MS. MARVEL Star Iman Vellani Has Written New Comic Series MS. MARVEL: THE NEW MUTANT
Ms. Marvel and The Marvels star Iman Vellani isn’t only the actress playing Kamala Khan in the MCU, she’s also now writing her own comic book adventures. The actress has written her very first comic book with the upcoming title Ms. Marvel: The New Mutant.
The comic will explore Kamala Khan’s mutant side, and in the story she “must fight for her right to exist as a mutant in this world. For her first mission with the X-Men, she will go undercover at Empire State University, where Orchis plots their next move… but not if Ms. Marvel stops it first!”
The series follows the events of Amazing Spider-Man #26, where Kamala “made the ultimate sacrifice to help Spider-Man save the world—but death didn't keep her down for long.” In X-Men: Hellfire Gala #1, “mutantkind resurrected her on their island home Krakoa, only to reveal that she herself is a mutant as well. However, before she had a chance to grapple with what that truly means, the anti-mutant organization Orchis launched a deadly attack that wiped out most of the Marvel Universe's mutant population and forced the X-Men underground.”
During an interview with Marvel.com, Vellani talked about the comic and the direction of the story, and what people need to know about the series before they read it, saying:
As we all know, she did die in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN (2022) #26. But all comic book deaths are very short-lived, and we've got a whole lot of Ms. Marvel left to tell! During Gerry Duggan's HELLFIRE GALA, we see Kamala resurrected by Krakoan Resurrection technology because Cerebro detected her to be a mutant this whole time.
Of course, this raises a million thoughts, feelings, concerns for Kamala internally, and she's like, "How can I possibly deal with this new thing while all the mutants are literally dying in front of me?!" She is thrown headfirst into what it means to be an X-Men at the Gala, and so she has no time to process any of this. So our series will pick up ten weeks after her death and, at this point, her friends and family—who all attended her funeral—their memories are wiped by the Miss Emma Frost, because that's a lot to deal with.
Kamala is just very alone at the start of the series. She doesn't want to bring her problems to the X-Men, because who wants to deal with a 16-year -old kid having a recurring nightmare, which is where we start the issue off? So she's dealing with a lot of the psychological aftermath of being resurrected and having to acclimate to these new colors that she's wearing, the new life that she's been given. It's a lot, and she just needs someone to tell.
Vellani went on to talk about exploring Kamala’s mutant side further and admitted that she hadn’t ever really read a lot of X-Men comics before this experience. So, she had to take a deep dive on everything X-Men before writing. She said:
I never really read a lot of the X-Men comics; I will say that. That was really scary for me, because I was just deep diving on everything X-Men, finding my favorite characters. Grant Morrison and [Jonathan] Hickman's runs were basically my textbooks throughout this entire thing.
I think it was just so fun to explore this different side of her, because for Kamala, she's already dealt with so many different labels. She's been an Avenger, she's been an Inhuman, a Champion, Pakistani, Muslim. She starts off thinking that being a mutant is just another label to add to the list, and it doesn't really change anything because she's always had the X-gene, so it doesn't really matter. Little does she realize that this new suit, the new colors, they bear so much more weight than she was expecting.
The world's entire perspective on Ms. Marvel shifts very drastically, and for the first time, she gets a taste of what it's like to be seen as a villain and an enemy, because after Hellfire Gala especially, the world just hates mutants—it's horrible! We've put Kamala at Empire State University and created a program that's funded by Orchis... and it is hard for her, as it would be!
You can check out a preview of the comic below and Ms. Marvel: The New Mutant will be released on August 30th.
