After Magnificent Ms. Marvel was canceled at 18 issues, Kamala kind of slid into the background for a few years. She got a Disney+ show, which I watched two episodes of and which also completely changed her powers. Then she was added as a supporting cast member to Zeb Wells' Amazing Spider-Man run, seemingly so she could be killed off perfunctorily for the purposes of having a "shocking" death in the story.
I think she was dead for two months, maybe three, in our time, before being resurrected by the mutant nation of Krakoa. Apparently Kamala was a mutant all along, albeit one whose x-gene never activated. And she got resurrected just in time for the whole Krakoa thing to fall apart and mutants to be forced back into hiding. Kamala's advised to just lay low, but refuses to stand by and do nothing.
Which brings us to this mini-series, where Kamala accepts admission to a summer program at a big university. . .which is actually a front for ORCHIS. While Kamala tries to deal with the fact that her attempts to show mutants are not worthy of hate just for existing aren't working, there's a doctor in ORCHIS' basement lab trying to use Kamala to basically destroy all the telepathic mutants. Something about a Trojan horse implanted in her brain by a drone that can access the telepathic network the X-Men communicate with, if Kamala can be tricked into letting it in. The virus appears in her dreams as her mutation, (depicted as a lavender glowy version of herself) trying to making Kamala feel as though the X-Men won't accept her without it. I was surprised they didn't go ahead and give her the MCU powers right then.
(I feel like it's odd that Dr. Gaiha's plan is to attack the X-Men via telepathic communication, but we never see Kamala communicate with them through telepathy, just communicator earpieces. But I guess ORCHIS doesn't necessarily know that, while they do know the X-Men have a crapload of telepaths.)
This isn't a mini-series about Kamala trying to juggle school with helping the X-Men in a world that now hates and fears her. It's outright mentioned she hasn't been to any of her classes yet. It's mostly Kamala struggling with the unresolved issues of her having died and been resurrected (none of her friends or family remembering this, thanks to Emma Frost, though she tells Bruno everything), and feeling like she needs to be too many things to too many people. Part of the reason Dr. Gaiha's virus almost works is because Kamala's been having the same dream about who she really is for 10 consecutive weeks (the entire time she's been resurrected.) The virus initially just feels like an extension of the dream.
Vellani and Pirzada do a good job capturing Kamala's hopeful, determined, slightly goofy, personality. That she'll rush to meet a threat without worrying that people might react badly to someone with an "X" on their costume showing up. That she'll critique the attacker on their poor punching form as she knocks them down, but then hold off on attacking any further until it's needed.
That said, I find it hard to believe the negative public reaction to her being a mutant would stun Kamala that much. Granting she was a big X-Men fan from the beginning, she's been hunted by the government, she's been accused of working with gentrifiers (who were actually HYDRA) by her friends, she's been pulled out of line by the TSA just because her last name is "Khan", and they got a security warning about a "Khan." As she notes more than once, she's a lot of different things rolled into one, and many of those things have gotten her hated or viewed suspiciously for no good reason. So why people disliking mutants so much is shocking, I don't know.
Bruno's the only member of her supporting cast that gets any real page space, and he's pretty much as usual. Dedicated to helping her with hastily conceived super-science, supportive of her desire to help others, but worried about her getting hurt. The both of them firmly insisting they're just friends, and not a couple. Bruno also shows no signs of the injuries he sustained trying to stage a jailbreak in the Civil War II tie-ins. He was supposed to eventually lose the ability to walk, but I don't know when that got erased. I can't remember it being a factor in the few issues of Magnificent Ms. Marvel I read.
I think, having seen his art on Fantastic Four, that Carlos Gomez mostly draws Kamala's waking hours, while Gorham draws the dream sequences. Gorham's work (seen above) is rougher and looser than Gomez's, and if he doesn't play with the weird physics of dreams in how things look, he does capture Kamala's frustration and confusion, and how ragged she feels.
Gomez's art is slicker, and at times the expressions feel like they fall in the uncanny valley, or like I'm seeing actors trying to hold a pose that suggests they're doing something, rather than feeling natural as it would if they were actually doing it. Gorham's version of Kamala is closer to how she originally was drawn by Alphona or Miyazawa, while Gomez kind of generics her appearance (her nose is significantly smaller, for one thing.) Gorham also draws her in her classic costume, while Gomez draws the new X-themed outfit, where the lightning bolt is reduced to a tiny thing on her left shoulder. And it's not like they put anything on her torso in its place; it's just blank yellow space.
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