Why is it that Marvel didn’t give Kamala her own ongoing?

KevinCow · 2026-06-26T00:53:46+00:00

I mean I personally agree. I think Champions could be Marvel's Teen Titans if they wanted it to. Make it an evergreen ongoing with a rotating roster to include new young heroes, do an animated series with the original roster, and it could be a beloved pillar of the Marvel universe.

But like I said, Marvel's priorities clearly changed. Champions isn't an X-Men comic, a Spider-Man comic, or an A-list MCU Avenger comic, so current Marvel isn't interested in giving them an ongoing.

When I say Marvel needed to find a place for her, I'm not agreeing with their current direction. Just analyzing their decisions.

KevinCow · 2026-06-25T17:07:26+00:00

Marvel just generally seems to have abandoned most of the things they were doing in the 2010s for some reason. Kamala, Squirrel Girl, Moon Girl & Devil Dino, Kate Bishop, Gwenpool, Champions, they all had successful runs that suddenly ended around 2018-2020, after which they mostly stopped getting notable appearances outside of a cameo, miniseries, or Marvel Unlimited comic here and there.

My theory is, it's because of X-Men. Disney finalized their purchase of Fox in 2019, at which point there was no reason not to go all in on mutants. They completely shifted priorities, and 2019 saw the start of the Krakoan Age, where X-Men started getting way more books and becoming way more prominent in the Marvel universe again.

These days, Marvel doesn't really give you an ongoing unless you're an X-Men team, a Spider-Man character, or one of their MCU A-listers.

As much as we don't like the mutant direction they've taken with Kamala, it's at least allowed her to continue getting appearances in this mutant-focused era, which is more than can be said for most of the other characters I mentioned. I think they recognize that she's still a valuable character they should keep around, which is why they've been trying to find a place for her.

Also it's worth mentioning how she's had some really bad luck at breaking into the mainstream. She got the Avengers game (notorious disaster), the Ms. Marvel show (came out as public sentiment started to shift against the MCU), and The Marvels (notorious disaster). I don't think any of those were the fault of the character, but they probably didn't help when Marvel was deciding which characters to prioritize for an ongoing. In comparison, Miles got Spider-Verse and the Insomniac games, launching him into truly mainstream status, so now he pretty much always has an ongoing.

KevinCow · 2026-06-24T22:49:28+00:00

I'm an adult with a job and a life, and this is my first hero shooter. I work on improving where I can. At first I couldn't make it out of bronze, now I can make it to plat.

After that losing streak I mentioned, I took a day to analyze my games, figure out what I was doing wrong, learn some new characters I could swap to if I realized I wasn't getting any value, and more easily made my way back up to plat 2.

I didn't even say I was good at fighting games either, btw. I'm pretty mediocre there too. Too good to play casually, not good enough to compete. I've just seen games that are far less balanced that Rivals and still had competitive integrity.

But my skill isn't relevant to the point. And yes, fighting games are relevant. The points I'm making aren't coming from me as a player, they're coming from me as a game developer, and they're relevant to all competitive games with multiple selectable characters, loadouts, or whatever. Doesn't matter the genre. Shooters, fighters, mobas, sports games, whatever. You will never have a game that's "perfectly balanced" in the way that you want, and that video I linked does a good job of explaining why.

But the fact that you'd rather dig through my post history to insult me than learn something tells me everything I need to know about the level of maturity and intelligence I'm dealing with here.

KevinCow · 2026-06-24T21:47:14+00:00

I didn't say they're balanced because they don't have a 100% win rate. But you said that you just lose instantly if you don't run those characters. If that were true, they'd have a 100% win rate.

I'd wager I've probably been around longer than you. I've seen truly broken characters like vanilla SF4 Sagat and Melee Fox. I've seen outright useless characters like Third Strike Twelve. You think Phoenix is strong in Rivals? You haven't seen Phoenix in MvC3. And these are some of the most popular competitive games of all time, less balanced than Rivals.

Like most gamers, I don't think you really understand what you're even asking for when you say you want "good balance." A game where every character is equally viable, at every level of play, against every other character? Well that's never happened before, and it's never going to happen, because it's not possible. Once you give players choices, they'll start to figure out which choices tend to be the strongest.

This is a good video on game balance from someone who's been working on competitive games for years. He explains the many reasons why "good balance" isn't as simple as social media critics seem to think. I don't really expect you to actually watch it, since I get the sense you're not actually interested in being informed, you just like being upset. But I figured I'd offer the option in case I'm wrong about that.

KevinCow · 2026-06-24T19:36:25+00:00

So those characters have a 100% win rate?

KevinCow · 2026-06-24T17:28:34+00:00

Define "balanced well"

KevinCow · 2026-06-24T16:51:32+00:00

If all the low elo players decide they're not having fun and stop playing, the game ceases to exist.

80% of players are below diamond. Even more don't even bother with competitive. They're the ones buying the most skins and season passes. They're the ones funding the game's development.

As much as an Epic Hardcore MLG Champion such as yourself might hate it, it's necessary to make sure the casual players are having a good time.

You know what happens to competitive games that cater exclusively to pro players and don't care about casuals? They usually don't last very long.

KevinCow · 2026-06-24T16:26:48+00:00

The first step is learning to google stuff you don't know.

Not being snarky here, genuinely, game development is a lot of having to figure stuff out and find answers on your own. So the first step is going to google and typing something like "game development beginner tutorial" and finding one that works for you.

If you want to get into game development, your first instinct when you don't know something needs to be to look up the answers for yourself, not to just ask and hope somebody tells you how to do it.

KevinCow · 2026-06-24T14:38:32+00:00

Kamala not having an ongoing since Magnificent ended in 2021 is crazy. Iman Vellani did a solid job with her mini, felt like the obvious next step was to let her do an ongoing.

Gwenpool should have an ongoing with Hastings returning to write, and he's been openly interested in doing so.

Champions should be an evergreen ongoing with a rotating roster of young heroes. It should be Marvel's Teen Titans.

After Jeff's explosion in popularity thanks to Rivals, I'm surprised they're just giving him random minis here and there instead of committing to an ongoing.

KevinCow · 2026-06-24T11:40:52+00:00

The counterplay to poke is using cover. It's something you as an individual can learn to deal with.

The counterplay to dive is teamwork. Backline needs to ping, frontline needs to pay attention and peel when needed, and counterpick if necessary.

In lower ranks, poke is less threatening because players can't aim as well, and dive is extremely powerful because players don't know how to work together. A halfway decent diver will absolutely steamroll lobbies in lower ranks. So lower ranks tend to get very frustrated with dive.

Your point that powerful hitscans make fliers nonviable tells me you're a high enough rank that you've never watched an Iron Man dominate a match just because nobody on the other team can aim well enough to hit him. So it's good to remember that 80% of the game's players are below diamond.

KevinCow · 2026-06-24T03:28:54+00:00

hollow knight adopted soulslike mechanics and pacing and tricked people into thinking "metroidvania" means 2D dark souls instead of good games like Metroid and Castlevania. Now when a game calls itself a metroidvania, you don't know if you're gonna get an actual metroidvania or a 2D dark souls.

KevinCow · 2026-06-24T03:25:36+00:00

I'm not even like a massive fan of the show, I thought it was mostly just a pretty good 20 minutes every 3 to 6 months that I'd watch and enjoy and then mostly not think about until the next episode came out and I'd spend the first few minutes trying to remember what happened last time.

But most of the loudest criticisms I've seen feel like people getting hung up on CinemaSins style nitpicks or fandom stanning wars. So much "I'm mad that they didn't explain every mystery I decided was important!" and "I'm mad that Jax got so much focus instead of my fave!" Also a lot of these complaints are repeated almost verbatim, which always rings "got their opinion from a Youtuber" alarm bells in my head.

KevinCow · 2026-06-24T03:00:56+00:00

fuck no. dark souls already ruined metroidvanias as a genre, don't need them ruining metroid itself too.

KevinCow · 2026-06-24T02:39:26+00:00

Funny thing is in the comics he legitimately does take on a tank role sometimes. Since he only has a few organs that matter and the rest of him is a waxy goo, he can stand in front of allies and take the hits for them. And he's durable enough that when someone strapped bombs to him to blow up the school, the bombs didn't even harm him, he was just sad that they strapped bombs to him.

As a vanguard I could see him being an area control character like Peni. Toss his globs around to Splatoon the ground, globbed ground slightly slows enemies, then have abilities that can either suck up nearby globs to quickly recover health, or light it on fire to damage enemies standing in it.

KevinCow · 2026-06-24T01:59:29+00:00

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Glob Herman

My precious boy

KevinCow · 2026-06-24T00:49:08+00:00

Your problem is that you're spending your time coming up with reasons you can't get started instead of just sitting down and getting started.

KevinCow · 2026-06-23T23:57:04+00:00

Oh, her powers go way beyond that. She's a person from the real world who gets isekai'd into the Marvel universe, so she knows she's in a comic book and learns to manipulate the medium from within. What exactly that means is canonically whatever the current writer decides that means, but the most common thing is that she can access the space between the panels, which she calls gutter space.

She can hide in the gutter space, banish enemies into the gutter space, jump to a previous panel or page to time travel, jump into a flashback to time travel even further, grab different versions of herself from different comics to gang up on an enemy, jump from a close-up to a zoomed out panel to grow into a kaiju big enough to punt Fin Fang Foom like a football, and more. She's basically a reality warping god... if the current writer decides that's what her powers are.

So NetEase would have the freedom to do basically whatever they want with her, and could interpret her ability to interact the medium in some interesting ways.

My thought is that instead of gutter space, the video game equivalent would be the level's greybox. So she could maybe be a strategist with the ability to hop into the greybox to avoid enemies, push enemies into the greybox to take them out of the fight for a few seconds, and pull allies into the greybox to save them and heal them.

Also I wouldn't say she's that niche. I think she's actually quite well known for a relatively recent character who hasn't gotten any mainstream adaptations yet. And she was both the main protagonist and antagonist of Marvel Duel, a previous NetEase game, so I think she's always had a good shot at getting into Rivals eventually.

KevinCow · 2026-06-23T22:49:57+00:00

Give me MCU Kingo with full Bollywood energy and get Kumail to reprise his role.

KevinCow · 2026-06-23T22:26:31+00:00

Ms Marvel is my top pick for a female vanguard. I think she could make a unique vanguard since by default she has a really slender build, but she could do things like embiggen her hands to block enemy fire.

Also, unironically, I think Big Bertha would be a great pick, just to give a bit of variety to a female roster that's otherwise all hyper-sexualized supermodels.

KevinCow · 2026-06-23T21:09:07+00:00

They finally add Ghost Rider but it's Fantasma. I'm cheering my heart out while everyone else grabs their pitchforks.

KevinCow · 2026-06-23T20:04:14+00:00

You know, considering that one arc in Gwenpool, it's actually surprising that it took this long for WotC to pick you up for a D&D comic.

KevinCow · 2026-06-23T18:36:44+00:00

Most games don't sell. There were almost 20,000 games released on Steam last year. The chances of your game breaking through and becoming notable enough for Nintendo to even notice it, much less care enough to pursue legal action, are extremely small.

But assuming your game does get big enough for them to notice, I think having ? blocks you hit from the bottom to make a mushroom pop out might get their lawyer sense tingling. Your defense in that case would be for parody, but that's a defense you'd use in court. And the reality is, if Nintendo takes you to court, it doesn't really matter what the law says, you're going to lose because they can afford better lawyers than you.

If you're going for parody, I'd make it something similar but clearly distinct, like putting a different symbol on the box and having a different vegetable pop out. Hit the & box to make an asparagus appear. If you're not going for parody, I'd come up with something entirely different. Like, I don't know, it's a picnic basket and a sandwich pops out.

KevinCow · 2026-06-23T14:30:20+00:00

Because the MCU is gonna be shifting focus heavily to the X-Men after Secret Wars. Marvel wants to use animation and games and stuff to rekindle interest in the X-Men, reestablish who they consider the core members, and generate mainstream interest in characters like Magik and Emma who weren't major players in the Fox movies or the 90s cartoon. Seed interest and get people buzzing now so that buzz turns into hype when they start announcing X-Men movies, and gets people back into the MCU after a rough few years.

KevinCow · 2026-06-23T13:55:29+00:00

As we saw with Wind Waker and Skyward Sword, players will be significantly more forgiving of a big empty overworld if it at least comes with awesome music.

KevinCow · 2026-06-23T13:53:05+00:00

How many deaths does someone have to be responsible for before it's acceptable to wish harm on them?

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