Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Ms. Marvel (Vol. 3), Issue #7 – “Healing Factor (Part 2)”! In the previous installment, after getting barely a lecture from Sheikh Abdullah, Kamala hears strange growling noises within Jersey City’s famous World’s Largest Pothole and suits up to investigate the sewers. There she meets a hologram of the Thomas Edison clone, aka the Inventor, aka the Birdman of Menlo Park, who intends to keep her alive to do nasty experiments upon her mutant teenage existence. She’s like “fuck that” and books it.

She also meets Wolverine, who is in the middle of tracking down a missing runaway from the Jean Grey School of I-Think-Professor-Xavier-Is-Dead-These-Days, so it was renamed. They team-up, fulfilling Sheikh’s advice to find a teacher to help Kamala get better at helping. AND THEN Wolverine gets hurt and now Kamala has to fight a giant alligator alone.

Kamala Khan has an audience! Wolverine is watching, she best not screw this one up.

Ms. Marvel (Vol. 3), Issue #7 [October, 2014]
Written by: G. Willow Wilson
“Healing Factor (Part 2)”

Fantastic cover art. Although she’s holding the phone with the wrong hand, UNLESS she has the camera view un-mirrored. Which nobody would ever do unless they’re a lunatic. OR, maybe she’s fondly viewing a photo taken earlier. Wolverine has never looked happier, I must say.

RECAP!

“Kamala Khan has always felt different. Nerdy interests, strict parents, and now…strange poly-morphing powers. She found out that the villain after her is a bird/human hybrid clone of Thomas Edison…yup. Luckily for her, Wolverine is on the case and is totally her friend now! Not so luckily, he doesn’t have healing factor and there’s a giant gator about to attack them. Bummer.”

G. Willow Wilson, speaking fluently the language of the kids these days.

Obviously, this is the doing of Thomas Edison the Bird, siccing a giant alligator on our heroes to keep them busy while he continues his various eugenic endeavors. Even with the alligator snapping its jaws, looking to really tear these two new assholes, Ms. Marvel is, and I quote, “trying not to squee” in the presence of Wolverine.

Even though Wolverine is hurt, he’s gonna take this beast on. Ms. Marvel, trembling, advises him to let her handle it. She’s got a plan! It’s to run away, how’s that sound? Let’s just run away. Byeeee.

Oh look, the 130-year-old superhero made a funny.

Nope! Wrong! Here’s what Wolverine wants her to try doing: poke its eyes for a bit. Get up there and kind of rattle those eyeballs around. He’ll try to head it off. Or something. Whatever. It’ll all work out, kid, trust him.

Ms. Marvel is on top of the monster, panicking as the dickens, trying to figure out what the hell to do. “This is gonna be so gross–” she cringes as she gets close to one of its enormous, yellow eyeballs…

She plunges an extendo-arm deep into the eyeball with a loud “SPLOOSH!”, which sends the gargantuan reptile into a frenzied…sadness. It looks sad now, like it’s crying. Marvel gets thrown off its head, landing what looks rather painfully into the water below.

Now it’s Wolverine’s oh-shit moment. He’s hurt, the alligator is hurt and mad, and Ms. Marvel is possibly hurt and/or dead and/or needs some kind of Wolverine-related assistance at any rate.

“How’s that one line about death go? ‘Biting the big one.’ Guess this is what fancy people call literalism,” muses Wolverine as the alligator’s open jaws ready themselves to chomp him like a tasty, albeit a bit hairy and pointy, morsel.

The alligator misses Wolverine by about three inches. Roughly twice the length of Cyclops’ cock, if nobody here is mistaken! Something pulled the creature back a little bit at the last minute. OUR HEROINE. Little Ms. Muffet, she pulled the alligator back with its tail. “Get–back– you giant– lizard!” she pants and puffs and groans and moans and huffs and fluffs! With long, spindly legs, she run up its back, clamps onto the top jaw and yells for Wolverine to do his “claw thingy”. Wolverine, indeed, does his claw thingy. SNIKT! I never get tired of that sound effect.

So he rips the alligator up a bit, it falls into the water, along with Wolvy, along with Ms. Marbles, then she gets out, then she helps him out, then the fight is over. Hooray team, good job, let’s all go out for a round of frosty chocolate milkshakes!

Kid, you don’t even want to know how many cute little baby ducks I’ve had to fucking pulverize in my time. Just crushed to paste.

Ms. Marvel hates that the whole superhero schtick has to involve hurting people, or animals, or places, or things, or vegetables, or minerals once in a while. That’s life, though. “It all circles around. The hurt, I mean,” Wolverine lays down some tribal knowledge, “Sometimes you can avoid hurting other people, but it usually means you get hurt pretty bad instead.”

He grabs his aching butt, which has aching-butt lightning bolts drawn next to it. The universal symbols for “ouch, my butt”.

“The pain’s gotta go somewhere,” Wolverine says. Ms. Marvel doesn’t want to believe that, but it’s true. She’s still young, but she’ll come around on that eventually.

Anyhoo, time to scurry. The closest sewer exit is blocked off by giant fallen rocks, so they’ll need to traipse through more of the sewer to find another way out. There could be more ghoulies and ghosties and fecalpheliacs and god knows what else in here. “Now might not be the best time to say this, but even without a few torn ligaments, I’m not the best swimmer,” bemoans the grumpy Wolverine. That’s ok! You can ride on Ms. Marvel’s back! He weighs about 700 pounds, but they’ll make it unless she collapses and dies right here in the sewer like a little loser. And we can’t have that happen, can we?

“How did you lose your healing factor anyway?” she asks during this perfect time to break the ice a little and share a stronger bond (so she can tweet about it later, probably). He says it’s a long story, perhaps one to read about in some other ongoing series, but the moral of the story is “appreciate it while you got it”. Healing is the only thing worth piffle. Everything else is flashy and stupid. ESPECIALLY those Cyclops plasma eyeballs. Fuck that guy.

They encounter an opening in the ceiling that looks like it leads outside. She stretches up enough for Wolverine to grab onto the ladder. It’s a tight fit, and it looks like it twists and turns. “You claustrophobic?” Wolverine asks his fresh-faced companion, and she’s too excited at this point to care. In she goes.

On their way up and out, Wolverine asks what Ms. Marvel is doing with Carol Danvers’ old moniker anyway? Seems pretty haughty, eh? Well, Kamala has looked up to Ms. Danvers her whole life. “And when she came to New York and all that stuff went down, I felt like she was the bravest person who ever lived.”

There’s an editor’s comment with respect to the “all that stuff” mentioned. I was advised to check out Captain Marvel Issue #17. So if I ever get around to that, you’ll see a link right there! Thanks for playing.

Anyway, becoming Ms. Marvel felt like it was necessary to emulate Carol Danvers. Then, after a bit of time, Kamala learned that she could just be herself, y’know? She doesn’t have to pretend to be anyone else.

“But you’re wearing a mask,” Wolverine observes, attempting to poke holes in Kamala’s teenage sense-of-self discovery like a grumpy asshole. Well, duh, sir, it’s because Kamala’s parents would lose their collective shits if they found out their daughter was gallivanting around the Jersey City sewers in spandex.

I’ve been to Vietnam, kid. I’ve paid good money for a glass bottomed boat.

They’ve almost made their way out of there, seeing a grate on the ceiling with sunlight poking through, indicating passage back to the outside world.

Then a metal door slams shut over the grate, trapping them. A TV screen, one of them 35” LCD flat screens I’d say, flips to a broadcast of Mr. Chicken Man Edison. “Greetings, my dears. I see you’ve bested my megagator. I’m very impressed. By you, I mean. Less so by the megagator.”

Chicken McEdison yammers on about how the big hungry alligator was the first trial, but now try getting out of THIS! Ha ha! And so forth.

The walls start slowly closing in on them, like this is a level from Sonic the Hedgehog and Dr. Robotnik is actually a cockatiel. Wolverine can be Tails.

“This maniac’s gotta have some power source,” Wolverine mumbles as he rips the TV off the wall, exposing many electrical components, “If we shut it down maybe we can stop the walls from turning us into jelly.”

Both are at a lost with this one, though, since neither graduated high school for vastly different reasons. Wolverine tries tearing a wire out with his hands, which gets him all sorts of electrocuted and, if he weren’t a freakish mutant about town, likely dead. But he doesn’t die. He just goes “Rrrrrrgghhh!”. Ms. Marvel tries her hand and pulling out wires too, which gets her all sorts of electrocuted and…you know the rest. “It’s like being snapped with a rubber band, except a thousand times worse and all over,” she thinks as her healing factor starts sapping energy out of her muscles. Honestly, it’s almost worse than getting hurt. Wolverine’s starting to admire this kid’s spunk!

Wolverine has a new idea. He helps her not-at-all-charred not-at-all-a-corpse up and asks her to shrink down and walk through the opening to find a power source.

And she finds a power source all right.

Great, another living thing I’m going to have to poke the eye out of.

“Is this what the Inventor is doing with all those missing kids? Hooking them up to machines?” she asks herself. Another one of those meddlesome robot bugs arrives to harsh Ms. Marvel’s mellow, snipping and snapping around the little pool. Ms. Marvel is starting to wonder if this Inventor is not a great guy at all!

Miss Marple punches the thing into robot crumbs, but another one across the pool zaps her with its Robot Scorpion Laser. She’s thrown back hard enough to punch a hole through the wall.

The hole is big enough for Wolverine to jump through! “RRRAAAHH!” Snikt snikt, mother fuckers.

Wolverine recognizes the Power Source Girl as Julie, his missing Mutant School runaway. She’s still alive, but in somewhat of a stupor. “There– there are others–” she grunts in Wolverine’s arms. Others what? Other sandwiches? Other triangles? Other doctrines of Christian Science? Gotta help Wolverine out here a little bit, sweetheart, he didn’t graduate high school you know.

Gah, too late. Julie’s out cold now! What a bitch, right?! Wolverine’s gonna get her to a hospital, Ms. Marvel wants to play in the sewers a little bit longer. Oh yeah, and find others. Heh heh. That too, certainly.

Wolverine tells her to take a break, but Ms. Marvel refuses. She goes all Batman on him. This is MY city! Jersey City is MY city! I don’t want anyone fucking with MY city! And so forth. Superheroes and their cities, my god. Relax.

Wait, what’s this about a tarragon bomb? It didn’t smell like a French restaurant to me!…well, maybe it did…

Ms. Marvel is sure that she’ll be hanging around so much more to investigate. After Wolverine shows his initial surprise about the terrigen-induced superpowers, he quickly pivots and changes the subject. Fine, she can do her thing, “but this ain’t a game. I’m gonna keep an eye on you,” he warns, training his wary eye on the teenager before leaving.

“When the student is ready, the master will appear,” Kamala ruminates of Sheikh Abdullah’s impossibly good advice. Even a slow clock is right once in a long while, eh? Things seem to be going pretty…pretty…pretty……. pretty good.

But of course, here comes the standard END-OF-ISSUE TWIST that always happens once the hero is led into a false sense of security. ATTALIN. Hudson River. New York/New Jersey border. Some spaced-out costumed lady with red hair looks over the river from her window, talking to herself. “The river is so quiet at night. So deceptive. You can’t tell what might be happening…just beneath the surface.”

Then STEVE FUCKING ROGERS enters the room, because God knows he needs to be in every Marvel series for some reason, to talk to this woman. “Wolverine just called. Seems he’s found a young Inhuman patrolling New Jersey. Says she’s got no idea what she is.”

This spaced out red-haired lady is like, really? Another one? They’re like cockroaches. This one’s not like the other ones, though. She’s special enough to warrant Wolverine actually picking up the phone. That must be pretty damn special. The red-haired lady wants her sent over right away for special training. “I don’t think that’s what Logan had in mind,” Steve says. Wolverine considers this new youngin’ as stubborn as himself. Says she wants to learn things on her own.

However, the red-haired lady argues placidly that Ms. Marvel needs a companion. “Someone to help her, and to be my eyes and ears while she grows into her power.”

And she knows just the…thing.

Lockjaw! A giant dog.

Final Thoughts

Inhumans! There’s a whole big event about that! Here, I’ll do the link thing here too, so you’ll see a link to the big multi-series Inhumanity crossover event somewhere in this paragraph if I ever get around to reading and writing about it! Even if it’s 20 years from now! That’s called magic, my friend.

Ms. Marvel gonna get a doggie. That’s cool I guess. Good for her.