Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Ms. Marvel (Vol. 4), Issue #1 – “Super Famous (Part 1)”!

Kamala Khan is A+! I want to read more Kamala Khan, so I am. And there’s nothing you jerks can do about it!

Sorry, I didn’t mean to call you guys jerks. I need every reader I can get.

Ms. Marvel (Vol. 4), Issue #1 [January, 2016]
Written by: G. Willow Wilson
“Super Famous (Part 1)”

Ms. Marvel begins the issue by recapping the events at the end of the previous series, namely the whole apocalypse thing. I don’t know how that that multi-series event panned out, but I can give you Ms. Marvel’s take: “Instead of [the world] crashing down in a fiery apocalypse, it simply got more awesome.” So there you have it.

Ms. Marvel is chasing down a culprit, and she’s got a few friends in tow now! Namely, Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, and Spider-Man, plus some other C-list Avengers I don’t care about and neither should you.

They’re all fighting a giant rat with a purple eyemask. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s been a lot of hard work,” she says of becoming America’s newest Avenger. “The learning curve is steep. I’ve had to be faster, stronger, smarter – and still home by curfew.”

Grove Street, Jersey City, Post Rat-Villain Obliteration: Tony Stark drops Ms. Marvel off at her house and books it even though he promised to help her with her physics homework. “Fuck THAT!” he says. He has a date! Go pound sand, kid! *peels off in his Lambo*

She falls asleep trying to do her homework. And here is where our adventure begins!

*sad trombone*

Kamala Khan tells us all about how things have changed since all this shit went down with The Inventor. For one thing, they rebuilt the science lab with a bunch of new whiz-bang equipment. Even Zoe Zimmer isn’t some airheaded, insensitive, accidentally-on-purpose racist anymore! She’s good-time buddies with Kamala and Nakia, and she even brings coffee like a good intern.

“Buhh…” I couldn’t have said it better myself when it comes to caffeine and skipping gym class.

Where’s Bruno? Well, not only are we talking about Bruno when we clearly should not be talking about Bruno, but he’s hanging out with Mike. And who’s Mike, Kamala asks? Zoe points to Bruno kissing a rather plump girl in the hallway. “That’s Mike.”

“Mike is a girl,” Kamala says, not a question.

“Short for Michaela, apparently,” says Nakia.

“When did this happen?”

“Like six weeks ago! Where have you been?”

“Are they… together?”

“Uhh, yes?”

Clearly, Kamala is having an issue grasping this new information that shouldn’t have been new information at all. “I just think of that moment Bruno and I had on the roof. it was pretty much yesterday, or at least that’s how it feels,” she thinks, frowning wistfully. She suddenly runs off, bolting down the hallway to get to class.

Kamala snipes at Bruno during physics class. He didn’t understand the homework, and she calls him a dumbshit moronic fuckpig. She tells him he should ask HiS gIrLfRiEnD for help instead. When class ends, Kamala storms out haughtily, leaving Bruno to chase after her. “Can we at least talk about this?” he asks as she continues to pull ahead and away from him in the hallway. “What’s there to talk about?” Kamala says, gritting her teeth. “You told me you were in love with me, then I see you kissing some random girl in the hallway.”

Saran-wrap that little dick of yours, son. Double wrap for maximum safety!

They bicker like this for a while. Bruno, ultimately, says “YOU TOLD ME TO MOVE ON, KAMALA. YOU TOLD ME!” To this, she says “oh yeah”, but she didn’t expect it to all happen so soon, you know? “I never meant to hurt you. I’ve tried to talk to you about Mike, but you’re so busy being an Avenger that you’re never around anymore.”

Soon after they briefly touch upon the embarrassing and gross penis-in-vagina stuff, both Kamala and Bruno notice and stare up at a giant billboard where Ms. Marvel encourages the population to clean up Jersey City! This is when Kamala fully realizes how much she isn’t paying attention to anything around her real life anymore.

“Did you sign some kind of weird product endorsement or something?” Bruno asks.

“NO! I’ve never seen this before!” she yells angrily (the manner in which most people yell).

The billboard is situated above an apartment development that now has an organic foods store, a yoga center, and two sushi restaurants. A man named Chuck offers Kamala and Bruno to check out their new model unit, and Kamala gets up in Chuck’s face about using Ms. Marvel to shill white people shit. He merely hands them pamphlets. “On behalf of Hope Yards Development, thanks for visiting Phase I of our downtown revitalizing project.”

Chuck looks like a hipster douche, and Kamala wants to give him an atomic wedgie. This whole billboard thing is driving her nuts. “What is happening?!” she cries, tearing her hair out. Nakia and Zoe show up to comment upon the billboard, calling Ms. Marvel a sellout to the gentrification of Jersey City. Kamala is like “NUH-UH SHE’S NOT!” Nakia is like “’Fraid so.” Kamala argues that maybe Ms. Marvel has been so busy sucking Avenger dick that she has let things slip away from her. Maybe, just maybe. Nakia finds that cute.

Kamala runs under the pretense that she’s meeting up with Aamir at the mosque, but she tears off her not-Ms. Marvel clothes to reveal her Ms. Marvel clothes and runs back to the Hope Yards Development complex. Rapping on the door SMARTLY, she yells to Chuck that she has a complaint. No answer. She tries turning the doorknob – locked. Then she smallifies herself and slips under the door crack.

They want to turn the Khan household into a Wild Fork.

She overhears a conversation going on outside. “You can’t just tear down my store and cut me a check! What you paid me wouldn’t buy five feet of sidewalk in Manhattan! I ran the grocery on this corner for twenty years!”

It’s Radislav, the man who runs a store! And he’s getting pushed out! Well, no mas! Ms. Marvel makes herself known and challenges these two security guard dudes roughing up Radislav to a fight! And fight they do, although they both have large, glowing, state-of-the-art crowd dispersal weaponry, so that isn’t rad. How did that happen? “Suspicious loiterers detected,” blares one of many Hope Yards security drones that buzz onto the scene. They look like they’re mere seconds away from opening fire and/or stinging the bejesus out of these two with their scary bee-like stingers, so Radislav runs to his car with Ms. Marvel in tow.

“Radislav, I don’t think this is a nice, normal blood-sucking corporation we’re dealing with,” Ms. Marvel says as the car is attacked by bee drones. Radislav peels away, asking why Ms. Marvel’s picture is up there on the billboard. Is she getting a little kickback? Eh? Some moolah? Bread, see? Getting her back scratched, as it were?

NO! “It’s like I’ve become public property…” she thinks, ruminating over how she used to be able to lay low. Radislav tells her this merely means people are paying attention to the good things she’s doing.

They bump into a new threat after rounding a corner: protestors! “OUT WITH HOPE YARDS!”, “KEEP JC REAL”, and a big picture of Ms. Marvel with the caption “SELLOUT”.

Ms. Marvel shrinks down to mouse-size and scurries out of Radislav’s car, running through the crowd hopefully unnoticed. She finds Bruno’s giant Bruno-leg and grabs onto the cuff on his jeans. “Just keep walking!” she squeaks. Bruno turns onto another street, away from the other protestors, as he and Ms. Marvel argue some more about Mike. Bruno flashes back to the moment he and Mike met…

And that really firm right arm from all the jerkin’ it he does all day.

When you get down to the nitty gritty, Kamala just plain wasn’t paying attention to nuthin’ and now she’s actually all butthurt about it; not Bruno’s problem.

Suddenly, a giant frog terrorizes the street with the protestors. Suddenly, Ms. Marvel is also gigantic and runs after the frog. “GET BACK HERE, YOU PSYCHO AMPHIBIAN!” Suddenly, a regular-sized bus is launched into the air and falls right in Bruno’s path. Suddenly, Mike pulls him to safety before the bus smushes him into a mush.

“Where did you learn those moves?” Bruno asks.

“I took an urban fantasy self-defense class a couple months ago. We covered narrow escapes pretty extensively. I’m Michaela, by the way. Michaela Miller. People call me Mike.”

They mention seeing each other in various classes, they bond over a shared fear of that pesky end-of-the-world scenario, and Bruno asks Mike out for some bubble tea. AND THE REST, AS THEY SAY, IS HISTORY. Or maybe not. Who knows?

“We liked the same books. We hated the same movies – It was just really easy for me to talk to her,” Bruno says to Kamala. “So we started hanging out every day. You were around sometimes. But you were always, you know… busy.”

Bruno met Mike’s two moms. Mike met Bruno’s grandparents.

Great idea, grandma. Let me just also tell my new girlfriend that I’m a neo-Nazi and I watch scat porn in my free time.

Bruno gets weird, and later decides to be really stupid and tell Mike during a walk that he has been in love with Kamala since second grade. Mike had already guessed. “She’s in half the pictures your grandma was showing me. With you looking at her in this kind of certain way.” She says she’s fucking out if there’s going to be some weird drama, and Bruno goes “HA! HA! WEIRD DRAMA! HA! NOT AT ALL!! I MEAN IT!! HA HA HA!! BRRRRRRRTTT!”

So they kiss. And that’s the story, Kamala. Got a light?

Final Thoughts

WELL, WELL, WELL. HOW THE TURNTABLES! Now that Bruno is unavailable, Kamala is going to try to horn in on the action and be all over that piece? Fat chance, sister! Maybe you should try your hand at Peter Parker, especially after… you know… she was horribly mangled in an accident at the bubblewrap factory.