Marvel really wants me to buy Ms. Marvel #1

This just made my day!

A reader just pointed out that the cover to Ms. Marvel by Sara Pichelli seems to homage the cover of Supergirl #1 by Gary Frank from 1996.

DC Women Kicking Ass

Thank you so much Sara Pichelli for paying homage to my favourite Supergirl cover. I don’t think anyone’s done an homage to this before! 17 years on and it is still such an arresting visual. I love the Ms. Marvel version which shows a little more of Kamala Khan’s face than the original showed of Linda Danvers. The logo is kind of terrible and the pink clashes with the cover image, but there is some nice symmetry between the lightning bolt and the “S” in Ms.

Just as Linda Danvers was an ordinary human girl who idolized Supergirl, the new Ms. Marvel is a teenage fan of Carol Danvers who gains superpowers and is inspired to adopt the mantle of her hero:

A new hero comes to the Marvel Universe next year with her own all-new solo title. Following the epic events of INFINITY, a 16-year-old Muslim girl from New Jersey discovers extraordinary body-morphing powers and follows in the footsteps of her idol, Captain Marvel, to become the new Ms. Marvel.

Marvel.com: Who is the new Ms. Marvel, and what makes her different?

G. Willow Wilson: The Ms. Marvel mantle has passed to Kamala Khan, a high school student from Jersey City who struggles to reconcile being an American teenager with the conservative customs of her Pakistani Muslim family. So in a sense, she has a “dual identity” before she even puts on a super hero costume. 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.

This makes her tough and vulnerable at the same time. When you try to straddle two worlds, one of the first things you learn is that instead of defending good people from bad people, you have to spend a lot of time defending good people from each other. It’s both illuminating and emotionally brutal. That’s what makes this book different.

Read more about the new Ms. Marvel, Kamala Khan, at the All New Marvel NOW! Q&A with author G. Willow Wilson.