SNAPSHOT
Marvel Studios’ Ms. Marvel is a new, original series that introduces Kamala Khan, a Muslim American teenager growing up in Jersey City. An avid gamer and a voracious fan-fiction scribe, Kamala is a Super Hero mega fan with an oversized imagination—particularly when it comes to Captain Marvel. Yet Kamala feels like she doesn’t fit in at school and sometimes even at home—that is, until she gets super powers like the heroes she’s always looked up to. Life gets better with super powers, right?… based on the Marvel Comics superheroine of the same name. It is the nineteenth television series in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and an installment of Phase Four. The series is produced by Marvel Studios and will be released on Disney+ (synopsis courtesy Marvel Cinematic Universe Wiki)
Three huge cheers for the increasing diversity that’s finally coming to the MCU!
Following in the footsteps of films like Phase 3’s Black Panther – its sequel Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is set to release this November – and Phase 4’s Shang-Chi and the Ten Rings and Eternals, have all brought much-needed and highly-welcomed cultural diversity to a previously very white superhero universe.
This trend has been i=vibrantly added to by the impending release of streaming series Ms. Marvel, intended in part as a character introduction to The Marvels which is set for a February 2023 release, featuring this series’ protagonist Kamala Khan / Ms. Marvel, as well as Carol Danvers / Captain Marveland Monica Rambeau.
It’s a wonderful thing to see, not simply because it very necessarily reflects the world as it is in all its multicultural glory, but because it enriches and extends Marvel’s storytelling which benefits from having a wider pallete to draw from.
Ms. Marvel gives us a Muslim American teenager who yearns for the perceived escapism of superherodom only to find it might be a good deal more complicated and whole lot more real than she ever imagined.
Quite how real we’ll find out when Ms. Marvel releases on 8 June, 2022 on Disney+