written by Mark Waid
drawn by Humberto Ramos (pencils) and Victor Olazaba (inks)
colored by Edgar Delgado
Following the events of Civil War II, three of the All New, All Different Avengers, Spider-Man (Miles Morales), Nova (Sam Alexander) and Ms. Marvel (Kamala Khan), have all quit the team, disillusioned as they are with their former idols and mentors. Rather than just go their own separate ways, however, at the insistence of Ms. Marvel, the three of them try something else altogether: they form their own team. Together with Totally Awesome Hulk (Amadeus Cho), Viv Vision, daughter of the Vision, and the X-Men's Cyclops (Scott Summers), they are the Champions!
These kids aren't keen on slugging it out with supervillains of the day, though; they fight decidedly more mundane, "real world" threats like human trafficking, religious extremism in South Asia and even small-town racism. Even more notably, rather than just save the day by punching the bad guys, they do something even more remarkable; they help people find the courage and determination to help themselves.
This may sound like hyperbole, but I think I've been waiting for this comic book my whole life.
As much as I loved reading the adventures of Peter Parker and various other Marvel superheroes as a kid, it dawned on me fairly early just how different I was from the heroes whose adventures I read, beginning with the color of my skin as opposed to theirs.
It also occurred to me, early on, that the problems that my heroes faced, while occasionally were the sort of thing I could relate to, like Peter Parker's money problems, were, by and large not really the kind I or anyone I came into contact with on a regular basis faced every day. Over time, while I still enjoyed reading their adventures, the fact that the concerns they faced were far removed from the experiences in the world I lived in made it increasingly harder to read out of anything more than habit.
Also, as I got older I found myself increasingly annoyed by the tokenism I was seeing in entertainment in general, whether it was in the comics I read or the movies or television shows I liked to watch. Asians (when I was growing up) were virtually nonexistent in American pop culture, save for a few Chinese, Japanese, and the occasional Korean character, and it was perhaps this rarity that caused me to gravitate more towards African American characters, and even then, with few exceptions like Will Smith and Denzel Washington in the movies, I observed that entertainment was still largely a white man's world. In comic books, leading black characters were exceedingly rare and the few that showed up in Marvel Comics, like War Machine or Falcon, were usually sidekicks. Asian characters were virtually nonexistent, and the only Filipinos in the comics I read were the ones who drew them. After a while, I just gave up and decided to just read the darned things with no expectations.
In fact, so jaded had I become over the years that, even when Marvel started introducing a more ethnically diverse line of superheroes like the African American Spider-Man Miles Morales, the Latin American Nova Sam Alexander and the Pakistani American Ms. Marvel, Kamala Khan, I was almost entirely dismissive of them, thinking that they were nothing more than "PC" bait. I was relieved to find that the stories told by creators like Brian Bendis, Sara Pichelli, David Marquez, G. Willow Wilson, Adrian Alphona and Takeshi Miyazawa were quality narratives and about far more than some ham-handed effort at tokenism.
There was something different about Wilson's Ms. Marvel stories, though. As a female Muslim-American, Kamala Khan represented two key demographics that were not only underrepresented in mainstream comic books, but who continue to suffer a great deal of discrimination in the real world. Her stories, to my mind, even if they weren't about racism or Islamophobia or hate crimes, paved the way for a book that could address these questions head-on. Her character had the potential to be a lightning rod for controversy, but because of some really quality storytelling by Wilson and her team of artists, she instead became a rallying point for the kind of superhero fans didn't realize they needed: a non-WASP, non-male protagonist.
For all of that, though, her stories stayed conspicuously safe.
Leave it to comic book veterans Mark Waid and Humberto Ramos to finally grab the bull by the horns and tell stories that, all things considered, can only really be effectively be told with this cast of characters.
In the Trump era of reinvigorated racism, this book is as important to the pop-culture landscape as Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's X-Men were to the civil rights turmoil of the 1960s. Waid is surely aware of the era he's evoking, here, as I have a feeling his inclusion of Cyclops in the lineup is a nod to that earlier advocacy. Sure, the stories being told here are a bit of a blunt instrument, but considering how dim a lot of Trump-loving comic book readers are, these stories may be exactly what the doctor ordered. Yes, the stories are preachy and without any subtlety whatsoever. No, this isn't Waid's best work by a long shot, but it is some of his most ballsy.
And yes, Ramos' work here is, well, as can be expected. It seemed to me that he was trying to refine his approach to Spidey when he rebooted The Amazing Spider-Man back in 2014 with Dan Slott, but here he's pretty much gone back to the big-eyed, gangly figures for which he's best known. The good news is that when he draws kids this way, as he did back in 2008 when he did a stint on Runaways, it works somehow. I'm still not a fan of his dubious take on human anatomy, but I must say he's got a good storytelling sense here.
I applaud Marvel for putting this book out every month. I'm glad they've decided to roll the dice with these characters, and that they've rankled the fanboys who think comics should be the way they always were.
I don't know how long Marvel will be able to continue publishing this title, but as long as they're publishing it, I'm buying it.
8/10
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