BW Media Spotlight

Okay, if I’m STARTING a feature article with a Just Some Guy commentary (contains swearing), you know I must have things to say.

Note that was from a gay black liberal who just happens to believe in storytelling over gimmicks. Essentially that’s what Kamala Khan is…a gimmick disguised as a character. Whatever you think about her skin color or her religion that’s basically how she’s been approached. The concept is actually solid. Kamala Khan (and isn’t it strange that modern heroes aren’t known to the audience by their superhero identities but their real names, making me wonder why they bother if they care so little) is a superhero fangirl who also struggles with her more orthodox Muslim family. One day a whiff of the Inhumans’ “Terrigen Mist” does a world tour and traps people in eggs. The ones that survive or something get turned into Inhumans. This was DisneyMarvel trying to distance themselves from mutants because they didn’t have the rights to the X-Men franchise as 20th Century Fox had those rights before Disney absorbed Marvel. Now that they’ve also absorbed Fox the mutants are back and the Inhumans are back to near-obscurity after their post-comic productions bombed like the town drunk carrying high explosives and upset at his failed stand-up comedy career. Yes, that was overkill. From what I hear it may not be overkill enough.

Anyway, Kamala Khan was really created to teach readers (I almost wrote kids but when’s the last time any of the mainstream writers cared about kids–IDW puts out more kids-related Marvel comics and they just lost the licence) about Muslim life after the alleged hate after the 9/11 bombing of the World Trade Center, Pentagon, and failed attack on the White House. Ignore the fact that the terrorists were extremists, there are people who don’t know the difference between culture and religion but now I’m getting off topic. The point is Kamala was never created to be just a superhero character. She’s a promotional tool for understanding Muslims first and that’s where the problem started.

And now apparently she’s about to be dead, thanks to events in Amazing Spider-Man, and there’s the usual response. Like her, or just like the idea of the second if you count Dusk totally first ever Muslim girl hero but don’t actually buy the comics, or if you actually like her comic, the response has been loud and obvious. However, I come not to praise nor bury Kamala Khan because she does have some merit…and death is like the flu in superhero comics.

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