Ms Marvel #6

Written by G Willow Wilson
Drawn by Jacob Wyatt
Colored by Ian Herring
Lettered by Joe Caramagna

Color me wrong, people, about a lot of things.  First off, issue #5 really was the conclusion to Ms Marvel’s first adventure.  Not much of a conclusion in my book, but technically, I guess it was.  Issue #6 views Ms Marvel as a bona-fide superhero.  She’s still new.  She’s still bad at her job, and she’s still clueless, but she’s not some kid playing dress-up.  The stakes have gotten a touch higher, the story’s gotten more absurd, and the execution is still spot-on.  Even fill-in artist Jacob Wyatt doesn’t miss a beat.  I was worried, freaked out, you might even say, when I saw that Adrian Alphona wasn’t going to be drawing this issue, but Wyatt is a fitting, talented replacement.  I was wrong to doubt him. Wyatt’s line art is little more deft, his characters a little chunkier.  He’s got his own way of abstraction, too, turning Kamala into a cartoon avatar at a few key moments.

Mostly though, I was wrong about G Willow Wilson’s writing.  With previous issues, Kamala Khan’s “adorable” dialogue ranged from genuinely hilarious to groan inducingly bad.  There’s not a lot subtlety put into this issue’s Wolverine team-up.  Kamala is spastically overjoyed to meet one of her heroes, and openly gushes about her fan fiction.  It’s exactly the sort of stuff I’ve griped about in the past with this series, but giving Kamala a brooding jerk like Wolverine to bounce her geek-speak off of goes down smooth.  He’s a perfect foil.  Wolverine could be in the next six issues of this comic and I wouldn’t even mind.

The one complaint I have lies in the further exploration of The Inventor’s true identity.  (Spoilers be coming!)  According to his own words, The Inventor is really… Thomas Edison?  Or a clone of him?  Or a reincarnated version?  Something like that could be awesome.  It could, but it feels like a joke, and does a lot to make the guy look like a raving maniac instead of a person with a personality.  I hope his identity doesn’t get too convoluted, and I hope they find a way to make this guy interesting again.  Saying he’s a real historical figure only served to strip away some mystery.  It didn’t make him a more compelling character.

Stray Observations - In this issue, Kamala openly refers to The Circle Q as her secret headquarters.  I called that shit two months ago!  Glad to see Ms Wilson also saw the continued storytelling and character-building potential in the convenience store.