Ms. Marvel’s Creators Always Wanted Her To Be A Mutant, Not An Inhuman

The constant back and forth of fans debating how and why the MCU has changed Kamala Khan’s origin and powers has been taking place for pretty much the entire duration of Ms. Marvel’s Disney Plus series. But with this final debate, it’s probably a good time to check in with the actual creators.

Spoilers for the Ms. Marvel finale follow.

The big change from comics to screen was the revelation that Kamala Khan was not just part interdimensional Djinn, but that her genes had a “mutation” relayed to her by her friend Bruno, as the classic X-Men theme plays.

It’s much different than the comics where Ms. Marvel was an Inhuman, an alien race of superheroes embedded on earth, but it turns out, this is always what she was supposed to be, according to her original creators.

Sana Amanat created the character with G. Willlow Wilson, and said this to Empire about their original goals with the character:

“Here’s a really important thing that people do not know – when we were thinking about the character of Kamala back, back, back in the day in 2012, 2013, when [G.] Willow [Wilson, comic book writer] and myself were ideating, we originally wanted to make her a mutant. That was the whole intention, to be able to do that.”

Amanat does not go into the details of why Kamala was made an Inhuman instead, but from the sound of it, it seems like that was a Marvel call to make her an Inhuman instead of a mutant, which could directly put into more X-Men stories.

But now, the stars seem to have aligned with the famous running joke(?) that Kevin Feige hates the Inhumans (after the MCU already did Inhumans storylines in Agents of SHIELD and a bad standalone show), and that this opportunity presented itself for Kamala to be a herald of the coming X-Men in Phase 5.

There have been some recent rumors that Marvel still does have at least a few plans with some Inhumans to come, like potentially bringing Black Bolt back, a variant of which was introduced (and killed) in Multiverse of Madness, played by his original actor from the ill-fated ABC series, Anson Mount (current killing it on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds).

The point is, this should settle at least one debate about Kamala’s origins, given that the intent of the original creators was to always make her part of the mutant family rather than an Inhuman, which seems like a decision that was pulled out of their control at the time. I do wonder if that was a decision made actually based around Agents of SHIELD itself, as at the time when Ms. Marvel was being created and introduced, that’s also when Agents of SHIELD, which the showrunners knew would star an Inhuman Quake, was just being spooled up, and the X-Men rights were firmly still in the FOX camp back then. Perhaps we’ll know the full story someday.

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