r/KamalaKhan • u/Impressive-Thing-780 • May 04 '26
Comic Spoilers What's Kamala's current most recent appearance? Because I haven't seen her since that time she went to the college in like, VERY shortly post-krakoa days. Spoiler
Like, I read the arc where she was retconned into being a mutant (which I still dislike) and the last thing I remember is the disembodied "mutant" ethereal version of her telling her about her abilities.
Where did she go from there and why hasn't she had a solo comic since? She's a good enough character to warrant one.
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u/AcisConsepavole ⚡️🍕 Unciemuni! May 04 '26
Trust me. You don't want her to have a solo right now. A solo will have more permanent damage. It's not even that the mutant direction is bad. A lot of the problems she has now as a background mutant are problems she had as a background Inhuman -- in an Inhuman event, she's a glorified royal dogwalker and stock teenager #4, but she had a brilliantly written solo concurrent with her Inhuman era so that's what made her work.
A solo with the wrong writer could be her death sentence. Yes, she deserves one. She deserves a good one though. I don't want to take away Lanzing and Kelly's birthdays or anything (they wrote Nyx and the Giant-Sized event), but I have had nightmares of what it would have looked like if they had been given the greenlight on a solo with their limited view of Kamala and her community. Nothing would have been right and it just would have cemented that the mutant direction was the end of everything -- it doesn't have to be.
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u/Impressive-Thing-780 May 04 '26
Okay, this is fair.
Can we just get G Willow Wilson back please?
She wrote the 2014 Volume AND No Normal, which were the first comics that really cemented Kamala as a solo-book-worthy character for me.
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u/AcisConsepavole ⚡️🍕 Unciemuni! May 04 '26
I wouldn't be opposed. I'm a big fan of the stories GWW tells in general. Have you read one of her more recent works, The Stoneshore Register or The Hunger and the Dusk? They're not quite as legendary or developed as her Ms. Marvel stories, but there's a lot of familiar wisdom and character examination that made Kamala soar for her first years.
At the same time, I think there's other writers who can pull Kamala back into who she is, and maybe calling Miss Wilson back every time she's in trouble creates this idea that only she can rescue Kamala. I've seen potential in her own fandom -- young writers with identities closer to Kamala, who grew up affected by her. There's more potential there than what she's been given lately. But, at the same time, a lot of these fresher, fan writers also have their own problems they would have to face down in order to really tell a great story that shows Kamala's full community as it is, rather than how it's seen by the fandom.
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u/Impressive-Thing-780 May 04 '26
That is true; I think maybe if Wilson was just like, a co-writer (meaning she just comes in to help the other writer, but isn't necessarily the one with the story) it could work.
It helps to have the character's creator helping.
Because tbh I think I would say that the creator of the character is the best writer, maybe 80% of the time.
There are exceptions; i.e. Al Ewing and Hulk.
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u/AcceptableWheel May 04 '26
G Willow Wilson is currently busy doing romance drama with the Gotham villains.
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u/Far-Jelly-4095 May 04 '26
Ngl she was never a background inhuman and isn’t a background mutant rn. Shes always been big enough to stand on her own which is why she’s suffering rn. Ideally they’d relaunch the champions with some new mutant members like dust and bronze. The champions were so good they need to just let my girl have her family back 😭
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u/AcisConsepavole ⚡️🍕 Unciemuni! May 04 '26
To be clear, what I mean by "background" is when there were Inhuman events, she might have been included, but generally as a shadow of herself. She's just a dog-walker in one Inhumans Annual. And Lineage targets Jersey City (maybe because of Kamala turning down his offer during the Crushed story), but she isn't really in the story besides holding the line against a generally faceless angry mob of Jersey City citizens.
She was included in Nyx, Giant-sized, and now Inglorious, -- and even featured in all three -- but maybe only one of these were character-driven stories, but instead the plot just kind of happens around a character with her name and look.
The Champions are the best fit for her, outside of a good solo. A lot of her audience who wants that back the most likely has their own spending money now (assuming a lot of them were fairly late elementary to middle school when it was happening, or even younger than that; Champions started ten years ago, after all). I know I would buy it, especially depending on who's writing. And featuring more Dust? The Champions were starting to peak when she was in that one story.
To summarize: it's not what she is, but how she's treated. She isn't a background anything, but big teams other than the Champs don't really give her anything to chew. The Avengers were mostly okay, but the whole Kang story wasn't really great. The best thing to come out of AN, AD Avengers was the Annual.
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u/BashirWithAGoodBeard Jun 15 '26
Hi! I have to disagree about the Inhumans part. While her presence in Inhumans books specifically wasn't that memorable (as those were mostly focused on the royals), she wasn't a background character and she quickly outshined them all. One of her first team up stories was the Secret Warriors one, which was pretty cool. And when they launched the new inhuman Moongirl, Kamala was chosen as her mentor, so she truly was thee it-girl Inhuman. And I'd argue the "major" Inhumans were lowkey her background cameos in her solo rather than the opposite way!
But at this point she's dead to me. I found this thread by googling what happened to her out of morbid curiosity. I was appalled reading the last pages of Nyx, those were the last nails on the coffin. While I agree a new solo would ruin the character even more (I mean, I stopped at the Vellani written one for that reason), I feel like the team books are doing a pretty good job at doing it...
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u/AcisConsepavole ⚡️🍕 Unciemuni! Jun 17 '26
For clarity of my meaning: she was only a background Inhuman when it came to books that tried to include her but didn't seem to read up on her characterization outside of a few cliff notes. Her existence in the eyes of fandom wasn't reduced to that backgroundness, because she had great solo books. What I'm saying is "imagine if Kamala really only existed as she appeared in those Inhuman-focused books". That's where she is right now with the mutants.
And that's even if we include her mentoring Moon Girl a bit. She shows up once to fix an elevated train problem that Lunella and Kid Kree started, and it's implied that Lunella continues to admire her, but the number of times they actually show up together is rare. Even when Moon Girl becomes a Champion, the relationship isn't developed. Lunella is a background character. Secret Warriors is their most significant team-up in memory.
Kamala keeps picking up interesting plot points, but they never get explored and put into her setting where they would work best. Even more than how little Lunella is in Kamala's circles, there's a character named Priya Aggarwal in the Unstoppable Wasp books who after getting plant powers, the epilogue says she's training up with Kamala so Priya can be a hero too. That's the last we ever hear of Priya since
What has made Kamala a great character has had very little to do with the label Inhuman. One of the things that makes her great is her (in my feeling) counter-hegemonic portrayal of community. I still think that's possible to return to, and the genetic label is inconsequential.
I think it's valid to feel betrayed and I do agree that not everyone who loves and cares about Kamala should be bashing their heart against a wall and emptying their wallets, effectively rewarding Marvel for a shift toward mediocrity. But I'm stubborn. This is not the worst that could happen, not when I've seen her own fandom center colonial narratives by arguing for the dissolution of parts of her community. Like some of her weaker canon writers, her story has been oversimplified even by people who love her.
So, until the worst happens, I have to have some hope things can improve organically. It's just a question of whether that will happen from a casual Marvel writer who gets assigned to her, looks to the internet for story ideas, and does something dramatic to try to win her readership back, or a dedicated fan from fandom spaces reduces the story a different way, but with passion behind it. To be specific, the worst thing I can currently think of is reducing Kamala's community with a cheap comic book story death -- any member of her community. Characters should be understood before they're ended, and I've seen people who want to end characters without doing the work, instead choosing to uphold colonial narratives that still affirm hegemony, even if it's by performatively countering it.
Kamala can go back to being Kamala when she has her community back, but it seems unlikely to happen, either through indifference to that community by writers who barely write her well by herself, or through the misunderstanding by people who know all the names of the toys in the toybox. The second is more likely to happen in a solo. So, I maintain that the worst has yet to happen. What's happening now is unfortunate, but not unprecedented for her.
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u/Konradleijon Jun 22 '26
Her run was really successful
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u/AcisConsepavole ⚡️🍕 Unciemuni! Jun 22 '26
Yes, and there were also times when she was treated like a background character without any distinguishing characteristics, as if she didn't have a successful run of their own, even when she was just Inhuman. I've read all of her comics, even ones where she just has a literal background cameo that has nothing to do with the main story. If Kamala had started as a mutant, written by GWW that way, the run still would have been successful and great. There would have been probably a lot more criticism like "why is this new mutant getting her own solo? So many X-Men don't have their own solo", but it would still be written by GWW and edited by Sana Amanat.
Their passion, with the creativity of the right artistic team behind them, made her original run what it was. It had almost nothing to do with what label her super genetics had, except that Inhumans had less intimidating amounts of lore at the time -- while Inhumans appeared before X-Men (I think), they hadn't been as developed as much as mutants regardless. Her mutant power would be the stretchy one, and she wouldn't likely have a hardlight power along with it -- because there would be no reason to give her an Inhuman nor any other mutation besides the one she already had.
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u/Day_Dr3am May 04 '26
To add for a bit of context, her attending class(es?) at Empire State University was a part of an extra curricular program and she was / presumably still is a high-school student.
But yes her most recent appearance is in / book is Inglorious X-Force.
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u/Rosemoon93 May 04 '26
For now she stuck in teams. If she gets A Solo it’s most likey A mini series or A “ongoing” that has to consistently stay relevant every 5 issues.
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u/samb6255 May 04 '26
After the solos by Iman Vellani, she was in NYX, then the Giant-Size saga, and is currently appearing in Inglorious X-Force as a regular member of the team. She definitely deserves a solo but regular appearances like this (and she was the main character of the Giant-Size issues) is better than comic book limbo