The Amazing World of Comics

So I’ve tasked myself with reading ten issues of Ms. Marvel, five of which from 1977 and the other five from Kamala Khan. To those of you who have been reading Comics for what I assume feels like forever, that may not seem daunting, but for someone like me, to buckle down and analyze ten comic books is a feat near unheard of.

I’ve been surprised many times over the course of the past few weeks in the information I’ve received surrounding the world of Comics. The most interesting in my current research is the difference in creative manifestations between 1977 and 2014. Between the two years I see a huge variation in how stories are told and how characters respond to situations. Carol Danvers, who the world now knows as Captain Marvel, seems extremely two-dimensional compared to current superheroine Kamala Khan. She doesn’t speak like a normal person, every single decision is provided to us in depth through thought bubbles or out loud thinking.

Kamala Khan, or those who created her, seem to trust that an audience can gather she is punching a criminal without her having to detail every moment of the event. She is also younger, clearly, but still more independent in her thinking, she speaks like a woman, like a girl, not like a vigilante. Kamala’s world isn’t as black and white as Carol’s. Carol lives in a world where men think they’re better than women and more often than not, they are wrong and stupid. The only men painted in reasonable lights are those that support Carol but even then they are transportation for microagressions. Sexism is the true evil in Carol Danver’s world, whereas discrimination and Islamaphobia is the true evil in Kamala Khan’s.

In Kamala’s world sexism isn’t dead but transformed, it isn’t blatant the way we see it in the original Ms. Marvel where men like Jonah Jameson seem to hate women.

During the time period, I’m sure it’s blatant enough for someone to recognize him as an awful person but if a character like that was placed in Kamala’s world he wouldn’t be a representation of men but an exxageration as well as a parody.

It’s comforting I suppose.

I suppose we love to look at the world as destructive and at its core I’d agree, we have so much further to go. But even just looking between 1977 and 2014 there has been progress.

We are progressing.

And progress stops for no one.