Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Ms. Marvel (Vol. 3), Issue #11 – “Generation Why (Part 4)”! Let’s wrap this sucker up! In the previous installment, Ms. Marvel’s confrontation of the Inventor’s cult kids doesn’t work. They think that volunteering their bodies as free electricity is in pursuit of the greater good. Their generation is useless, the planet is dying. Makes sense. Ms. Marvel doesn’t like that at all, though! But it takes the Inventor kidnapping Lockjaw to convince the teenagers to side with Ms. Marvel and help her out.

So that is indeed what happens. They band together and break into the Inventor’s hideout.

However, he’s prepared, and he’s going to try to take them down. And it’s not going to work entirely because these are comic books and the bad guy never wins! So let’s just get this over with!

Ms. Marvel (Vol. 3), Issue #11 [February, 2015]
Written by: G. Willow Wilson
“Generation Why (Part 4)”

The Inventor’s main holding area for dumb teenagers, dubbed the Grid, contains a whole lotta dumb teenagers. “The Grid’s carbon-neutral, non-polluting, and better yet…it’s taken a bunch of useless brats off the streets,” he prattles happily. Sounds fine to me, but Ms. Marvel doesn’t think so for some reason.

What does she think? “I think you’re a megalomaniac with some kind of weird Pied Piper complex.” She puts her bony finger right up to his bony beak and sneers. “I think you’re a bird.”

“I AM NOT A BIRD!” he squawks birdily. He starts getting personal now too. He knows all about Ms. Marvel, or should he say, CAMILLE CAAN!! *reviews notes again* …KAMALA KHAN!! He knows you go to Coles Academic High School. He knows that she tried fighting his destro-bot at said high school. What he doesn’t know yet is her real identity! Even though I just implied that he did, that’s called DRAMATIC LICENSE. That’s actually the only thing he has left to figure out! There wasn’t much to figure out in the first place.

Ms. Marvel looks nonplussed. She hopes he’s bluffing. He has to be bluffing. No one saw her do any of that! Why would he know?

BY THE WAY, while you’re mulling over whether or not he actually knows or doesn’t know who you actually are or ARE NOT as it were, the Inventor totally stole your buddy. You know the one. What’s-her-name?

I’m having her try out one of my sensory deprivation tanks. Soothes the mind, body, and soul. See? I’m a nice guy!

Yeah, it’s Nakia. Checkmate, bitch. Now what are you gonna do about it?

“Let…her…GO!” Ms. Marvel grunts, growing her fist to the size of a bird-like creature and then punching the bird-like creature pretty hard. He squawks like a bird about it.

The Inventor zaps her with electricity. Two can play this fighting game! “With your powers, you will make an excellent addition to the grid.”

Vick leaps into the fray! He hits Larry Bird’s big robot with a bat. “You want some of this?!” he squeaks at the monstrosity that’s easily 600 times bigger than he is. Which isn’t saying much, really.

“Recalibrating targets,” pipes the huge robot.
“No! Do not calibrate targets!” Vick yells petulantly.
“Deploying countermeasures,” says the robot after recalibrating targets.
“Deploying the who what?!” yells Vick in his best Bill Cosby impression. Zip zop bippity bop! Have a drink!

While Vick proves to be a useful idiot, Ms. Marvel works on freeing her friend from the tube. While the bird looks on in horror at these kids messing with his prized robot, Ms. Marvel opens the tube undetected, starts delicately detaching tubes and wires from Nakia’s body, and–

KA-BOOOM!

Strong words, man. Do you French your mother with that mouth?

Something explodes! I don’t know what! There’s some vaguely magenta-colored light and smoke filling the room. All the kids fly in all the directions!

“Enough of this. If you all cooperate, no one else needs to get hurt,” declares the Birded One.

A frazzled Ms. Marvel looks on at the ensuing chaos. The room is filled with smoke. Vick is trying to lead a fight against a cockatiel. Lockjaw is being held somewhere, who knows? Nakia is unconscious and no longer sensory-deprived. What to do, where to start?

Overwhelmed, she realizes that Vinatos and Medusa were right. She shouldn’t have handled this alone. She should have listened to their crusty old wrinkled experience and accepted the offer to lay low and let some other seasoned superheroes handle this business. She hasn’t played any Minecraft in a while! She hasn’t been able to write fanfiction about Iron Man and Captain America boning in a hot tub for weeks!

She grabs her phone and dials Bruno, who is sleeping blissfully in his bed. Undisturbed by all this needy friend-turned-superhero business.

Bruno snorts himself awake. He has a giant submarine sandwich in the bed next to him. He probably hugs it while sleeping.

She also hit him up on the Emergency Corn Phone, which is also a telltale distress signal.

Bruno immediately calls 9-1-1 and requests police intervention to the location of Kamala’s cell phone. I wouldn’t do that if I were him; the first thing the police are going to do is shoot the brown girl with no questions asked.

Vick is starting to get nervous. Where’s Ms. Marvel? Why isn’t she coming in here to stop this robot?

“I gotta go,” she says, carrying her unconscious (but relaxed as hell) friend, “But I’ll be right back. I promise.”

Suddenly, Ms. Marvel gets a great idea! She’s been thinking big all this time, and that’s stupid! Time to think small. Time to shrink down and infect this robot like a nasty little virus.

Right before Vick and his posse of enfeebled teenagers gets crushed, the thing pauses and initiates a shutdown sequence: “Internal systems compromised. Manual override in progrrrrrrrr–.” It appears Ms. Marvel is squirming and slithering her way through the gearworks, gumming up the machinery and passing by a lot of dead rats along the way.

Eventually, she reaches a panel full of wires that she needs to Jack Bauer her way through, snipping the right ones or else the robot will go off like a bomb! Maybe. Why would that happen? That’s stupid.

She transmits her voice through Robby the Robot over here, telling the group to go get her dog. Vick stands there like a drooling moron until he gets grabbed by the scruff and bossed around handily.

I’m the one with the intimidating pube-beard and you will do what I say!

“You are going down, bird guy,” Ms. Marvel announces through the robo-intercom, “All your bots are belong to us.” Grrroooaaann. G. Willow Wilson showing her age with that reference.

Mr. Bird, with his patching plaid vest/slacks combo, is extremely pissed off right now. EXTREMELY pissed off. He’s going to take a shit on someone’s head any minute now. Time to take drastic measures. “You can’t thwart the Inventor that easily, little pimple!”

He opens up his Pip-Boy and pushes a button labeled “Nuke It”. The robot starts glowing red, the universal color scheme for electromagnetic radiation. The last time the Inventor did this, Kamala temporarily lost her powers. I don’t remember when that happened, so I can’t link to the issue! Just take my word for it that I’m taking Kamala’s word for it.

Ms. Marvel starts panicking as she ever so, so, so gradually reverts to normal size within the tight-fit of the robot’s sharp and pointy internal components. At some point she’ll get too big to, you know, not die. She attempts to push against a metal plate that may or may not be a hatch, but it’s too strong. Maybe it’s made out of unobtainium or adamantite or naquadah!

ZAP! ZZOT! Get out of there, Ms. Marvel! BLOP! BLORP!

The weak little children grow concerned about the clanging happening within the robot. Ms. Marvel also grows concerned in a concerning, growing fashion. Luckily, at that moment, Vick comes back with Lockjaw. Or rather, Lockjaw comes back with Vick, since Lockjaw’s doing all the “coming back” while Vick gets dragged on the floor by a chain like James Byrd Jr.

The ever-growing Ms. Marvel starts poking through a hatch a little bit. Leg sticking out. It looks uncomfortable. I guess the hatch budged after all? Unclear! Lockjaw leaps up there and starts tearing off metal pieces and freeing Ms. Marvel from the oppressive tyranny that can only come from growing in a place that one feels that she no longer fits in. So to speak. She’s got a black eye and she’s all wrapped up in a thousands wires and cords.

“This isn’t right! This isn’t how it’s supposed to end!” Inventor Birdseed whines petulantly.
“Learn to live with disappointment, boss,” says Teenager #5.

Ms. Marvel places her nemesis under CITIZEN’S ARREST! OooOOoooO, scary. Then the police show up to place Ms. Marvel’s nemesis under real arrest. That one is more effective.

I always hate it when I’m trying to arrest the criminal bird and then he just runs away theatrically.

“No! I refuse! I will be recognized for my genius!” squawks the bird again, and he starts running off toward his robot. He keeps going, even after weak demands of “stop” and “don’t”. Ms. Marvel warns him that the machine is about to collapse, but the Inventor runs up the robot anyway. Then the robot collapses! Then, while everyone is distracted by flying machinery and smokey wafts of smokey smoke, the Inventor zips on out of there.

The police approach Ms. Marvel and don’t shoot her in the face, which is very gracious of them. They help her out of her bind, and she’s pretty put out that the Inventor got away. The cop feels her pain. “Think of it this way, kid– greater people than this guy have been crushed by their own self-importance.”

But what about jail? And a trial? And, like, execution by hanging? Hanging from his dick and balls? None of that’s gonna happen? Boo.

Look on the even brighter side! She just cleared off a giant stack of missing persons’ files! You just made cop lives easier! Does that help?

No? Didn’t think so. Look, kid, you did good. But a lot of this is way more than a 16-year-old girl can handle, powers or no powers, and there’s way worse in Jersey City than some smartly dressed talking bird. And now that you’re a well-known crusader, you’ve attracted the attention of people who want to actively remove you, if you catch the drift.

She realizes now that there’s no going back. Ms. Marvel is now her parallel life. It’s not just a costume.

“My new normal is no normal.”

The teens crowd around her and give her their own individual versions of praise. Claps on the back, huzzahs, pew-pew pistol fingers, it’s sickening. She tells them to get back to their real lives, but most of them don’t wanna. They want to keep punching bad guys! Ms. Marvel gets exasperated and starts talking like Abu: “If we don’t stay involved in what’s going on in the world, how do we know we’re not gonna end up falling for the next evil genius who wants to use us for some crazy scheme?”

They all just PROVED today that their generation isn’t useless! So get out there and keep on being not-useless!

That did the trick.

Meanwhile, the Inventor’s plump little buddy Knox gets arrested for 50 counts of kidnapping and corruption of a minor.

“Idiots…they think this is over” mumbles Knox, “Who do they think cloned edison? Who invented the Inventor?”

Final Thoughts

Who cares?! How about that for an answer? Who cares about the big, dumb bird!

I didn’t like this story! I was underwhelmed! The No Normal storyline was much better balanced. Equal amounts of getting-used-to-fucked-up-powers stuff with the teenager-with-strict-parents stuff. Abu and Ammi were barely in this one to tell Kamala that she’s grounded every fifteen minutes. There wasn’t enough of the human element or the teenage angst or the personal growth that the series started with. It was just a bunch of shoehorned climate crisis generational resentment stuff!

Oh well. Maybe next time!