Iman Vellani is best known for bringing Kamala Khan to life across Ms. Marvel and The Marvels, but this month she stepped behind the page as a writer. Chachu, her first solo comic and her first creator-owned work, arrived from Image Comics on August 5, and it trades capes and cosmic stakes for something far more personal.
A neo-noir road trip, not a superhero story
Set in 1979, Chachu follows Leila, a 19-year-old Pakistani-Canadian with a love of film and pulp detective novels, who travels to California hoping to reconnect with her estranged uncle. That uncle, whom she affectionately calls her “chachu,” is a semi-retired private eye once famous for marrying the very starlet he had been hired to find. When the man’s wife vanishes again, the pair are thrown together on an unplanned road-trip investigation that turns Leila’s first real taste of adulthood into a reckoning with family secrets and long-buried grief.
Vellani has said the story grew out of her own coming-of-age experiences in the entertainment industry. She has spoken about being drawn to comics for their “capacity to hold contradiction” better than almost any other medium, a tension that runs through the book’s mix of mourning and momentum.
A stacked creative team
Vellani is far from working alone. The five-issue miniseries is illustrated by Marianna Ignazzi (Exquisite Corpses), colored by Eisner Award winner Jordie Bellaire (Absolute Wonder Woman), and lettered by Lucas Gattoni, with the project packaged by Tiny Onion for Image. Ignazzi has described building the film’s world through reflections in sunglasses and rearview mirrors, cigarette smoke, and neon, the visual grammar of a lived-in 1970s.
Why it matters
Vellani is not a total newcomer to comics writing. She previously co-wrote several issues of Ms. Marvel with Sabir Pirzada. But Chachu is her first time steering a book entirely on her own, and doing it at Image, on a creator-owned title, is a meaningful statement. An MCU headliner choosing an intimate indie mystery over a franchise tie-in says a lot about where her interests lie, and it is exactly the kind of debut that makes the indie side of the shelf worth watching.
Chachu #1 (of 5) is on shelves now from Image Comics.
