Comic Info
Comic Name: Ms. Marvel (Volume 4)
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Writer: G. Willow Wilson
Artist: Takeshi Miyazawa/Adrian Alphona/Nico Leon
# of Issues: 6
Release Date: 2016
Ms. Marvel (4) #1 Variant
Reprints Ms. Marvel (4) #1-6 (January 2016-June 2016). Kamala is up to her ears in problems. Whether it is balancing her family life now that her mother knows her secret identity or just trying to pass math, Kamala is finding that being an Avenger and a student isn’t easy. When an industrialist begins to use Ms. Marvel’s image to promote the gentrification of her neighborhood, Kamala finds Ms. Marvel is becoming unpopular, but even bigger problems arise when Kamala tries to create clones of herself to solve her time-commitment problems.
Written by G. Willow Wilson, Ms. Marvel Volume 5: Super Famous follows Ms. Marvel Volume 4: Last Days. The series relaunched after the “Last Days” storyline but the collection numbering remained the same. The collection features art by Takeshi Miyazawa, Adrian Alphona, and Nico Leon and collects two three issue story arcs (“Super Famous” and “Army of One”). The issues were also collected (with issues #7-12) in Ms. Marvel—Volume 3.
Ms. Marvel has been fun from the beginning, but the series also has been continuously caught up in bad Marvel “Event Series” that really ruin the flow of the story. This volume fortunately has Ms. Marvel just being Ms. Marvel…and it is nice.
Ms. Marvel (4) #5
The first storyline is a bigger storyline for Ms. Marvel with Ms. Marvel taking on Dr. Faustus and HYDRA. The series tries to have a bit of Spider-Man’s early days with it being much more about Kamala’s homelife than the superhero aspect of her life. Here, Jersey City turns against her when the gentrification begins (by HYDRA) and that has multiple potential storylines evolving from it.
I wish the second storyline had done more to continue the “we hate Ms. Marvel” idea of the first three issues of this collection. The second story however is probably a bit more fun than the first story with idea of Ms. Marvel trying to deal with time problems of being a superhero (I always wonder how Spider-Man and Batman could spend the whole night superheroing and then be ok in the morning with maybe one yawn). The speed of the story however is a bit fuzzy and I feel it could be drawn out a bit longer or tightened up in a way that made more sense…it seemed like a lot of time was passing with Kamala’s family stuff but no time with the golem stories.
Ms. Marvel continues to be a fun little series. Despite Marvel’s attempts to boost their big names, it is their smaller series that seem to be working now because they are original and different. It is good to see Ms. Marvel not caught up in some massive “Event Series”, and I wish it would remain that way. Ms. Marvel 5: Super Famous is followed by Ms. Marvel 6: Civil War II.
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