Ms. Marvel: The New Mutant #3 isn’t like any other Tuesday.
Ms. Marvel: The New Mutant #3
Iman Vellani and Sabir Pirzada (writers), Carlos Gómez and Adam Gorham (artists), Erick Arciniega (colorist), VC’s Joe Caramagna (letterer), and Tom Muller and Jay Bowen (designers), with Sara Pichelli and Matthew Wilson (cover artists)
Marvel Comics
October 25, 2023
As promised by the second issue, the third installment of this four-issue miniseries delivers a deep dive into Kamala Khan’s dreams, illustrated by Adam Gorham. Kamala surfs her subconscious with Dr. Surfer. Meanwhile, Orchis, operating in Carlos Gómez’s waking world, has implanted a Trojan Horse with a psychic bomb in Kamala’s brain as they attempt to learn Ms. Marvel’s secret identity and expose her connection to the X-Men.
In her dreams, Kamala encounters some ghosts of comics past, present, and future. First, she sees herself and her friends Bruno, Nakia, and Zoe on an unremarkable day in their past. Then, she meets a bigoted Captain America spewing hateful rhetoric about mutants.
In one panel, nightmare Steve Rogers says, “This path is meant for those who are dedicated to the triumph of good over evil, for those who fight in the name of righteousness!” In the next panel, dream Kamala responds, “I fight for what I believe is right! How does that make me the enemy?!” It’s a brief exchange, but it touches on a much larger conversation about who gets to do good. It’s not just about Kamala being a mutant but also about what being a mutant can stand for now that she – a Pakistani, South Asian, and Muslim American teenage girl with brown skin and superpowers – is one. Iman Vellani and Sabir Pirzada know that mutation can be used as a metaphor.
A mysterious figure in a hooded cloak answers Kamala on the next page, “You’re not the enemy, Ms. Marvel. You’re the competition.” The cloak falls away, finally, to reveal a humanoid representation of her yet-to-manifest mutation, glowing purple like her cinematic counterpart’s hard-light constructs. Except that it isn’t her mutation, it’s actually the Orchis virus. When it offers Kamala a new set of superpowers, Kamala narrates, “I was afraid that being a mutant meant I was no longer anything else. / But that doesn’t erase any other part of me. / It just makes me more… me.”
Kamala then summons the figments of her imagination, “Characters of fanfic past… / …ASSEMBLE!” On the last page, appearing to have won that battle, Kamala wakes up to the beginnings of another in Orchis’s war against mutantkind.
