Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Ms. Marvel (Vol. 4), Issue #12! In the previous installment, Kamala done fucked up and now she’s outside the good graces of both Captain Marvel AND her best ol’ buddy Bruno. Bruno is so upset, in fact, that he’s planning on getting a scholarship for a school in Wakanda! She may never see him again!

Kamala is a sad sack and this whole issue will reflect it. Someone stop her before she ties up a very fashionable noose.

Ms. Marvel (Vol. 4), Issue #12 [December, 2016]
Written by: G. Willow Wilson

Kamala doesn’t pass through security so easily at the Newark Liberty International Airport. “Let me guess,” she says scornfully. “There’s some kind of security alert for a random guy named Khan?”

The security officer admits that that’s true, and we here reading the comic are clutching our pearls and screaming RACIAL PROFILING! Satisfied that Kamala isn’t going to do a 9/11, the officer gives her back her passport and she’s on her way.

“This is the first time Ammi and Abu have let me travel alone,” she thinks. She’s headed to Karachi to visit about 30 family members, and it will be nice to get out of Jersey City for a little bit. Away from Ms. Marvel responsibilities and Stinky Bruno and anything and everything!

But then she sees Bruno in the airport heading for the Birnan Zana, Wakanda gate. They catch each other’s eye, and Kamala looks mortified. Time to find a new best friend! You like MMORPGs, right Kamala? School is full of incels who are into that nerd shit!

Soon enough, Kamala is on her own plane to Pakistan. 21 hours and two layovers later, she arrives at her destination. Mirka Andolfo, the comic book artist, made Pakistan tinged brown because any country with brown people in it also has brown sky, of course.

“KAMALA!” yells about… yep, about 30 people in the airport. Kamala looks nervous. It’s her mom’s mother as well as every other bum in her extended family. “Here’s the nice thing about grandmas,” she says. “No matter how far away they live and how long it’s been since you saw them last, they always make you feel like you never left.”

Eep! Oh no! Family!

HOW TOUCHING. Everyone call your grandma right now and say hi before she gets dementia.

Kamala hasn’t been in her grandmother’s house since she was about nine or ten years old. Her grandparents got married and moved into the top floor. Then their kids got married and they moved into other apartments; pretty soon the whole house was lousy with relatives. Kamala recalls that her mother was pregnant with her in this apartment building, so technically it’s her first home. Maybe. Not really, though. I wouldn’t count it.

Grandma – Naani – shows her her bedroom for the next month: her mother’s room when she was a girl. Kamala gets settled in while a cousin or something bitches about getting his room stolen. Kamala confronts the teenage boy, who gets extremely nervous. “It was my mom’s room way before it was yours,” Kamala tells the boy as she displays some bored-Garfield-lookin’ eyes. “Who are you, anyway? Are we related?”

He introduces himself as Kareem, a sister of an aunt of a friend of a brother of an uncle of a friend or something. Not technically related, so they’ll be fucking pretty soon. “I’ve been living here while I study for my university entrance exams,” he smiles as they introduce themselves more pleasantly. But then he gets chewed out for speaking to a girl in his indoor clothes! D’oh!

The guy blushes and grimaces and shoves off while Kamala laughs. “See you, Kareem.”

Later, Kamala tries to blend in by wearing traditional Pakistani clothing, but she fumbles her Urdu words and Naani lowered the spice level in her food to “white people levels” (Wonderbread and mayonnaise is on the menu today!) Overall, she’s having a hard time relaxing. In America, she’s too Pakistani. In Pakistan, she’s too American. She doesn’t belong anywhere!

Not getting blown up by errant cartel activity would be a good start.

And after some sage advice from Naani that amounts to “cork it”, Kamala relaxes a little bit. That is, until a giant BOOM rings in the air. This basically amounts to “oh, that’s just the silly cartels!” who are blowing up hydrants so that people have to buy water from them. “I’m not Ms. Marvel this month,” Kamala thinks. “I’m not here to super-hero. I’m here to unplug, reconnect with my family, and try to figure out what to do with my life.”

For a while, she’s fine. She integrates nicely into Karachi society, she listens to her Naani’s stories, she drink chai tea, she eats exactly zero McDonald’s hamburgers, she rides horses, hangs out with that Kareem kid, and does all sorts of touristy stuff. “I try to sort out my head,” she says. “But no matter how many lists I make and how much I cry about Bruno and Captain Marvel and everything that’s happened, I feel like I’m drifting.”

Ms. Marvel! Kamala! Karachi! Jersey City! Too much to separate! Agh! Agh! Agh!

Another BOOM occurs, this time right outside the apartment. Kamala looks over the balcony and sees a bombed hydrant. Kareem looks over his own bedroom’s balcony and tells her that this has been happening a lot over the last few weeks. “I hate that you have to see these things,” he says. “The corruption, the chaos… so many people are leaving now to get away from it. Going to the UK or the U.S. or the Gulf. Sometimes I think ‘If everyone leaves, who’s left to fix things?’”

کراچی کے شہریو، کبھی خوفزدہ نہ ہوں! یہ محترمہ مارول ہے!

Well, that tears it! No more of this not-superheroing fuckery! Ms. Marvel is going to go be Ms. Marvel now for the greater good of the Karachi people! “I stake out a neighborhood on the outskirts of Karachi where there are known to be illegal subsoil wells… which, okay, I had to Google. I don’t have to wait long until I spot what I’m looking for.”

It’s a van with a sign on the side that says “GABBAR SINGH IS MY COPILOT”, which is something that I had to Google. Ms. Marvel lands on the roof of the van with a THUMP! and grabs two of the three guys inside with giant hands. “You’ve blown up your last fire hydrant, you wannabe Robin Hoods!” she yells as the third guy — the driver – careens off the side of a cliff and lands 50,000 feet below. “This is it,” she thinks. “This is what I’ve been missing. Some good old fashioned bad-guy butt-kicking.”

She declares herself MS. MARVEL, whom the fellas don’t know or recognize. Not the effect she was going for, but hey! At least she maintains a commanding presence and – oh shit! Knives! Run!

With a SPAK! and a SPAK! and another SPAK!, knives hit the ground. The assailant who is scaring the four individuals is none other than Laal Khanjeer! The Red Dagger! He has a belt fulla knives and he looks handsome with his bandana covering his mouth! “Where did you come from?” he asks Ms. Marvel. “What are you doing here?”

When Ms. Marvel asks him the same question, the Red Dagger tells her she patrols Karachi like a superhero. He tells Ms. Marvel that her involvement is making a big mess of things. Step off and stay in your lane, lady.

Can’t just fuck shit up in your own country? You have to travel to the Eastern Hemisphere too?

Ms. Marvel looks sheepish and apologizes. While these two exchange pleasantries, the water bandits tiptoe away without further harm. Ms. Marvel and Red Dagger shake hands and she is off on her own again.

“I think it’s time to go back to Jersey,” she thinks. “I didn’t find the missing pieces of my life in Karachi, because the missing pieces aren’t part of a place. They’re part of me. They’re things only I can figure out.”

The next morning, after exactly 45 minutes of sleep, Kamala steps out of her bedroom to see Kareem enjoying, sleepily, his own cup of chai. They flirt for a moment, Kareem gets a boner, that sort of thing. She realizes that Jersey City is her home, and she needs it just as much as it needs her!

And so on and so forth. The end.

Final Thoughts

WHAT ABOUT BRUNO? WON’T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE BRUNO?

Envisioning a new Bruno series where he’s in Wakanda getting into all sorts of crazy hijinks with Black Panther. Maybe he won’t try to blow anything up anymore, but we can only hope.