Tenmar said:
Also a side note. Her powers? Hey nothing to knock at but honestly she could be a super hero of her own instead of taking up the mantle of Ms.Marvel. Especially when said powers of this upcoming character has no relation or even match that of the original Ms.Marvel. May not have to be a clone but still it's like they are just using a brand name to get people to buy while also getting good rapport for being politically correct(I really couldn't find another word to describe the reason why a person's race should be the selling point as a superhero). Hope that fault lies on the marketing department and not the team that got to recreate Ms.Marvel.
EDIT: Anyone else notice that the father's hands were closer in size to that of Ms.Marvel using her body morphing ability? Hell put him in that outfit and Mr.Marvel away
Pretty much my thoughts, it's another stunt. The comic industry realized a while ago that ethnicity swapping was a good way to get attention and short term sales, the fact that the industry is heavily left wing in it's outlook also helps. Right now it seems their plan is to periodically mine the publicity by liberalizing one hero or another for attention. Sort of a variation of the comic culture in the 1990s where they found every excuse to put a #1 on something to try and sucker in collectors, albeit this can't be as heavily saturated for the moment.
For the most part they are using the same gimmick as DC of trying to transfer a well known name to a character that isn't the character that defined the name. In this case Carol Danvers is still around as "Captain Marvel", so they really aren't rebooting anything. It's similar to DC's stunt about how they were going to turn a well known "Iconic" DC character gay, they chose Green Lantern, but it was the original Alan Scott lantern as opposed to any of the iconic characters that made that hero popular. A "major hero going gay" in name only so to speak.
That said I think the intent here is simply to mine money and press by doing something a lot of people will find fairly offensive and ridiculous, while at the same time trying to make some kind of left wing message about tolerance which misses the point of the issues to begin with. As someone pointed out, Muslim culture as it applies to the current tensions is such that you could never have a Muslim MS. Marvel since she would by definition be violating her Muslim role as a woman (someone else pointed this out). The solution to this is to have her be Muslim in name only and try and change opinions based on that version of things. To be honest if she's Americanized enough it might not be a big deal, assuming she assimilated into society to the point where her religious convictions are something you'd never notice unless she told you, with her investing a fairly trivial amount of time and effort on them, much like most Christians who you would never know were Christian unless they told you or showed a cross. At which point it simply becomes more
of a factoid than anything that defines the character. Sort of like how Ben Grimm (The Thing) is apparently Jewish, Stan Lee apparently said so and showed off some artwork of him wearing the scarf and beanie at one point (apologies I can't spell the proper names off the top of my head, so I'm being basically descriptive). Various other characters, especially those with oriental backrounds, rarely have faith come into play. Danny Rand (Iron Fist) spent years in a monastery as did Doctor Strange, and really Taoism/Zen/Buddhism or whatever tradition they were trained under rarely comes up.... so at the end of the day we're pretty much getting a dusky skinned character under the name Ms. Marvel who will probably be a poster child for Muslim assimilation into society, which is fine overall actually.
I'll also be honest in saying that it wouldn't surprise me if a big part of this is also wanting to get another Muslim girl out there after the way they really messed up Dust. I won't go into a huge tirade (though you can probably look it up easily enough). To put it bluntly in setting her up (saying she was a Sunni, etc...) the writers really know enough about Muslims to do it right. To put it into perspective the Shiites are more of the orthodox factions, while the Sunnis were the more progressive faction in the region, which is why we backed Saddam originally to try and counterbalance Iran and keep the Shiite population in check before he sold out to the USSR to go conquering. They seemed to want her to be Sunni to make a leftist political point about tolerance since that was who we were at war with, but at the same time had her running around in a Burka and being ultra orthodox at least to begin with, something which didn't quite make sense, and on top of that it's a hard sell to present a culture like that, even through the trappings, while maintaining any kind of message of tolerance.
At any rate, all rambling aside, I have no real desire to get behind this character. I don't mind it really since it's not a reboot, and they are after all keeping the actual Ms. Marvel around under another name, but to be honest it seems like a giant gimmick meant to grab attention, I seriously doubt there are many major plans for the character beyond it's introduction. I suspect she'll be paraded around as fairly high profile for a bit to make a few leftist statements and have Marvel go "look at what we did" then in a couple of years she'll be relegated to comic trivia, and something that will come up once in a while in a supporting role in other books, or shown in massive fight scenes, in a "hey, look, it's that old Muslim Ms. Marvel" context... the fate of many other gimmicky comic characters. What's more it's inevitable someone is going to want to bring back the actual Captain Marvel (as in Mar Vell of the Kree) under the original name, which means Carol will go back to being Ms. Marvel just as she tends to after briefly taking other names (Binary, Warbird, etc...). I think it was last year or the year before I was watching a fairly new cartoon version of "The Avengers" and they had the Kree show up in what seemed to be a lead in to Captain Marvel in the fairly classic sense (ie renegade Kree named Mar Vell with the rank of Captain). That means that Marvel seems to be fairly interested in keeping the classic property alive and "out there" in some sense.
I'd probably have more respect for it if they just did it instead of the big "Hey look, we're using an iconic name for a super hero from a cultural minority that is less than popular in the US right now" press release. That kind of thing doesn't typically end well.
