Ms. Marvel recast as 16-year-old Muslim girl from New Jersey

NEW YORK, Nov. 7 (UPI) -- A 16-year-old Muslim girl from New Jersey, who discovers she has body-morphing powers, will be the new Ms. Marvel, Marvel Comics announced.

A comic-book series about the latest incarnation of the iconic character will premiere in February.

"The Ms. Marvel mantle has passed to Kamala Khan, a high school student from Jersey City who struggles to reconcile being an American teenager with the conservative customs of her Pakistani Muslim family," the series' co-creator G. Willow Wilson said in an interview posted Wednesday on the Marvel Comics website.

"So in a sense, she has a 'dual identity' before she even puts on a superhero costume. Like a lot of children of immigrants, she feels torn between two worlds: the family she loves, but which drives her crazy, and her peers, who don't really understand what her home life is like. This makes her tough and vulnerable at the same time. When you try to straddle two worlds, one of the first things you learn is that instead of defending good people from bad people, you have to spend a lot of time defending good people from each other. It's both illuminating and emotionally brutal. That's what makes this book different."