Comic book superheroes may be good at fighting supervillains intent on world domination and preventing alien invasions of planet Earth, but they also leave a fair amount of destruction in their wake. And while mad scientists and artificial intelligences running amok may be easy to defeat, helping people in their everyday lives with the more human evils that they face tend to fall outside the domain of most superheroes.
A lot of the above has to do with the fact that comic book superheroes aren’t real, and the same can be said of the Doctor Dooms, Ultrons and Krull shapeshifters of their world. Racism, sexism, senseless violence, climate change, and a host of other issues, on the other hand, do exist in the real world, and even the collective geniuses of Tony Stark, Bruce Banner and Reed Richards are unable to cure those ills even if they were capable of trying.
Just as hate crimes and climate change have become more important to a new generation of Americans, the same holds true for a new generation of comic book superheroes as well. Since the election of Barack Obama in 2008 – an historic event that redefined the image of a United States President – the Marvel Universe has opened its ranks to a more diverse group of superheroes that reflect the outlooks of this new generation and are redefining the concept of superheroes in the process.
Although many of these new creations initially assumed the moniker of such established characters as Spider-Man, Ms. Marvel, the Hulk and Iron Man, they quickly crafted their own personas and likewise developed their own sets of beliefs and world views. In 2016, a small group of them even banded together to form an alternative superhero team to the more mainstream Avengers, calling themselves Champions and fighting for a world that they believed was still in need of heroes.
“We see it all around us more and more every day,” the new Ms. Marvel declared at the end of the first issue of the 2016 Champions comic book series. “People with power punching down, taking lives when they don’t have to. Meeting unarmed perps, even unarmed kids, with lethal firepower. That’s the world we’re inheriting, where violence does all the talking. We’re in a war for a better tomorrow. Join us. Help us win the hard way – the right way – not with hate, not with retribution, but with wisdom and hope. Help us become Champions.”
It is Kamala Khan (Ms. Marvel) and Miles Morales (Spider-Man) who most epitomize this new generation of superheroes. Conceived in response to Barack Obama becoming the first African American President and created in 2011 by writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Sara Pichelli, the Afro-Latino Morales followed in the footsteps of Marvel’s biggest superhero in an alternate universe where the original Peter Parker had died at the hands of the Green Goblin.
The favorable reception of the character resulted in Miles Morales being brought into Marvel’s primary universe after the events of the publisher’s Secret Wars and Battleworld storylines. The popularity of Morales then increased exponentially when he became the main feature of the 2018 animated film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which was not only a critical and commercial success but an Academy Award-winning motion picture as well.
Kamala Khan, meanwhile, is a Pakistani American teenager living in New Jersey who discovers that she has shapeshifting superpowers, and was created by editors Sana Amanat and Stephen Wacker, writer G. Willow Wilson, and artists Adrian Alphona and Jamie McKelvie. The first Muslin character to ever star in their own Marvel comic book series when Ms. Marvel premiered in 2014, Khan adopted her superhero moniker as tribute to personal hero Carol Danvers, who by then was known as Captain Marvel.
Kamala Khan not only connected with comic book readers across the country but her youth, ethnicity and gender also made her the perfect “poster superhero” of the late 2010s, a time period when immigrants and the concept of diversity was often under fire from the political far right. Along with Miles Morales, this new Ms. Marvel quickly became the face of a new generation and the de facto leader of the Champions as well.
Rounding out the Champions’ roster is Amadeus Cho, a nineteen-year-old Korean American genius who succeeded Bruce Banner as the Hulk before crafting a new persona as Braun; Sam Alexander, a younger version of the intergalactic Nova; and Viv Vision, the fabricated daughter of the synthezoid Vision. The team has expanded since their debut to include Riri Williams, an African American teenager who built her own Iron Man suit and goes by the name Iron Heart, and Nadia van Dyne, another teenage genius better known as the Wasp.
While many issues of the Champions comic book series are traditional comic book narratives, other storylines depict the realities of the time period and Kamala Khan’s desire for the group to be an alternate type of superhero team. In the third issue of the series, for instance, the Champions travel to the fictional Asian country of Sharzad where a group of militant fundamentalists are killing women and young girls who do not conform to more conservative traditions.
“They believe that women are to be shamed, to be hidden away, given no access to medical care or education,” it is explained. “To be stripped of their human rights. Recently, it’s been getting worse. Young girls have been murdered in the streets for the ‘crime’ of carrying a schoolbook or being seen without a burqa.”
Malala Yousafzai – the youngest person to ever win a Nobel Peace Prize – served as an inspiration for the storyline. Yousafzai became a prominent activist for the education rights of women in the mid-2010s after having been raised in a small Pakistani village where young girls were often banned from attending school. After a failed assassination attempt, Malala Yousafzai became arguably “the most famous teenager in the world” and the threat of gender apartheid within Muslim countries received international media attention as a result.
A few issues later, meanwhile, the Champions travel to the fictional Daly County, where hate crimes have drastically increased since the election of a new local sheriff. They are joined by Gwenpool, another recent addition to the Marvel Universe who migrated from our own real world into the world of comic books. The belief that she now resides in a fictional universe leads Gwenpool to see Skrull shapeshifting aliens when there are only teenagers spray painting racial epitaphs on the homes of immigrants, and supervillain organizations like Hydra when it is every-day human beings spreading hate and causing destruction in the community.
“Evil is not exclusive to supervillains, aliens, secret societies and monsters,” Ms. Marvel tries to explain. “Sometimes – as we are sorely learning – problems are complex. Sometimes, there’s just not anything to hit.”
That complexity is further exemplified in the multi-arc “Northern Lights” narrative. The supervillain Master of the Universe has established a base of operation in northern Canada and is working on repairing melting glaciers and rebalancing Earth’s temperatures in an attempt to halt the global climate change threatening the planet. While his intentions may be good and even praise-worthy, however, his reasons are another matter altogether.
“The ‘catch’ is that I will rule this planet at some point in the future,” the self-proclaimed Master explains. “But the only way I can do that is to make sure there is a planet for me to rule.” He further adds that his timetable for world domination is hundreds of years in the future, raising the dilemma of whether the Champions should support his current efforts or take action against them since they are a part of an evil plan to ultimately enslave the planet.
Just like in the real world, there are no easy answers in the Champions comic book series, but that doesn’t stop the young group of superheroes from trying to find solutions nonetheless. More importantly, the likes of Kamala Khan, Miles Morales and Amadeus Cho believe that while racism, sexism, senseless violence, climate change, and a host of other issues may not involve supervillains, that does not mean that they fall outside their purview as superheroes.
“We’re not here to play cops and robbers,” Ms. Marvel tells the others. “We’re a movement for change. The Champions mean nothing unless people believe along with us.” For a new generation of Americans – and older generations as well – the fictional Champions are indeed something to believe in, especially when the real world itself is in need of heroes of its own.
Anthony Letizia