Fallen Friend: The Death of Ms. Marvel

[deh_tommy]

And now, a special “post-issue” teaser MARVEL released on their website...

Comments

[numeronone]

"Alle Rein"? What's an "Alle Rien"???

[numeronone]

And who's "S. Marv"?

[deh_tommy]

I don’t know which cover’s worse, this one where the Muslim character is put in a Christ homage or the one where it looks like people are celebrating her demise. Either way none of the covers actually feature her friends or family.

[numeronone]

NTM the solicited cover which is entirely about Peter sobbing, up to and including the giant hovering head of Kamala giving him a withering look for making it all about him.

[deh_tommy]

That’s the default cover, the ones above are variants. It still doesn’t make sense because Peter is front and centre yet only shows up in the last two pages and I don’t think the Thing even shows up at all (at least not in a speaking role).

[super_fly]

They look like they were on their way to appear on a cover of Shazam and got lost

[tcampbell1000]

I've gone on before about tribute covers that are too busy imitating their forebears to have any sort of internal logic. The "Ms. Marvel in the arms of death" cover is an especially weird example.

You're right that it's grounded in Christian Renaissance art, but it's also a riff on the standard cover of The Death of Captain Marvel, (featuring the character Mar-Vell) which was highly lauded in its day for dealing with death in an honest, uncompromising way. Unlike virtually every other major superhero death in the entire history of comics, Mar-Vell's death has basically stuck. I can see the thinking behind trying to connect Ms. Marvel to it, since she's part of that same Watsonian-Marvel legacy.

But I'm not sure Kamala ever mentioned Mar-Vell once in her career, so invoking him now seems off. Plus, the original cover was appropriate because (1) Death was an actual character in the story and (2) it was a story primarily about Mar-Vell dealing with his last days and accepting his end. Neither of those things are true here: Kamala's death took place in another comic entirely, this is just a memorial service. (At least they didn't call it "Funeral for a Friend," though I know somebody was dying to.)

So yeah, you're right, the covers are 0 for 3. At least the contents of the issue are pretty much on target.

[deh_tommy]

You could argue there was some degrees of separation in that he was Kree and she was Inhuman, but chances are this is being done to do away with her Inhumanity anyway so there goes that connection. So so far the only cover that kind of works is this one.

The contents are fine, if a little expected, but it’d probably hit harder if this felt like a natural storytelling beat at all, wasn’t such a clearly corporate mandated shakeup to bring her in with the MCU and if it wasn’t surrounded by creepiness (like keeping her family in the dark or seemingly hiding her body, or to go out of the book for a second that scene in Amazing Spider-Man where Peter Parker seemingly stole her mask and sleeps next to it).

[cyberghostface]

If they had her in a crucified pose I guess I could see the issue but this in itself is a reference to the Captain Marvel cover and it's more to do with it being a famous work of art over the character being a Jesus stand in. It's also been homaged numerous times in the media.

http://www.comiccollectorlive.com/LiveData/StoryArc.aspx?id=569c572f-fdb0-4c36-bd21-e44ead5cf6a1

For example Magneto did it and he's Jewish.

[deh_tommy]

I didn’t like that story either, but I could make the argument that cover is at least is kind of fitting. Magneto and Scarlet Witch are parent and child, Jesus himself was Jewish, Wanda was hated and feared among her people, they follow a plan where he, her father, lets her die so a few days later she can rise again, defeat death and gather the lost souls of the dead into a sort of afterlife, she’s split into three pieces (and yeah I know it’s meant to be the maiden, the mother and the crone they were going for but bear with me here).

Of course the cover for Fallen Friend here was meant as an homage and not as a Jesus stand-in, but that in part is why I take offence because it’s just incredibly lazy (just swap her with Captain Marvel, never mind most of the other characters on the cover don’t even appear in the book let alone have any connection to her) and makes it fairly blatant they’re not going to even try to commit to the bit any longer than they have to. Or maybe I’m just overanalysing things.

[blues32]

Christ homage? It's an homage to 'The Death of Captain Marvel" cover. Basically trying to give this story any real sort of impact by leaching off of a good story's cover.

[deh_tommy]

Which in turn is a riff on Michaelangelo’s Pietà. tcampbell1000 above has a great write up on why it doesn’t really work as an homage to The Death of Captain Marvel either.

[onsokumaru]

I love how Cyclops doesn't have time for that bullshit.

[icon_uk]

Really? Have to say, I'm not liking how that was portrayed at all. If Logan can do the courtesy of being htere for Kamala's friends, you'd think Scott could too, given that yes she WAS important to him when he was a teenager.

[deh_tommy]

At the very least I hope he has the decency to tell her family first before they blow any money on a funeral.

[icon_uk]

Oh, is the intent there that he's having her resurrected?

[numeronone]

A lot of cynical speculation is that the Krakoan protocols will bring back Kamala as a mutant for some of that sweeeeeet sweet MCU synergy.

[tcampbell1000]

Yeah, that seems to be the direction all the hints are going. Just as Emma told him about Kamala's passing, she added, "I assume this changes your calculus on our previous conversation?" Unless Cyclops was vetoing the construction of the first Krakoan mosque, it seems like that "previous conversation" was about resurrection for non-mutants. So he'd feel it was inappropriate to mourn at the same time he was seeing to her return.

[shadowpsykie]

I mean Krakoa already brought back everyone via resurrection protocols by inserting a temporary mutation into the people. It’s possible that doing it again, would require full/permanent mutation.

[onsokumaru]

With the years, I'm getting more and more annoyed at the funeral issues of popular characters, featuring other popular characters who already died at least once.
Even if the mutants weren't planing to bring back Kamala, I'd be all for Scott to be like "nah, lets not waste time, I'll just wait until she comes back unlike whatshisname rock dude nobody cares about".

[deh_tommy]

Still quite the jerk move to call it “theatre” to his grieving friends, especially when they’re not in the know and Kamala’s not the only one in the procession being mourned.

[thehood]

Immortal Hulk pointed out that General Ross has had multiple funerals, which is why there were few people at the latest one.

[angelophile]

Yeah, she's totally getting resurrected in a few weeks as a mutant, isn't she?

[icon_uk]

I mean, they've revealed that you don't need to be a mutant for the Krakoan process to bring you back, they brought back Steve Rogers (And it just struck me that Sinister might have edited HIS genes too, which would be amusing) and committed to bringing back sick human kids after the AXE thing a while back, so she'd be eligible anyway.

[shakalooloo]

Nightcrawler took the DNA sample from Captain America while Sinister was still inside the Celestial, so the dastard was not involved in the process at all, luckily.

[cainofdreaming]

He wasn't really skulking around with an injection needle while the Five were doing their work on the others either. The corruption was built in to the whole resurrection process.

It's just that Hope's powers somehow corrected it away. And since it was Hope doing the resurrection for Cap, pre-being corrupted herself, it shouldn't be an issue.

[shakalooloo]

Wasn't it just that he'd tampered with all the vials of his own stored gene-samples?

[shadowpsykie]

didn't they have to put in a latent mutation in people in order to do so? maybe applying this again would "activate" the mutation?

A few weeks! Ha!

[stubbleupdate]

[stubbleupdate]

I liked the Doctor Strange page.

The Peter Parker page feels awful

[morallyambiguousscience]

I found the Doctor Strange page to be a lecture to the audience that makes no sense when they're immediately afterwards going to tease her coming back.

[deh_tommy]

I took it more as a lecture reminding himself not to get any crazy ideas.

[scorntx]

So Peter figures "your daughter was my friend" is an inappropriate thing for a random white guy to say, but "your daughter was my hero" is fine?
Maybe he should've started with the "she was my intern" thing, just to break the ice.


In all seriousness: Did Carol at least do something?
Don't know off-hand how she and Kamala last left things (last time I saw them interacting was when Carol was Caroling things up in Civil War II) but given she's supposed to have been Kamala's inspiration she presumably had some part in all this?

[cygnia]

Not shown here, but there is a scan of Carol attending as well.

[deh_tommy]

Ah fridge, I thought I had that on here already. Hang on.

EDIT: There we go.

[tcampbell1000]

I think "hero" implies an appropriate distance, whereas "friend" does not, when the deceased was maybe 18-19 and Peter is indeterminately thirtysomething.

Carol turned up at the end of G. Willow Wilson's story to take part in the memorial and give Kamala's friends (those who knew her secret) some support. And in the stories since Civil War II, she and Kamala had come to an understanding. Kamala still admired Carol, but in a more nuanced way, and got a lot less anxious about standing up to adult heroes in general.

[zachbeacon]

"Hi, my name is Peter Parker and I'm the weirdo who sleeps holding your daughter's mask"

[tcampbell1000]

Taken on its own merits, this is good as you'd expect from the talents involved, covering a wide range of Kamala's relationships from the personal to the professional. I might've preferred a bit more of the former, but for the most part they mingled well. Even Peter behaved himself, keeping his focus on the grieving instead of trying to make Kamala's loss part of his THE IMMENSE TRAGEDY OF MY LIFE AND LOVES narrative.

From what little I know about Muslim funerals and memorials, things are fairly simple and open, but a certain dignified reserve is expected. Sobbing is fine, wailing is not. But allowances are made for the young, and teenagers at funerals more generally tend to feel the loss a lot more uncontrollably.

The decision to keep Kamala's parents in the dark even after her death is...hard to defend, especially when her mom insists that Kamala's just missing in action. Kamala told them once and they handled it fine, they lost the memory, and then her father's illness changed her calculus on what she could burden them with. I guess they figured Kamala wouldn't want them to feel guilty for the danger she put herself in? Though in the long run, maybe her mom's handling it better than anyone, albeit for reasons she doesn't know. Maybe praying for a safe return, as if Kamala were a soldier overseas, is the right response to the death of a superhero.

I can see why the Cyclops page was cut from the printed book; the stories in it are about actual, relatable grieving, whereas Cyclops is practically Stan Lee, winking at the camera and saying "Wish you could read more Kamala after this? Well, it's NEVER THE END, true believer!"

Don't know if this syncs up with the Krakoan Five going on strike until a better government comes to their nation: if it does, then an increasingly lonely Cyclops might have to take more of a hand in national politics to get Kamala's case fast-tracked. I'd like to see that, because it's about time to retire this "Mutants Are Better Than People" theme song for good.

I have some hope that Marvel is not shortsighted enough to divorce Kamala from her faith, which almost everyone would agree is the most remarkable single thing about her. But I'm less confident in their ability to do right by her relationships after the way things went in Amazing Spider-Man...or to see the continuity between those relationships and that faith. Whether we as readers will have cause to mourn those ties, and see this issue as the final closure on some of them, is as yet unknown.

[deh_tommy]

Well with yesterday’s Immortal X-Men firmly calling out many of the messed up implications of the Krakoan era thus far and since this is clearly being done for corporate synergy with the MCU where she’s still unabashedly and unashamedly Muslim, I doubt they’ll get rid of her faith anytime soon.

Holy crap, they don’t know Kamala is Ms. Marvel? So Peter really did just nick her mask off her? I thought maybe they gave it to him because he was the last person she was with or something, but what the fudge? Where’s her body being kept?

[cyberghostface]

I don't see Marvel giving her any crisis of faith period, there would be too much backlash and as you said it was one of her main selling points.

[lbd_nytetrayn]

Okay, amidst all the cynicism surrounding her being brought back by Krakoa as a mutant, I think I forgot about Cyclops' relation to her (though I thought it was a Cyclops from a parallel timeline), and that honestly feels like the missing piece to me.

Is it stupid? Yeah, kinda. But at least it's stupid in a way that makes logical sense (well, some of it), and I can at least respect that.

[leahandillyana]

Why is Kamala dead?

[lizard_of_aus]

An unceremonious scene in a Spider-Man issue where she sacrificed herself to save Peter.

[deh_tommy]

“An unceremonious scene”

HEYOOOOOOOOO

[deh_tommy]

Do you want the Watsonian explanation or the Doylist explanation?

The Watsonian explanation is that an old enemy of Spider-Man, the Scribble Man, returned to torment him and branded Mary Jane as a sacrifice. If he can stab and kill her with his ritual dagger, he can ascend to godhood and take over the world. Kamala Khan was working as an intern at Oscorp to make sure Norman Osborne truly wasn’t evil anymore. To make a needlessly long story short, the Scribble Man finally made his move to kill MJ, so Kamala shapeshifted into her and Scribble Man stabbed her instead, ruining the ritual and defeating him for good (for now) because said ritual wouldn’t work with stabbing anyone else.

The Doylist explanation is speculated to be to boost sales for Ms. Marvel, drum up excitement for her new film when she inevitably comes back a few months down the line (Fall of X notably has this “classified” book coming in November) and have her get resurrected as a mutant by the X-Men with a new set of powers to bring her more in line with how she’s portrayed in the MCU.

[zachbeacon]

I know a lot of people are (rightfully) upset with Peter and Scott here but I'm not too thrilled with Red Dagger either.

The line about not remembering their last conversation would be fine in a vacuum. Relatable even.

But I'm pretty sure the last time I saw them on-panel together was during one of those Voices stories and he was being a massive a-hole.

[deh_tommy]

“The last time we met, I basically called her a coward and a self-hating Pakistani because she didn’t want to spontaneously abandon her normal life and connections in New Jersey. Funny, it didn’t seem important then.”

In all seriousness, I could be wrong, but I think that was a prequel story? I believe chronologically speaking the last time they met was in Love Unlimited.

[cyberghostface]

Even more gross when you consider how awful Pakistan is for women.

https://organiser.org/2023/02/01/106919/world/pakistan-is-the-second-worst-country-when-it-comes-to-discrimantion-against-women-human-rights-watch-report/