Emine Saner in The Guardian:
In many ways, says the writer G Willow Wilson, Marvel's new comic-book character is a typical teenager, dealing with the angst of high school, before discovering superhero powers. So far, so Peter Parker. Except 16-year-old Kamala Khan is female, and a Muslim: unusual enough in the world of comics to have caused quite a ripple when it was announced in November. “She's a child of Pakistani immigrants,” says Wilson from her home in Seattle, where she is already working on the third issue; the series will start in February. “On the one hand, she grew up in an American city as a fairly typical middle-class American kid, but she's also got the tradition and history of her parents. She faces a lot of the same dilemmas many second-generation kids do.”
The idea came from two Marvel editors: Sana Amanat, who had been telling her colleague, Steve Wacker, tales of growing up in a Muslim family. (The idea predates the recent rise to prominence of the similarly named, similarly brave teenage girl, education activist Malala Yousafzai.) Amanat and Wacker approached Wilson – who converted to Islam in college, and whose work includes the comic Cairo and novel Alif the Unseen – to be the writer (with artwork by Adrian Alphona). “My immediate thought was, 'What are we going to get ourselves into?'” she says.
More here.
