If you’re an avid follower of Marvel Comics, you’ll likely recall last year’s Ms. Marvel debacle.
In May of 2023, Marvel Comics announced that they’d be killing off the character in an issue of The Amazing Spider-Man - news that didn’t exactly go down well with fans.
It was teased to be the “most shocking” issue published in 50 years. True to their word, Kamala Khan was stabbed in the back whilst disguised as Mary Jane.
There’s always a way for our doomed heroes to return within the world of Marvel Comics but fans were displeased that Kamala was killed outside of her own mainline series, feeling that the death was rushed.
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This storyline also fell during AAPI Heritage Month and yet here was a character who provided many readers with a sense of representation being killed off.
Thankfully, a few months later in July, Ms. Marvel returned as a member of the X-Men in the four-issue series Ms. Marvel: The New Mutant.
This allowed the character to more closely resemble the MCU’s Ms. Marvel who was also teased to have mutant powers.
In fact, The New Mutant series was written by Ms. Marvel herself, Iman Vellani with art by Carlos Gómez and Adam Gorham.
The MCU’s Ms. Marvel last appeared in the vastly underrated The Marvels. Take a look at the film in action below.
All these months later, it’s now been revealed why Marvel Comics decided to kill Ms. Marvel off in the first place - and it is indeed related to her powers.
Cody Ziglar, the writer of Miles Morales: Spider-Man, appeared on the Amazing Spider-Talk to talk about the work of his successor.
“It was funny watching when the whole Kamala stuff was going down,” he said. “[Zeb Wells] had told me months before what the plan was, which was, [Kevin] Feige was like, ‘Hey, I don’t do this very often, but can you please just like do this to make things in line with [the MCU] because we have some stuff we want to do with Kamala.’”
Following the interview, Marvel Studios denied Feige’s involvement, telling Gizmodo, “The decision to make Kamala a mutant character - a focus she’ll continue as part of the X-Men line’s 2024 relaunch, From the Ashes - [was] as an explicitly editorial decision, one in the making well before the events of Amazing Spider-Man #26.”
Either way, it’s clear that regardless of whether Feige was involved or not, the evolution of Kamala’s powers has always been at the heart of this decision.