Ms. Marvel, Vol. 2: Generation Why by G. Willow Wilson, Adrian Alphona, Jacob Wyatt Published by Marvel on April 7th 2015
Pages: 136
Format: Paperback
Source: Purchased
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Who is the Inventor, and what does he want with the all-new Ms. Marvel and all her friends? Maybe Wolverine can help! If Kamala can stop fan-girling out about meeting her favorite super hero, that is. Then, Kamala crosses paths with Inhumanity -- by meeting the royal dog, Lockjaw! But why is Lockjaw really with Kamala? As Ms. Marvel discovers more about her past, the Inventor continues to threaten her future. Kamala bands together with some unlikely heroes to stop the maniacal villain before he does real damage, but has she taken on more than she can handle? And how much longer can Ms. Marvel's life take over Kamala Khan's? Kamala Khan continues to prove why she's the best (and most adorable) new super hero there is!
Collecting Ms. Marvel(2014) #6-11.
Another really great entry in the Ms. Marvel series. This time out we get the conclusion to the The Inventor story line and learn a little bit more about Kamala Khan and what made her turn into Ms. Marvel during the Terrigen Cloud when everyone else was unaffected.
Ms. Marvel is still trying to figure out her power. Every time she thinks she has a handle on them, something happens or doesn’t happen and she’s completely confused again. This volume, consisting of issues 6-11, was a lot of fun again. Ms. Marvel meets her personal hero, Wolverine, in a two-issue arc that’s really clever and funny. I admit that I’m not up on my X-Men lore. I would love to read those comics, but it’s been going on and there are so many, and they branch off into approximately 100 different directions. It’s the same with a lot of long-running comics. So I don’t know exactly where this fits in in the wider X-Men world, or in Wolverine’s story. But it was great fun seeing the two of them together, and I really appreciated that when he showed up, Ms. Marvel didn’t fade into the background. This was still very much her story; Wolverine was just there to lend a helping hand.
Kamala Khan is still really struggling with how to fit Ms. Marvel into her day-to-day life. She’s starting to feel that Ms. Marvel has a lot of responsibilities, but Kamala has a lot of them, too, and they don’t always match up. Her family is putting a lot of pressure on her, only one of her friends knows about her double life, and it’s a lot for a sixteen-year-old girl to handle.
But she does handle it. And she’s really funny and smart while she’s handling it. She’s really smart in STEM, and she uses that knowledge in figuring out how to defeat her enemies. She unashamedly tells Wolverine about the fan-fic she writes about him (third most upvoted story on Freaking Awesome last month) and throws pop culture jokes at her enemies as she takes them down. In short, Ms. Marvel is who I wish I’d been when I was sixteen. There’s a lot here about the way teenagers are perceived today and how important they really are to our future. G Willow Wilson is able to make these points without being preachy or hammering you over the head with it. That’s not to say it’s subtle, it certainly isn’t that, but it’s not overdone.
I really recommend everyone read this comic. I don’t think The Inventor is going to go down in the annals of great supervillans, but for Ms. Marvel’s first big boss fight, I thought he was fine. He was tough enough to give her a real fight but she had to get resourceful to do it. I can’t wait to see what’s next for her.
About G. Willow Wilson
G. Willow Wilson began her writing career at the age of 17, when she freelanced as a music and DJ critic for Boston’s Weekly Dig magazine. Since then, she’s written the Eisner Award-nominated comic book series Air and Mystic: The Tenth Apprentice and the graphic novel Cairo. Her first novel, Alif the Unseen, was a New York Times Notable book and winner of the 2013 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. She currently writes the bestselling monthly comic book series Ms. Marvel for Marvel Comics.
Willow spent her early and mid twenties living in Egypt and working as a journalist. Her articles about the Middle East and modern Islam have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly and the Canada National Post. Her memoir about life in Egypt during the waning years of the Mubarak regime, The Butterfly Mosque, was named a Seattle Times Best Book of 2010.
