Another day, another Marvel series. Whether you’re sighing with relief or despair at that news is probably irrelevant — the series will premiere on June 8 and perform extremely well, because it’s Marvel.
Ms Marvel heralds the arrival of Kamala Khan to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Played by newcomer Iman Vellani, she is a Pakistani-American teenager from New Jersey who struggles to adapt to her high school and the trailer, released this week, shows her tense relationships with her classmates and her parents. Khan looks up to Captain Marvel (played by the Oscar winner Brie Larson) and the series will have her morph into a foil of her superhero idol and assume the mantle of Ms Marvel.
Power-wise, this means she can transform her arms into psychedelic, elongated battering rams. If you came into this article already questioning the profundity of the MCU, that description may do little to sway you, but the series is certainly groundbreaking in other ways.
Up until now the MCU has mainly delved into Marvel Comics’ 20th-century catalogue of characters for inspiration, with most of their cinematic figureheads — Iron Man, Spider-Man and Doctor Strange, to name a few — debuting in the 1960s.
Ms Marvel is one of only two 21st-century Marvel properties, along with the Guardians of the Galaxy, to be given their own film or television series. But whereas the Guardians were seen as more obscure comic-book characters, the Ms Marvel comics were wildly popular when they debuted in 2014, both because of the delightful writing and for introducing Marvel’s first Muslim superhero.
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“It’s not really the brown girls from Jersey City who save the world. That’s a fantasy,” Khan says in the trailer for Ms Marvel. During its formative years diversity was certainly something of a fantasy for the MCU. The original Avengers, who served as figureheads for the MCU, were all Caucasian, heterosexual and five sixths male, with Scarlett Johansson the only female superhero. It took Marvel 18 films to have one led by a black actor (Chadwick Boseman in Black Panther) and 21 films for a stand-alone female-led entry (Brie Larson in Captain Marvel). These films became two of Marvel’s most successful, proving that audiences relish diverse storytelling.
The MCU has also thrived when it takes risks creatively — hinging Guardians of the Galaxy around a mixtape of 1960s and 1970s rarities was certainly a shot in the dark, as was telling the story of WandaVision through the trauma-stricken eyes of Wanda Maximoff, who manifested her surroundings as the sets of 20th-century American sitcoms. Ms Marvel seems to have taken a similarly creative approach, telling its story through the eyes of a teenage girl, with scenes playing out as homework doodles and daydream fantasies.
With any luck this new direction for Marvel will pay off and perhaps make those who haven’t felt represented by the MCU so far feel somewhat more welcome.
Ms Marvel premieres on Disney+ on June 8
