Warning: Spoilers for Ms. Marvel: The New Mutant #4!Fans of Kamala Khan can rest assured that, for now at least, Marvel won’t be tampering with who Ms. Marvel is. When the revelation first emerged that Earth-616’s Ms. Marvel would return from the dead with a new mutant gene—similar to how her MCU character onscreen is a mutant rather than an Inhuman—the bulk of die-hard fans reacted with outrage. There was a concern that Marvel would drastically retcon Ms. Marvel’s character to fit her MCU characterization.
Thankfully, Marvel makes it clear that fans have nothing to worry about in Ms. Marvel: The New Mutant #4 by Iman Vellani, Sabir Pirzada, Adam Gorham, Carlos Gomez, Erick Arciniega, VC’s Joe Caramagna, Tom Muller, and Jay Bowen. The series has served as a means to assimilate Kamala Khan into both the X-Men and the overall mutant community as she learns what it means to be a mutant.
In that regard, the series has seemed like a meta way to communicate directly to those readers concerned about the direction Kamala’s character is going. The limited series ends in arguably the most meta fashion by reassuring fans that Marvel will not be retconning her powers anytime soon.
Ms. Marvel Won’t Be Retconned – Yet
The bulk of this series has alluded to Kamala’s mutant gene possibly one day giving her a new power, or at least offering the potential of granting her greater power. The anti-mutant organization Orchis tries to capitalize on this knowledge with a deadly Trojan horse that backfires when Ms. Marvel refuses to change herself, and she has a similar discussion with Emma Frost in this issue. While Marvel still hasn’t unveiled Kamala’s new mutant power, Emma tells her that when she was hit with the Terrigen Mist that gave her Inhuman powers, it severed the branch that would have allowed her mutant power to blossom.
Her resurrection at the Hellfire Gala made it possible for this mutant power to manifest again. Emma tells her it will be Kamala’s choice if she either wants her mutant ability to replace her Inhuman powers, or if she wants to use the mutant powers alongside her Inhuman ones. Kamala says that if her mutant powers activate, then she’ll deal with it, but right now, she doesn’t want to risk erasing any part of who she is. In a series that has been straightforward about acknowledging what Ms. Marvel symbolizes as a character, this feels like an overt way to tell readers that Marvel is not using her death to retcon her powers to be more in line with the MCU version.
At Her Core, Ms. Marvel is Still Ms. Marvel
Time will tell if Marvel sticks to its word on this one, but the series has gone out of its way to illustrate that Ms. Marvel’s powers don’t define who she is. Everyone had varying opinions on Marvel trying to reflect Kamala’s MCU character in her comics character, and the reaction to her death and how it played a factor caused even more vitriol. However, this series tried its best to focus on the themes that make up the character’s core, themes like identity. Those themes make up who Ms. Marvel is and have nothing to do with her powers. Regardless of where Marvel goes with that character in relation to her MCU counterpart, as Kamala says herself at the end of this series, “I’ll always be Ms. Marvel.”
