan’s introductions out of the way, the new Ms. Marvel series has picked up the pace in the last few issues. The bulk of this issue is a superhero adventure and the first official team-up for Marvel’s young Muslim heroine. After rescuing a friend from the clutches of “the inventor” last issue, she’s been fighting his patrol bots every night while searching for his lair. Her search leads her to the sewers, and to Wolverine.

There’s still a bit of room for Kamala’s family life in this entry. While we don’t see Kamala’s family on panel, she has a brief conversation with her brother on the phone, leading to a talk with her youth leader at the mosque. The brief glimpses into Kamala’s religion help build her character without feeling preachy, and in this particular case it offers some genuinely good advice.

While her personal life tidbits are interesting, this comic’s real highlight is Kamala’s interaction with Wolverine. Her geeky personality completely takes over when they first meet. She annoys him with talks of her fan fiction, but they start to get along once the fighting begins. Her nerdy personality makes her very relatable – I could totally see myself reacting the same way if I ran into some of my favourite fictional characters.

While Adrian Alphona takes a break, Jacob Wyatt takes over on art duties. While it’s not quite as detailed or quirky as Alphona’s art, Wyatt does a good job at capturing the comic’s mood. It’s a fun style with a good variety of colours and some decent background detail. Like Alphona’s art, there is the occasional visual nod hidden in the background, including Kamala’s X-Men style jacket. On the down side, there are a lot of panels where characters’ eyes are completely white. It’s kind of distracting when close-ups of the same characters show irises.

The recently released estimated sales numbers revealed that this title is currently selling around 34,000 copies per issue. While this title deserves more sales, I hope it stays there. It’s very similar to Spider-Man’s early days with a geeky teenaged superhero, except she happens to be a Muslim. The character is fun, relatable, has interesting powers and stands for Marvel’s recent attempts at branching out for new audiences. If you haven’t checked this series out, you really should.