Kamala Khan, the teenager at the center of the new Disney+ show “Ms. Marvel”, isn’t your typical Marvel superhero. Sure, she battles bad guys. But she’s also a Muslim high school student living with her Pakistani-born parents in Jersey City — which makes “Ms. Marvel” the first show or film in the Marvel universe to feature a Muslim hero.
Head writer Bisha K. Ali says Khan’s character was informed by her own experiences growing up in England as the child of Pakistani-born parents, as well as the experiences of other second-generation writers.
While the show is written for a broad audience who love the Marvel cinematic universe, Ali says it also speaks, in part, to people “who rarely get to see themselves be the protagonists, who have suffered from a history of poor media representation in the West.”
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