What is Ms. Marvel’s origin story?

It was clear from the trailers that Disney Plus’ Ms. MarvelShe would make some changes to the comics, especially in regards to her superpowers. But it’s Kamala Khan’s origin story where the Marvel Cinematic Universe is likely to be making the biggest changes.

The story about Ms. Marvel’s origins is just a little bizarre on paper. Things get more bizarre when you consider the number of companies fighting for the right to Marvel Comics intellectual properties. So here’s why we’re definitely not going to see Kamala’s original backstory in her TV show — and why nobody is really surprised.

[Ed. note: This piece contains mild spoilers for the first two episodes of Ms. Marvel on Disney Plus.]

Iman Vellani stares at a screen with a starburst of light behind her in Ms. Marvel

Its second episode is available here Ms. Marvel makes it clear that the origin of Kamala’s bangle — a family heirloom from her great-grandmother — will be a central mystery in the show. We may not find out much about Kamala’s mysterious ancestor or the origin of her piece of jewelry, which awards power over difficult light structures for a while.

The mystery could lead someone to look into how Kamala obtained her abilities in comics.

Is it possible for Ms. Marvel to have the powers she has in comics?

Kamala Khan pauses, disorented, by a telephone pole, as swirling mists surround her. “Oh no,” she waves her hands in front of her face. “I’m drunk. I’m totally drunk,” in Ms. Marvel #1 (2014).

Kamala, in her comic book debut of 2014 discovered she was the daughter of Inhumans after her superpowers were activated through exposure to Terrigen Mist. That sentence might lead a person to ask: “What in the heck does that mean? And… why? And… why? This.”

You can ride in the time machine along with me back to 2011! It was the first time Marvel Studios seemed to have developed an Inhumans project as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

What the heck are the Inhumans anyway? They’re a group of Marvel Comics characters originally introduced in The Fantastic FourStan Lee and Jack Kirby. Created after the X-Men and before the Eternals, they’re somewhere in between the two concepts. Like the Eternals, they’re a race of humanity that was genetically altered in the ancient past by extraterrestrial forces and lived on Earth in secret. The Eternals, however, were nearly all-powerful, immortal and omnipotent. However, the Inhumans lived in secret because of their superstitious and violent past humanity.

Inhumans, in a similar but less relatable fashion to the X-Men were hated. Marvel Comics was always on the lookout for any similarity to the X-Men in 2011.

Yep, we’re gonna talk about the 20th Century Fox X-Men deal

By 2010, the X-Men movie franchise, based on an exclusive film license to the X-Men purchased for a bargain basement price after Marvel’s 1990s bankruptcy, was a well-established moneymaker for 20th Century Fox. Ike Perlmutter (a conservative billionaire) was apparently resentful that Marvel Comics still published what he considered to be de facto advertising for his rival. That is, X-Men Comics.

Marvel Comics made it clear that they would not be pursuing the X-Men. Instead, they wanted to bring a new pot to a boil. Inhumans had been a hit, and Marvel Comics and Marvel Studios both tried to make them happen.

For Marvel Studios, that meant producing the MCU’s biggest flop, InhumansThe television series, then quickly abandoned the whole concept with the exception of a short reference. Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. It meant that Marvel Comics had to find a way of creating more relatable Inhuman characters. The problem was that, in Marvel Comics canon, the process of unlocking an Inhuman’s superpowers was, unlike the X-Men, a very deliberate one: Inhumans were ritualistically exposed to a mutagenic substance called “Terrigen Mist.” You couldn’t just get a bunch of random humans waking up as Inhumans in the way that a teenager could wake up and discover their mutant powers.

Terrigen Mists from the Terrigne bomb sweep through human populations, enveloping random people in cocoons and transforming them. “As the Terrigen Cloud expanded, all those with Inhuman DNA in their genetic code began to receive their birthright,” reads narration boxes. “Some would change slowly. Others quickly. But the world... it was changed forever,” in Infinity #4 (2013).

So, the cross-over event 2013 Infinity, Black Bolt, the king of the Inhumans, detonated the “Terrigen Bomb,” releasing masses upon masses of clouds of Terrigen Mist into Earth’s atmosphere. Why did he detonate it? Well, he was fighting Thanos and— look, it doesn’t really matter; the important thing is wherever the clouds drifted, wherever they touched a person with traces of Inhuman DNA (i.e., whose ancestors had once had babies with an Inhuman) it zipped those people up in gross goop cocoons and activated their latent Inhuman abilities.

And that’s how Kamala Khan got her powers in the comics. She was walking hime from a party she shouldn’t have gone to, Terrigen Mist rolled in, she got cocooned, and she stepped out a shapeshifting, stretchy superhuman. Kamala’s instant success, from an editorial standpoint, was an outlier. Most of the new superpowered characters — or Nuhumans — that Marvel created with the Terrigen Mists plot line did not hit it big in any significant way (although Lunella Lafayette, the super-intelligent star of Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, is another Nuhuman who’s getting her own show soon).

Moreover, it is not surprising that the Inhumans were never as well-received as the X-Men.

Are Kamala and Inhumans in Disney Plus?

(L-R): Iman Vellani as Ms. Marvel/Kamala Khan, holding up her hand, which is glowing with strange energy, and Matt Lintz as Bruno in Ms. Marvel.

It’s not clear.

After the failed attempt of InhumansThe characters of the Terrigen Bomb were left behind by Marvel Cinematic Universe, which was broadcast on ABC. Actors who played the characters moved on to other roles, so there is no Terrigen Bomb. The Terrigen Bomb is not a thing. Ms. Marvel eschews any kind of cocoon or supernatural weather event in favor of a family heirloom and an icy generational silence surrounding Kamala’s great-grandmother.

So far, the series appears to be tying Kamala’s powers to her family in a way that they simply aren’t in the comics. Sure, in the comics, her family did struggle through the Partition of India, and her great-grandmother did have a bangle in which she hid the family’s money as they traveled, which was passed down from mother to daughter to Kamala. But it’s not magical, it’s just meaningful. And Kamala’s comic book abilities are technically derived from her genetics, but on such an ancient level as to amount to pure chance.

A connection back to Kamala’s great-grandmother could still be leading to a “Kamala is descended from a race of superhumans” reveal — but with the reduced state of the Inhumans in the MCU these days, it seems more likely that this is a brand-new origin story, possibly even one that’s completely disconnected from other Marvel properties. If anything cosmic is going on, there are other, more central kinds of nonhuman folks that Kamala’s great-grandmother could turn out to have been.

Maybe she’s an Eternal, a similar-to-the-Inhumans property that is actually of going interest to the current architects of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Or maybe Kamala’s great-grandmother was a member of the Kree, the alien race that featured largely in the MCU origin of Captain Marvel. That would both bring Kamala’s MCU origin closer to Carol’s current Marvel Comics one, and give her a direct connection to Carol in advance of her appearance in MarvelsThe upcoming sequel is Captain Marvel.

We won’t know for certain until Ms. Marvel reveals more of its take on Kamala’s origin story.

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