Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Ms. Marvel (Vol. 3), Issue #10 – “Generation Why (Part 3)”! In the previous installment, a woman dubbed Queen Medusa whisks Kamala away from the wreckage of the school in order to heal on New Attilan, “the home of her people”, as she is an Inhuman and everything. She heals, but she doesn’t want to stay, so she leaves! There will probably be ramifications of that decision in the near future. Ritual canings, removal of internal sexual organs, the usual stuff. Plus, her powers aren’t maintaining consistency. Kind of fading in and out randomly. That’s going to suck.

Upon return to Earth, Kamala immediately decides to stakeout the abandoned house to try to thwart whatever bullshit is happening there with the runaway teenagers and the weird, mysterious cult-like practices. And then she learns that these kids weren’t kidnapped, they’ve volunteered for this getting-hooked-up-to-power-robots shit! Like it’s a cult!

Which I thought I already knew? Wasn’t the whole thing with Vick that he was doing this willingly? This isn’t a revelation!

Ms. Marvel (Vol. 3), Issue #10 [February, 2015]
Written by: G. Willow Wilson
“Generation Why (Part 3)”

Ms. Marvel stands there in disbelief, just totally perplexed that all these kids she showed up to rescue don’t want to be rescued at all. They all signed up for this. They want to be stuffed into machines and siphoned of their energy. They’re doing this for the “greater good”.

“Okay, explain this to me like I’m dumb,” Ms. Marvel narrows her eyes at these cult volunteers. Some glasses nerd starts talking. It’s like this, ma’am: per the Inventor, teenagers are at a very useful age for generating a ton of body heat. This heat can be harnessed, and if enough kids volunteer themselves, the world wouldn’t have to kill each other over oil and natural resources and climate change can be contained, even reversed!

“We’re parasites, basically. Kids are, I mean,” the kid continues, starting to look a little sheepish and self-aware. The planet is overpopulated, and he thinks they’re part of an “extra” generation anyway. So, it’s win-win, right?

Ms. Marvel thinks this stuff is cuckoo bananas with a cherry on top! “We’re supposed to roll over and become human batteries so the adults can max out their air conditioners and credit cards without worrying about the future?” she challenges. But the kid argues back that there won’t be a future anyway at the current rate things are going, so helping in some way is better than doing nothing.

Knox and Doyle are officially giving free mustache rides for the next fifteen minutes.

Ms. Marvel instructs her enormous dog to sit on these two leader mopes until she does some more thinking. They screech that she’s making a big mistake, but fuck that. Lockjaw piles on top of both of them and transports them away somewhere else. Hopefully the moon where they die of oxygen depletion before Ms. Marvel summons him back.

She faces her audience of peers and settles them in for some real talk: don’t listen to what all these old farts have to say about their generation. They’re just jealous and resentful and they cannot seem to stop writing news article after news article chock full of words like “entitlement” and “killing capitalism”. “We’re not the ones who messed up the economy or the planet. Maybe they do think of us as parasites, but they’re not the ones who are gonna have to live with this mess.”

Her trite speech of millennial and zoomer talking points is cut short by a constant beeping. And then a giant BA-BOOM! A full-page explosion! Teenagers flying everywhere! Piles of concrete and dust and hormones!

“How did that happen?” Ms. Marvel asks.
“It’s the Inventor,” replies a girl with half her head shaved, “he had that place wired to blow if anyone ever compromised his operations.”

Blowing up the operations sounds counterproductive to continuing operations! But that just means the Inventor is watching, he sees everything, and everyone has to be careful!

A sky full of helicopters comes into view, combing the area for teenage ne’er do wells. There’s no time to wait and see if they’re here to help or here to punish, time to get the hell out of dodge.

Ms. Marvel starts shepherding kids out of the property. “If I don’t shut the Inventor down fast, it’s gonna be all-out war on the streets of Jersey City,” she thinks as she struggles to plan out a way to get these kids on her side. Meanwhile, the kids are terrified of what the Inventor will do to them if he catches them all gallivanting with the enemy!

Fancy hat today, Dr. Robotnik, sir.

It’s too late to be terrified, though, because the Inventor has just arrived in his very large robot contraption, all ready to murder these little urchins!

“You just keep getting creepier, you know that?” Ms. Marvel sneers, berating the talking bird for convincing these kids that electricity is worth more than their lives. The Inventor argues that these kids have been told that their lives are cheap anyway since forever, may as well make them feel better by contributing!

No. Time to fight!

So they fight. She grows her hands until they’re the size of garbage cans and prepares to start pummelin’.

“You underestimate me, Ms. Marvel. I’ve been studying you.”

The Inventor launches two of his own giant robot fists right into her bread basket! Right in the old baby-maker. Not only was she thrown clear, but the electro-charged fists jolted her shit. And now her elasticity has been temporarily lost ♫♪ because of sciiiiieeennnnccee! ♪♫♪

With a robot fist, the Inventor hoists her upside-down by the leg. Looks like Ms. Marvel is in the soup now! How’s she going to get out of this one?! Looks like she’s done for! There’s no way out of this one!

“LOCKJAW!” she hollers!

“HURRRRHHH!” he responds!

Lockjaw crashes this bitch to the ground!

“Come on, little cells. Get stretchy again,” Ms. Marvels wills her special Inhuman body to do its thing. And does it? It does! Just kidding! Or am I? Maybe! Or is it?

Nah, it doesn’t really work. Lockjaw has to intervene again before the robot descends upon Ms. Marvel and crushes her into an unmalleable, and certainly not stretchy, ball of cheap silly putty. And Lockjaw is successful! And Lockjaw…somehow tricks this reincarnated Thomas Edison wannabe into punching himself right on top of his own hatted head? Anyway, he squaks like the freakish bird he is. All like “Hrrrraaaaack!!”

All the teenagers look sad except for one. He’s wearing a red hat and his skin has the complexion of Kleenex. Look out for this guy, he’s rebellious! I think it might be Vick but I don’t fucking remember at all! lol

So the Harvey Birdman threat has been neutralized. He and his robot apparatus lie crumpled on the ground.

Yeah, well, sometimes we just have to let the teleporting dog do its thing.

“Here’s how this is gonna work, evil bird clone,” Ms. Marvel gets down to brass tacks, “Lockjaw is going to warp you to a deserted island somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, preferably in shark-infested waters. And if you ever set foot in JC again, I’m not gonna be this nice.”

Yeah, that’s not gonna happen. Birdman outfitted his ultra-sophisticated mechanical suit with PHASE-DISRUPTING FORCEFIELD TECHNOLOGY! This means that he can shine a red light at Lockjaw and his powers don’t work.

Lockjaw’s flailing around going “HURRR!! HRRRHHUUUHRRRR!!!”, and I find that funny. Sorry! He’s encased in a large red bubble now. A fitting end.

Birdman’s suit does a GO-GO-GADGET HELICOPTER and he starts fucking out of there. Bye! “I hope you have learned a valuable lesson today,” he says, getting away until next they meet, taking Lockjaw with him. It’s really sad. Ms. Marvel is sad about this!

Looks like some of these kids are finally flipping to the other side on the Birdman issue. “Dude. He totally stole your dog. That is not cool.”

Good, good stuff, now we can get somewhere here! She rolls with it. “Yes! He stole my dog! He almost got us killed! This is the guy you’re protecting! This is the guy you think is going to save the world by turning you into lightbulbs!”

But, as history has told us with the entirety of the presidency of a certain someone who shall remain nameless (Trump), a cult leader could do very bizarre, idiotic, or unsavory things in plain sight of his followers and it still doesn’t make much of a difference.

“We know he looks terrifying, but he’s got a point,” claims a freckled girl, “The world is basically melting. Canvas bags and hybrid cars ain’t gonna cut it. We’ve gotta do something drastic.”

Yeah, fine, that’s a salient point. But saving the world won’t matter if you have to give up an entire young generation to do it. Then who’s going to enjoy a saved world? Generation X? They don’t enjoy anything!

“We have to matter. If we don’t, there’s no future worth saving.”

So she goes around the circle pointing at these lunkheads to try to prove an argument. One by one, like a team building exercise, she asks what each one is good at. What each one did for fun before prostituting their bodies to Big Bird Energy. One girl is good at computers. One guy was good at making things out of junk. One kid will do anything anyone asks him to do even if it’s dangerous or shitty or causes one to become a human battery! Everyone is useful.

Well…but…uh…we miss the tingly feeling in our genitals from all that electricity…

Ms. Marvel rallies her sad-sack troops and they, somewhat begrudgingly, decide to help her out. Possibly because there’s a dog involved. If there wasn’t a dog involved these kids would have lifted her up and thrown her down a ravine by now.

A plan is formulated! Inventor McBird’s hideout is in an abandoned power plant. You can get in the secret back entrance through a drain pipe and into a steam vent. It’s booby-trapped, so watch out. Cut the power from the breaker at the end of the pipe before heading up the steam vent! Now try not to imbibe any Fizzy Lifting Drinks, because the top of the vent has a giant fan that could hack you the fuck up into teeny, tiny, smelly little pieces. So be careful.

Of course, if you’re some kind of large Inhuman mutant-adjacent being, you could just enlarge your fist to the size of Jupiter and punch that sucker to…Mars.

Hey, Ms. Marvel, is it really you? Wow, I’m a giant fan! Heh.

So now that you’ve climbed Hell Pipe and made your way to the roof, you’ll find the glass dome of the atrium ceiling. All you have to do now is crash through that thing and land on the Inventor and Knox and crush them to death with your Large Butt. Got it?

Good. Ms. Marvel does all that. She doesn’t crash through the thing yet (spoiler alert!), but she does attempt to eavesdrop as she puts all her weight on the glass. The Inventor and Knox discuss their plots and schemes with respect to Ms. Marvel’s obvious inevitable attempt to get her dog back. “With those powers, she will make an excellent addition to the grid,” says the Bird, rubbing his bony bird hands in delight.

Check your watch, Knox! What time is it? Why, it’s time to let the world know about all these plans! Knox doesn’t know why, the grid isn’t even ready yet. Shouldn’t they give it more time? NO! “The people are ready to hear what I have to say.”

“The young are seen as a political burden, a public nuisance. They are not considered worth educating or protecting. They are called parasites, leeches, brats, spawn–” soliloquizes the fiendish cockatiel, which the hero is gonna hear and use against him. I’ve seen this all before!

OK, here’s the part where Ms. Marvel crashes through the glass! Sorry for spoiling that earlier.

Heh heh. Hi everyone! Ms. Marvel is here to get her dog back now please. Also, any kids you might have squirreled away.

The Confident Mister Marvel, aka Bird Bones, he is like “Really, fool? You’re gonna try this again? You and what army? I will peck your face until death do us part.”

And then Ms. Marvel is like “Me and this army!”

Yes, all the spindly, nerdy teenagers are here to help.

The Inventor isn’t afraid! He’s got another big robot machine who will wipe the floor with these punks!

He’s also got about 9,000,000 other tubes filled with kids. What are you going to do? Save all of them?

Final Thoughts

Yeah, probably.