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Why Marvel's comics changed Kamala Khan to match the MCU's Ms. Marvel

Marvel executive editor Tom Brevoort says that it comes down to "gut instinct" as to when to switch things up on comic book characters to match their MCU counterparts

Marvel Comics executive editor Tom Brevoort has been talking about the ways in which comic books change their characters to fit the MCU lately, which makes sense, given that it’s something that’s been happening for years now — but why does it keep happening, and what kind of thought goes into pulling the trigger to make the change?

That was something a reader asked Brevoort in this week’s edition of his weekly Substack newsletter, Man With A Hat. And, as is his way, Brevoort answered with a cool-headed clarity. Adapting a character to fit their portrayal from the MCU or other outside media “really just comes down to gut instinct,” he wrote, although he added that even in that case, “somethings, people guess wrong. But even then, there’s always the possibility of some new story that will make everything all right.”

Ultimately, though, Brevoort argued, it’s a matter of making sure that audiences are able to recognize the character that they’ve become familiar with elsewhere when they read the comic books. “Once you become aware that a global audience that absolutely dwarfs that or ours in publishing is about to experience a character in a given way, then it becomes almost inexorable that certain elements of that depiction are going to wind up seeping into future stories,” he reasoned, “either immediately or over the long haul as creators who grew up with that interpretation of the character being central to them come into the field and start to write the stories.”

The example he presented — one of two originally raised in the original question from reader Brandon Giles — was Kamala Khan, whose comic book incarnation was killed and resurrected with a new power set, becoming a mutant in the process to tie her more closely to the MCU plans for the character.

“Say what you want about the Kamala Khan situation, but it’s a stone-cold fact that far, far more people relate to her as having weirdo hard light powers than embiggening herself. So you could choose to fight that, to swim upstream against public awareness. Or you can work to bring about a unification between the two in the best way possible—without throwing out everything that came before.”

And if you manage to get a few high-selling issues out of the process, all the better. (That’s not an invitation to kill off Wolverine any time soon and bring him back taller and less Canadian, Marvel.)


Graeme McMillan

Graeme McMillan: Popverse Editor Graeme McMillan (he/him) has been writing about comics, culture, and comics culture on the internet for close to two decades at this point, which is terrifying to admit. He completely understands if you have problems understanding his accent.

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