Let's Talk About... The Latest Victim of Cinematic Universe Synergy at Marvel Comics.

For those who haven’t somehow heard yet, there are going to be spoilers for Amazing Spider-Man issue 26, coming out May 31st. Please do not read further if you wish to remain unspoiled.

…are they gone? Cool.

Marvel Comics seems to have made the first step in a process to completely rewrite Kamala Khan into a character closer to her Marvel Cinematic Universe incarnation.

I’m sure you’ve heard the comparison to the Women in Fridges trope. Yes, it’s completely cliche to refer to killing a female character as “fridging” them without more evidence that the death was simply done to further the plot or develop the male character. After all, some female characters have died without being “fridged,” and there have been some male characters “fridged” to actually further along a female character’s development. Perhaps the most famous of these is Terry Long of DC Comics.

This is Terry Long. He married Donna Troy of the Teen Titans and was a massive creep to every woman on the team, despite being at least 10 years older than all of them.

And now he’s dead. Unforutnately, his kid with Donna also died, because John Byrne is horrible.

However, cliches are cliche for a reason. And now, Kamala Khan joins the ranks of “women who have died to cause Peter Parker pain.” And by this point, there’s probably a good dozen of them. There will likely be an article on that later. While all we have are a few teaser pages of the comic and some badly-focused bootleg comic images, it’s rather easy to tell what has happened. 

Throughout the current Zeb Wells’s run of Amazing Spider-Man, Mary Jane Watson has been continually set up for death. She had a misadventure in another reality for four years, where she became romantically involved with a gentleman named Paul, and enraged a mystically empowered maniac named Rabin by repeatedly kicking him in the proverbial (and possibly literal) balls the whole while. Marvel also repeatedly teased MJ’s death with teaser pages and callouts: Peter web-swinging in front of George Washington Bridge, where Gwen died. Perhaps the worst of them all was the teaser cover for Amazing Spider-Man issue 26, where a title on the page calls itself the most shocking issue in 50 years!

Interestingly, Gwen Stacy died 50 years ago.

You can see where fans would get “confused.”

On May 16th, some goons on the infamous internet website 4Chan posted images that showed the final pages of Amazing Spider-Man #26 two weeks ahead of time (it may have been posted on Reddit first, but it’s hard to trace these things sometimes). The internet exploded.

Marvel initially claimed this was fake. Then claimed fans shouldn’t find spoilers online. Then spoiled everyone three hours later. Class act.

Rather than Mary Jane dying, as the current run of Amazing Spider-Man has been hinting at so much throughout the last several issues, Kamala Khan dies. Likely, she will die in place of Mary Jane or in place of Peter himself. Caught in a proverbial corner, Marvel released the hidden cover for Fallen Friend, a one-shot comic teased to be about the person who died in these pages of Amazing Spider-Man #26.

FALLEN THAT-PERSON-I-WORKED-WITH: PETER IS SAD. THIS SUMMER FROM MARVEL!

Pissed-off fans began to ask many questions, some of them at once:

-Why is she being killed off just before starring in a major motion picture?
-Why is she being killed off in a Spider-Man comic?
-Why is she being killed off despite being only on 12 pages of the entire run beforehand?
-Why is this not in her own comic?
-Why is this all focusing on how sad Peter is?
-Why is Wolverine there and not Cyclops, since she’s his childhood friend?
-Where are the Champions, her team?
-Where are Kamala’s friends and family?

Well, dear readers, I may need a tinfoil hat after this is done…but I’ve got a theory. This is literally to push Kamala Khan into being a mutant, to make her closer to the incarnation we’ll see on the small and big screen in the MCU.

Let me explain.

Amazing Spider-Man, no matter how angry the fans get at the comic or the writing on the book, is consistently Marvel’s best-selling comic, aside from the sales bumps seen for those fancy #1 issues. While actual numbers are hard to come by these days (perhaps because the comics industry is afraid of showing off how small their sales numbers are), Amazing Spider-Man issue 23 ranked 4th and 17th in the month of April 2023.

The reason it’s both is because Disney is currently using Marvel to push 100 years of Disney variant covers, which are selling like crack pancakes. Crackcakes. Combine these unprinted numbers, and Marvel has the best-selling comic of April 2023 by a country mile.

Similarly, Amazing Spider-Man issue 22 hit ranks 10 and 22 the prior month of March, thanks again to a variant cover offer. Keanu Reeves’s much-hyped BRZRKR took most of the ranks above 10, but again, Marvel has one of the best-selling modern comics with Amazing Spider-Man. Logically, this means that the death of Kamala Khan is going to be seen by most of the current fans who read any Marvel comic. Those who miss the comic itself will find out from the marketing and in-house ads in the other Marvel comics, and the constant key-jingling of a character’s death and the promise of the comic becoming extra-valuable on the secondary market will increase sales.

And while we’re talking about sales, guess what also sells well?

#1 issues and major event comics, which means that Marvel’s own Fallen Friend will likely be a top seller for the month of June. Since it’s a one-shot issue, we will also likely see people clamor to grab the issue that has Spider-Man mourning this girl he hung out with a few times, with almost no one she knows on the cover. Combine a few variant covers, and Marvel is going to make a mint with this comic.

And thanks to an accidental spoiler from Previews World? We know what step three is now, happening in August 2023.

The page has “magically” become hidden away once more, but trusty Google can still find it.

Ok, so “bringing a character back from the dead” is literally the most predictable thing in comics since DC and Superman completely broke the entire concept of death being permanent back in the 90s.

However, it should be stated that this is possibly the fastest any comic character has been brought back from the dead if you don’t count being revived in the same story. Spider-Man’s death in The Other, for example, doesn’t count in this case since he was revived and revitalized during the same storyline. What we don’t have any additional information on is what will happen in this series…but let me posit a few guesses.

Guess 1: Kamala Khan will be revived on Krakoa.

Kind of a no-brainer, I admit. The recent Marvel event A.X.E.: Judgment Day revealed that the shortcut Krakoa has can revive literally anyone, not just mutants. It’s very likely that Cyclops, who has been repeatedly established to consider her a childhood friend, will be arguing for her revival. 

Guess 2: Kamala Khan’s revival will alter her powers.

Since we’re working with what is most likely some MCU synergy the likes we’ve not seen since the Guardians of the Galaxy got updated to match their movie incarnations, Kamala Khan is very likely going to wind up with glowy energy powers to match her live-action incarnation. If we go with the Krakoa resurrection, the fact that Kamala is an Inhuman will wind up causing a distortion of her powers or…

Guess 3: Kamala Khan’s resurrection will bring her back as a Mutant.

Come on, we all saw this coming.

Marvel has been slowly pushing away the Inhumans for the past several years now, likely as some counter-reaction to Ike Perlmutter’s insane obsession with pushing the Inhumans before Disney absorbed Fox into the media monstrosity. We’ve had Black Bolt show up in the recent Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, but his TV show on ABC has been struck from the Cinematic Universe canon entirely. The recent attempts to push the Inhumans in the place of the Fantastic Four as core structures of the Marvel Universe also got quietly smothered as the Fantastic Four returned in Dan Slott’s run on the book.

Now that the Inhumans are solidly back in their proverbial corner of the comic universe, it makes perfect sense (in the marketing sense) to import the most successful recent Inhuman to something more universally recognized. After all, people are more familiar with mutants over the last two decades than “those guys who get superpowers from inhaling gasses from crystals and have a slave race on the Moon we don’t like to talk about.”

Yeah, the Inhumans are a whole weird thing.

Is it a good idea?

No, not really…but not for the reasons you would think.

Making a character feel more like their adapted counterpart is a long-standing tradition for comic books. Gotham City became decidedly darker and more gothic after Tim Burton’s Batman movies. Mr. Freeze received a massive amount of character depth after his premiere in Batman: The Animated Series. Oh, and they also took Harley Quinn right from the same cartoon and added her to the comics incredibly quick.

Superman learned to fly from his cartoon shorts in the 40s. Not satisfied with that, Superman imported the incredibly popular Jimmy Olsen from his radio show and TV series The Adventures of Superman in the 50s, as well as the entire concept of Kryptonite.

The X-Men would get leather outfits inspired by their original movie trilogy costumes, while Spider-Man would go through a bizarre biological evolution to gain organic web-shooting capabilities for a time. Tony Stark also went from a mostly flat well-meaning heroic failure into a snarky and sarcastic charming ball of smarm thanks to Robert Downey Jr. In fact, the comics even purposely had Tony Stark erase some of his memories to round off some of his more recent horrible decisions and reboot his personality to something akin to Robert Downey Jr.

James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy would overwrite the existing team of characters in a largely lateral move at best, vastly altering decades of characterization to make new readers to the comics more familiar with them.

The problem is most of these were either changes the fans generally approved of, or were changes that could be smoothed over after a time. The Guardians being changed is perhaps the most contentious, seeing how it altered their characters beyond what they were at the time, mere months before the movie came out. Sales of the books have made Marvel look the other way, however, and it’s been long enough that newer fans are often shocked to see an incarnation existing prior to the movies. Otherwise, these retcons and alterations felt like natural additions to the universe.

Kamala Khan has been around for only a decade, a short time compared to most of these characters. Her being an Inhuman is only a smaller part of her character, as she has mostly stayed in New Jersey and on smaller teams. This has helped her avoid most of the chaos and confusion that often surrounds the larger Avengers or Inhuman stories. However, until her appearance in the streaming live-action series Ms. Marvel, Kamala has always been an Inhuman.

Square Enix’s ill-fated games-as-a-service Marvel’s Avengers, where Kamala was a heavy plot-focused character?

Avengers Assemble? Marvel Future Avengers? Spidey and His Amazing Friends? Marvel Rising? Lego Marvel Super Heroes 2? Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order?

Every single time, she has been an Inhuman. Most times, the rest of the Inhumans aren’t mentioned or dealt with. Its hand waived as just another type of super-powered person, much like a mutant. In some ways, this isolates her from the other heroes of Marvel in these adaptations and makes her an outsider, since she isn’t in the same easy category as “science experiment gone wrong” or “born with these powers.” It’s another way kids can identify with a hero and find something of themselves in Kamala. This has, in some ways, helped fans make a stronger connection with her than with any recent Marvel hero.

Aside from maybe Miles Morales, who hits all the “cool kid hero” tropes without coming off as annoying. His recent movie helped.

In the long run, this likely won’t affect the sales of Kamala’s comic. Fans of the MCU will come in after The Marvels hits theaters, buy an issue or two, and then leave again because comics are incredibly overpriced and built for a market that hasn’t been relevant for over three decades. Die-hard fans are still going to buy her comic because comic fans will scream and rage over decisions made by editorial, only to ask for another issue the next month because they have to get their fix. Marvel editorial has even said they aim for this with some books since rage-purchasing is still purchasing.

Especially with Amazing Spider-Man.

And if this does somehow backfire in their faces, they can just ask Dan Slott to write an issue where Professor Xavier shows up to call Kamala Khan out for running around in Mutantface. There really isn’t a way they’ll lose this.

Dan Slott’s Fantastic Four run had several good ideas, like Ben Grimm and Alicia Masters getting married. This was not one of those good ideas.

Congratulations, Marvel. You found a way to make a win-win scenario. It just cost the foundation of your breakout character who speaks to a whole new audience, is incredibly popular with fans outside of comics, and just might convince some of them that she’s dead forever, and they won’t come back.

At least it won’t confuse the one person who wanders into a comic shop after seeing The Marvels and asks for an issue of Ms. Marvel.

Unless they pick up any of her comics prior to August 2023.

Or any of the video games starring her.

I’m sure it’ll work out.