ESSAY: The Day Kamala Khan Died

Panel from Amazing Spider-Man 26 depicting Peter Parker holding Kamala Khan in his arms

Fifty years ago, Gwen Stacy died.

Cover of Amazing Spider-Man #121 by artist John Romita Sr. depicting Spider-Man and supporting characters

Flung from a bridge during a fight between Green Goblin and Spider-Man, her death was, as advertised on the cover of Amazing Spider-Man #121, a major turning point for American superhero comics. It marked the end of the Silver Age of comic books and a turn towards more mature themes in the genre. It’s also one of the foremost examples of fridging. Taken from “Women in Refrigerators,” a term coined by Gail Simone in 1999, fridging occurs when a woman is killed in order to advance a man’s story, such as when Green Lantern Kyle Rayner’s girlfriend Alexandra DeWitt was murdered and stuffed in a refrigerator.

Today, Kamala Khan is dead.

Cover of Amazing Spider-Man #26 by artist John Romita Jr. depicting Spider-Man and supporting characters

Her death, as spoiled by Entertainment Weekly following leaks on social media of Amazing Spider-Man #26, marks the anniversary of “The Night Gwen Stacy Died.” While it may yet have broader implications for the genre, right now it is just another example of fridging, this time with the added dimensions of race and religion absent from the earlier deaths of Stacy and DeWitt, both white women. Whether the decision of the creative team or editorial, Marvel has chosen to kill a Muslim woman of color–the first to lead her own ongoing title, which has not been published in years–in order to advance a man’s story. And they did it during Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, less than a year after the South Asian American teenager debuted in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Superheroes do not stay dead. That is not the point. It might have been a point if Kamala had died in Ms. Marvel, surrounded by the friends and family introduced in that title in the decade since she first appeared in it in 2014, or Champions, surrounded by teammates. Instead, she dies in a book in which she barely appeared, without the foreshadowing afforded to Mary Jane Watson, and the subsequent one-shot dedicated to mourning her, Fallen Friend: The Death of Ms. Marvel #1 (an issue number making clear just how much of a cash grab this grotesque stunt is), literally centers Peter Parker on its cover.

There is speculation that they’re killing her in order to make her a mutant. I cannot imagine that writers, artists, and editors who tell stories about people bitten by radioactive spiders cannot imagine a different, better way of retconning an origin story. They could have found a way to honor that story like the streaming series on Disney+ did. What writer Zeb Wells, artist John Romita Jr., and editor Nick Lowe–all white men–chose to do instead is not only a creatively bankrupt gimmick worse than “The Death of Superman” but also sexist and racist. This was a choice for each of them, even if it was a plot point mandated from above, because they decided to put their names on it despite any objections they may have had. Moreover, even if the end result is a mutant metaphor that better represents people like Kamala Khan, they will never be able to retcon the violence preceding it.

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4 thoughts on “ESSAY: The Day Kamala Khan Died

  1. Maybe it’s a blow for equality that a minority superhero can, for the first time, get killed off for cheap angst and then get resurrected in a new #1 six months later?

  2. WOW
    Thank you SO much for the SPOILER HEADLINE
    I read an RSS Feed and this just BLEW THAT AWAY
    Thank you SO much

    1. Having read the issue in question, finding out here is actually a better presentation of the story beat than the one they did in the comic.

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