Female Muslim superhero unveiled

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s… a Muslim girl superhero? That’s right. The newest cape-draped, superpower-wielding member of the Marvel Comics team is Kamala Khan, a 16-year-old Muslim girl living in Jersey City, New Jersey, who finds out she is a shapeshifter and can take on the world. She will be unveiled in February, Marvel announced this week, as the lead character in a new series meant to boost the company’s diversity.

The character of Khan will have a Pakistani family and the codename Ms. Marvel. That name, Marvel said in a press release, is borrowed from her idol Carol Danvers, a blond, blue-eyed superhero from the Air Force who left the title behind to become Captain Danvers.

Khan, Marvel’s first-ever Muslim leading character, will find that like most teenagers, she has to walk a fine line between saving the universe and not upsetting her parents.

“Kamala has all of her opportunities in front of her and she is loaded with potential, but her parents’ high expectations come with tons of pressure,” Marvel said in a press release. “When Kamala gets powers that give her the opportunity to be just like her idol, Captain Marvel, it challenges the very core of her conservative values.”

The series writer, G. Woodrow Wilson, is a convert to Islam herself, and she explains Khan’s complexities on the Marvel website.

“In a sense, she has a ‘dual identity’ before she even puts on a superhero costume,” Wilson explains on the site. “Like a lot of children of immigrants, she feels torn between two worlds: the family she loves, but which drives her crazy, and her peers, who don’t really understand what her home life is like.”

No word yet on whether or not Marvel plans to release a Jewish superhero, or if Khan’s arsenal of powers are put to use solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.