Ms. Marvel, Kamala Khan and Muslim Representation in Comics

Ask most readers to name a Muslim superhero and the answer, if it comes at all, is Kamala Khan. Muslim representation in comics is worth examining through her — not because one character settles the question, but because her case demonstrates how Muslim representation actually succeeds when it does.

What Ms. Marvel got right about American-born Muslims

Kamala Khan is a sixteen-year-old from Jersey City. She is Pakistani-American, she is a fan of the Avengers to a degree her family finds tiresome, she writes fan fiction, and she wants to go to a party her parents have refused to let her attend. When she acquires powers, her first instinct is to take the form of the blonde hero whose poster hangs in her bedroom.

The specificity is what makes it land, and it is why the book still gets cited whenever Muslim representation in comics comes up. The comic knows what a Friday at the mosque actually looks like for a teenager who would rather be elsewhere, what it is to negotiate a curfew in two languages, what an older brother’s recent turn to greater religious seriousness does to a household. Her faith is neither a burden she overcomes nor a badge she brandishes; it is a fact of her life that generates ordinary friction, like her curfew.

This is directly traceable to who made it. Sana Amanat, who co-created and edited the series, is Muslim-American. G. Willow Wilson, who wrote it, is a convert to Islam who lived in Egypt. The domestic detail reads as observed rather than researched because it was.

The context Kamala Khan arrived into

The character launched in 2014, into a period in which American Muslim communities were the subject of sustained institutional attention rather than fictional interest.

Surveillance programmes had been running against mosques and community organisations for over a decade, and the resulting distrust was severe enough that congregations found themselves unsure whether an outreach visit was outreach or intelligence-gathering — a tension documented in reporting on community groups turning informants over to the very agency that had sent them. Meanwhile the available fictional Muslim characters were, by an overwhelming margin, security threats.

Against that, a comic in which the most serious ongoing problem is a curfew is not a small intervention. It is an argument about who gets to be an ordinary protagonist — which is the whole of what Muslim representation is asking for.

Why the commercial result mattered more than the reviews

The series sold. The first collected volume outperformed a great many established titles, stayed in print through repeated reprints, and became a fixture in school and public library collections — a market that turns over slowly and does not restock things that do not circulate.

That fact did more work than any amount of critical praise. Publishing decisions are made on the expectation of return, and the standing internal argument against a Muslim lead had always been commercial rather than ideological: it will not sell, it will narrow the audience. Kamala Khan retired that argument with numbers. The character’s eventual move into television followed the same logic.

Representation arguments are won this way far more often than by persuasion.

What Ms. Marvel did not do

She did not resolve Muslim representation in Western media, and the series never pretended to.

Muslim representation in comics is a volume problem before it is a quality problem, and one title does not move a volume. Naming a Muslim superhero should not be a quiz question with one answer.

One character in a medium with a comparatively small readership does not offset the volume examined in our broader piece on Western media depictions. Nor was she the first attempt: The 99, published out of Kuwait from 2006, built a whole team of Muslim heroes around the attributes of God, ran internationally, and drew organised political hostility in the United States that had a good deal to do with why it never achieved comparable reach.

There is also a burden problem. When a demographic has one prominent character, that character is required to represent everyone, and every choice the writers make becomes a statement about a global population of nearly two billion people. Kamala Khan is Pakistani-American, Sunni, suburban and middle-class. That is one experience among a very large number, and being the only one on the shelf makes it carry weight it should not have to.

The measure of what Muslim representation gained

The useful test is not whether one character is admirable. It is whether the next one has an easier time getting made.

By that measure the series did its job. It established that a Muslim lead could carry a flagship title, that specificity in the writing improved rather than limited the audience, and that hiring creators from the community produced better work — which is the least surprising finding in the whole story and the one that took longest to act on.

Kamala Khan is a symbol of representation for American-born Muslims mostly because there was so little competition for the position, and American-born Muslim readers had been waiting a long time for one. The point at which she stops being a symbol, and becomes simply one of many Muslim characters in circulation, is the point at which the thing she represented will have actually arrived.

Questions on this article

Q.01

Who is Kamala Khan?

A sixteen-year-old Pakistani-American from Jersey City who takes on the Ms. Marvel identity in the 2014 Marvel series. She is the first Muslim character to headline a Marvel title, and she inherited the name from Carol Danvers, whose poster is on her bedroom wall.

Q.02

Was Ms. Marvel the first Muslim superhero?

No. Earlier Muslim characters existed in mainstream American comics, and The 99 — a Kuwaiti-published series launched in 2006 — built an entire team around them. Kamala Khan was the first, though, to carry a flagship Marvel title in her own right.

Q.03

Who created the character?

Editors Sana Amanat and Stephen Wacker, writer G. Willow Wilson and artist Adrian Alphona. Amanat is Muslim-American and Wilson is a convert to Islam, which is directly visible in how specific and unsentimental the domestic detail is.

Q.04

Why did the series succeed commercially?

Because it worked as a teenage superhero comic first. The premise — an awkward fan of the established heroes who unexpectedly becomes one — is a durable formula, and the religious and cultural material sits inside it as texture rather than as the subject.