Comic Book / Kamen America

Kamen America is a superhero comic series and the flagship property of Iconic Comics. It is written by Mark Pellegrini and illustrated by Tim Lim, together known as NINJAINK.

Carly Vanders is an all-American girl who loves fashion design and wants to help her nation. During a USO performance for American troops, she's hit by irradiated space debris and given incredible powers. From there she becomes the superheroine known as Kamen America and vows to protect innocent people from all that might threaten them, including a series of villains who also gained powers from the space debris... and some monsters who happen to be much closer to home.

Eight issues of Kamen America have been released as of September 2023, as well as a couple of crossover issues with some of Iconic Comics' other properties. There are also two webcomic spinoffs of the series, Kamen America: The Web Series and Kamen Academy, and some Japanese doujinshi.

Kamen America contains the following tropes:

• A Dog Named "Cat": Carly's pet, named Badger, is actually a capybara.
• Addiction-Powered: Downplayed, but Kimiko reveals that her water-based powers can work on the water in alcohol too. Thus, if there's no water around, she can make do in a pinch by drinking alcohol and going from there.
• All-American Face: Carly started out as an ambitious American girl who loves her country, and her superhero outfit incorporates the American flag. Kamen America's innocent looking blond hair and blue eyes also invoke the Phenotype Stereotype of how Americans are percieved to look like in Japan, enriching the Animesque and Sentai influences the Comic incorporates.
• Alpha Bitch: Carly originally saw Sylvia as this, since Sylvia was wealthy, popular, and somewhat insensitive towards Carly herself. This was compounded after Sylvia was given a suit of Powered Armor which let her become a 'rival' hero to Carly. The two got over it and were eventually able to team up.
• Animesque: While the main comic is not a Japanese Manga, its artstyle invokes Manga and Anime designs as per the page's cover image just as much as it does from western superhero comics. Kamen America also markets itself heavily to Japanese audiences as well thanks to its familiar style, official Japanese translations, and its title of "Kamen America" that shows it draws from Sentai series as well. Both fan and official art produced by the comic's Japanese audiences as well as additional promotional media made by Japan therefore looks indistinguishable from how the main comic is drawn.
• Big Bad Friend: Vicki, Carly's best friend since childhood, is revealed to be the villainous Vermillion Masquerade, the arc villain for the first four issues.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: The second arc features a plot where a seemingly globalist team of false superheroes are manufacturing disasters and alien robot attacks supposedly instigated by "light pollution" are secretly a ploy to push a radical climate agenda, while the conservative All-American hero is declared a lunatic conspiracy theorist for trying to expose these problems. This matches Republican depictions of real-world issues such as global warming and the COVID-19 Pandemic.
• Elemental Powers: Each character that was hit by Venus-contaminated debris develops these. Carly has electric powers, Misha has fire powers, Kimiko has water powers, and Vicki has earth powers.
• Engineered Heroics: Carly's arch nemesis Vermillion Masquerade turns out to be her best friend Vicki... who secretly worked with Lansky to create monsters that Carly could fight and defeat. This benefitted Lansky, who merchandised both the monsters and the heroes, and it also helped Carly by giving her a chance to showcase her heroics. Of course, when Carly found out about this, she was extremely unhappy.
• Expy: Carly Vanders is an expy of both DC's Supergirl and Marvel's Captain Marvel, who respectively have the similar names of Kara Danvers and Carol Danvers and are already expies of each other. Similar names aside, Kamen America's outfits draw from both Supergirl's All-American Face and Captain Marvel's original Ms. Fanservice Leotard of Power, and not there's also all 3 parties sharing blond hair. Her previous alias as "Warhen" is a play on Carol's stint as Warbird. They also possess similar powers.
• Evil Matriarch: Sylvia's mother Cynthia is one of the main villains of the series.
• Fictional Country:
  • Toepkekistan, which is a mountainous country seemingly somewhere in Central Asia that's vaguely similar to Afghanistan.
  • Misha aka Kamen Comet comes from an unnamed fictional country in Eastern Europe. She'll have you know she's not Russian, she just did mercenary work for them.
• Fire-Forged Friends: Carly and Sylvia hated each other for a long time, culminating with them fighting each other in petty grudge match. It was there, however, when both came to realize they had no reason to hate each other. Not long after, they would become very close friends, and teammates as part of the Kamen Corps.
• Genre Mashup: A Western superhero comic that borrows heavily from the Magical Girl genre. It also has quite a bit of political Satire as well.
• Good Shepherd: Carly's priest, Father Blatty, is depicted as being compassionate and caring towards his congregation. He's also revealed to be part of the Vatican's combat exorcist program, though he may have retired from that.
• High School AU: The second web series, Kamen Academy, functions as this: it sets all the main characters as students in the same high school.
• Legacy Character: Deconstructed. Sylvia turns down the opportunity to usurp Carly's superhero identity, stating that the identity of 'Kamen America' isn't defined by a uniform or set of powers. Instead, she declares that the hero's identity is instead uniquely Carly's on account of all the good deeds and heroic work Carly had done while using that name.
• Loose Canon: How Kamen America treats the Wall-Might series that Kamen America and several other characters (namely Marmot Maiden and Icetosterone) debuted in. Because it's much more farcical compared to the more serious tone of this story, the creators are very reluctant to acknowledge the events of those books as having fully happened for real. The basic idea is "If you think it's canon, great! If you don't think it's canon, also great!". For what it's worth, Wall-Might makes a speechless cameo appearance in the first volume, and some things like Kamen America's early gig as Warhen are referenced as Broad Strokes.
• Making a Splash: Kimiko's powers let her control and use water as a weapon.
• Ms. Fanservice: Carly herself is this; she is conventionally attractive and often fights in a Leotard of Power. Moreover, her outfits in general accentuate this for her team, which causes some problems when monsters attack during a fashion show and Sylvia has to run back to the hotel while wearing one of Carly's skimpy outfits so she can get her power armor and deal with the threat.
• Occidental Otaku: Bandit Okami is a Hispanic guy who is absolutely obsessed with anime and manga.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted. There are two characters named Cynthia in the series: Cynthia Wormwood, the Straw Feminist teacher that Carly and Vicki had in their youth, and Cynthia Prestige aka Kamen Unity, Sylvia's stepmother, head of Prestige Inc. and overall Big Bad of the series.
• Phenotype Stereotype: Though it's a western superhero comic, Kamen America is heavily Manga Influenced too (as per the name of the comic), and therefore Carly's All-American Face, blond hair, blue eyes, tall height and general proportions poke at how Japanese audiences stereotypically view Americans.
• Private Military Contractors: Carly has to fight these on a somewhat regular basis. Misha started as an employee of one before she defected and joined the Kamen Corps, and Hare Trigger ran one.
• Privileged Rival: Sylvia starts off as one of these, thanks to her family's immense wealth. Eventually, Carly and Sylvia become close friends.
• Radiation-Induced Superpowers: Carly, Misha, Kimiko, and Vicki all develop these as a result of being struck by debris from a space probe that had been contaminated by Venus radiation. Sylvia also develops these after spending long periods of time wearing a suit of powered armor that had radioactive particles in it.
• Redemption Demotion: Vicki loses most of her powers after she finally surrenders to the Kamen Corps and begins her process of redemption.
• Sadist Teacher: Downplayed. While Wormwood isn't truly sadistic, she's certainly disrespectful and cruel to Carly and Vicki, belittling their interests and insisting they develop different ones. Near the end of her life, she realizes she was wrong and apologizes.
• Shared Universe: Most obviously, with Black Hops, which is also created by Timothy Lim and Mark Pellegrini, and the two of which are part of a series referred to by the creators as "Kamenality". However, both of them also share the same universe with Soulfinder by Doug Ernst, Rags by Brian Ball, Punchline by Matt Weldon, Longharbor by Alejandro Mirabal, and Tomorrow Girl by Ben Dunn, albeit their continuities are less intertwined.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: This series is close to the 'idealism' side of the scale. The heroes are generally able to stop and even redeem the villains without having to make moral compromises.
• Smooth-Talking Talent Agent: Lansky, the depraved talent agent whom Carly ultimately fires, is one of these.
• Stop Being Stereotypical: Wormwood is adamant that Carly and Vicki are 'wrong' for liking stereotypically feminine interests such as fashion and art, and she tries to push them to have more 'masculine' interests like sports. By the end of her life, though, it's indicated that she mellowed out.
• Straw Character:
  • The Fateful Lightning Arc has an entire team of them. the Zenerengers are a team of heroes who put on a show of global unity and champion progressive messages such as opposing pollution and touting diversity, only to be revealed to be frauds who hate each other, are not actually heroic, and are Only in It for the Money, being a rather blatant Take That! at the "political messaging over likable heroes" concept.
  • Any character, villain or background civilian, that questions Kamen America's conservative beliefs or her attempts to expose the villainous acts of the Zenerengers is written as an ignorant thug who is treated either as a fool or a lunatic. Minor flashback character Ms. Wormwood is an early example.
• Take That!: There's quite a few, either done directly or more subtly interwoven into the narrative, done from a right-wing conservative perspective.
  • Nero Lansky's agency Lansky & Schultz is one to real world talent agencies that tout the ideas of "diversity and inclusion", but only for the optics and the potential to make more money. Notably, in the first volume, he suggests giving Warhen a black female sidekick named "Major Babe" because she's "diverse", and they'll say that she came up with the "Babe" part herself (thus it's "empowering, not sexist").
  • Also in the first volume, Carly asks Misha if they get US media in Russia, when Misha already knew about her. She replies "Just CNN. They don't like you very much." This is a rather obvious dig on CNN's perceived left-wing bias.
  • Ms. Wormwood in general is made as Take That! to modern feminists, as someone who pushes female students to do manly things against their feminine desires, sees traditional femininity as a weakness, and overall ends up Dying Alone.
  • Carly's father Charles has a design that looks almost exactly like Carol Danvers as Captain Marvel, just a bit more masculine. This is likely a dig on the modern version of Carol Danvers, who is often criticized by the detractors as looking too masculine.
  • When Sylvia Prestige first becomes Kamen UN, there's clearly a dig on globalism, where she says that "borders are just a social construct". Naturally, Kamen UN is just an Unwitting Pawn for Vermillion Masquerade, taking part in an Engineered Heroics scheme until she learns the truth, after which she abandons the identiy in favor of Kamen Victory.
  • Sylvia explicitly shoots down the opportunity to usurp Carly's title as Kamen America, explaining that "Kamen America" isn't defined as a mantle, but it uniquely belongs to Carly herself. While a powerful moment in the story, it's also a more subtle dig on the idea that character identities are just "mantles" that can be handed down, which Marvel Comics and DC Comics are known to do.
  • Cynthia Prestige / Kamen Unity is largely based on the idea of real world Corrupt Corporate Executives that present themselves as heroic and virtuous in public as a front, but are actually evil and hurting people in reality, matching up with the conservative viewpoint of the creators. Her "light pollution" scheme is very clearly an analogy for climate change.
  • The Zenerangers as a whole are a dig on diversity-approved, politically correct organizations that signal how virtuous they are, but have no real virtues of their own. The Zenerangers are written as only being good guys on the surface level, while actually being full-on villains. Also, they can't stand each other, often making digs at each other for their differences, and making it clear they're only being forced to work together for the optics of it.
• Toku: The henchmen in the second arc, the Zenerengers, are modeled off of these.
• Villain with Good Publicity: Cynthia presents herself as a righteous activist who is using her resources to protect people, and she's widely beloved for it, but she's actually a villainous monster.
• Wall of Text: When Dr. Gracey explains the science behind Carly's new Swiftsword, his words fill up the entire panel, though with his head obscuring about half of them. Sylvia immediately regrets asking him.
• World of Action Girls: The female characters are the main focus and the overall driving force of the series, from the heroes, to the villains and even side characters.
• World of Buxom: Most of the main female heroes and villains in Kamen America and its Shared Universe are quite well-endowed and beautiful.