Kang and his place in the Marvel multiverse, explained

For nearly 60 years, the time-traveling malcontent Kang — who makes his big-screen debut in Quantumania: Ant-Man & the Wasp After a tease last week, this week Loki season 1 — has been a staple of Marvel Comics. Yet if you mention his name to a Marvel fan, don’t be surprised if a certain familiar look comes into their eye; that glazed, vacant, middle-distance stare of instant apathy that can only mean:

“Oh, God. Kang again?”

In space, no one can hear you scream — but that doesn’t stop an evil-doer from trying. Polygon is celebrating sci-fi villainy this week because somebody has (or else).

The trouble is that Kang, with his one-dimensional villainy and retro-Silver Age sneering, has become synonymous with impenetrable storylines that are about 10 steps too complicated for their own good: navel-gazing, self-referential comics that obsess over their own continuity for continuity’s sake. If you were a multidimensional warlord in 3000 A.D. your life might be at the very least interesting. Boredom, however, is an emotion Kang might sympathize.

This is a crime beyond what Kang can have imagined, readers. This is or should be. NothingIt’s boring to see a garishly dressed, extravagantly outrageous, multidimensional, time-traveler with multiple dimensions who dresses up for laughs as an Egyptian Pharaoh. Kang can be great when he’s recognized as the Marvel universe’s most sinister villain.

Kang is who?

Jonathan Majors as Kang the Conqueror in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. He wears a shiny, engraved power suit and sad. His face has two scars that run from from hairline to eyebrow and then cheek to jaw.

Nathaniel Richards, a man born in the 31st century, found war, conflict, struggle, and victory all too boring. In an effort to replicate the heroic deeds and feats of warlords such as Genghis Khan or Alexander, Richards travelled backwards in time and conquered everyone and everything. (If you’re wondering, Kang is a Fern descendant of Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four, but that’s less a central building block of his character and more a piece of trivia.)

Kurt Busiek is a comic writer. This simple idea holds the key to understanding what makes Kang so interesting. He was the author of many Kang stories during his time on The Observer. Avengers title, Busiek would be the first to admit that he has, in his words, “some skin in the game” when it comes to this character. But as he tells Polygon via email, “I think he works best when he isn’t treated as some generic time-traveling villain… Any story where Kang uses time travel to sneak around and set things up for him to win easily in some coming conflict seems to me to miss the point of the character. He doesn’t want easy. If he did he could have stayed at home.”

Busiek discovered the secret ingredient to great Kang stories across history. It is the fundamental fact that the character has been portrayed so well by many authors. Kang the Conqueror’s ridiculousness is not surprising. He is chaotically over-the-top and flamboyantly evil, and he’s the first person in the world to admit it. He doesn’t even have superpowers: Just an endless array of deus ex machina future tech. He is unapologetically brilliantly willful and magnificently. Strange. And that’s just the way Marvel should keep him.

To understand that central weirdness, you need to go back and look at Kang’s very first comic appearance — a story in which he isn’t even Kang at all.

In Arizona, in the year 3000.

Rama-Tut, wearing his big Pharaoh hat, explains that he is quite familiar with the Fantastic Four. “How can he know about us a thousand years before we were born?” the Human Torch asks — “And he’s talking English!! Before the language was even invented! This is nutty!” exclaims the Thing, in Fantastic Four #19 (1963).

Pharaoh Rama-Tut explains to Reed Richards that he is also a time traveler in ancient Egypt, who has subdued them with technology from the year 3000. He shows off his Ultra-Diode Ray, which just looks like a gun, man, in Fantastic Four #19 (1963).

Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and their creative partnership was just beginning in 1963. Even though it was still a very early stage of their creative partnership, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby already knew they had what it took to create the occasional glimmers of mad genius in all aspects. In that year’s Fantastic Four #19: The foursome journey back to the past to find lost medical technology. However, they are immediately captured by the soldiers of Rama-Tut, who is a mad, megalomaniacal time-traveler and ray gun-wielding Pharaoh.

Rama Tut has a ridiculous part. He draws inspiration from TV dramas of the 1950s and his outfit strongly reminds me of a Steve Martin costume. Amazingly, the time machine that he takes to the past is actually the literal Sphinx. The panel where he brings the monument down to earth after zipping through time-space remains beautiful six decades later.

“And so I travelled back into the dim past, back to the land of ancient Egypt in my marvelous time machine,” says Kang, over a panel of his time machine, which is shaped like the Sphinx, slamming ignominiously into the Saharan sand in Fantastic Four #19 (1963).

Rama Tut’s story was not something readers were likely to consider serious at first, even though it had been written by Silver Age Marvel Comics. It was another character who could easily be forgotten if it wasn’t for an unusual and unexpected decision just one year later. In 1964’s Avengers #8, the Kirby and Lee team introduce us to a brazenly self-confident warlord from the future, intent on picking a fight with the Earth’s greatest heroes.

This, for the first time, is Kang in the identity and purple-bedecked costume in which we’d come to know him. He is a shaman right from the beginning. MoreHis personality is what you would expect from him, with his sexually arrogant confidence in himself and his insolent certainty in his success. When we first catch sight of him, he’s lounging like a Playboy centerfold on what can only be described as an invisible flying beanbag chair, and lackadaisically declaring, “No need for such unseemly speed! Kang the Conqueror doesn’t care about time!!” (Thor’s deadpan reply, “I find his confidence disturbing,” is a model of perfect Stan Lee comic timing.)

The Avengers confront Kang the Conqueror for the first time. Kang is dressed in a green tunic and purple thigh-high boots and cuffed gloves, belted with a purple harness. His face is covered by a purple helmet with an impassive blue mask, as he looks looks at a strange technological doohickey and lounges on a transparent floating beanbag chair. “No need for such unseemly speed!” he says, “Time means nothing to Kang, the Conqueror!!” in Avengers #8 (1964).

Most importantly, however, is the surprise revelation: Kang is not a past version of Rama Tut. Kang was sent back to Egypt on a wrong course and he has since been able to move forward. OwnFuture before we return to the present. It was extremely unusual. A bit of unexpected, and totally unnecessary, linking of continuity that gave a simple character just enough head-spinning complication to be mind-trippy in an early-’60s sort of way. The brilliant and bizarre move was by Kirby & Lee and made Kang just odd enough to be a staple in Marvel’s Marvel universe.

Then it got even more strange. Lee and Don Heck introduced a new product two months later. Third time-traveling ne’er-do-well, this one going by the name Immortus. Unlike the immediate Kang/Tut connection, it’s unlikely that Lee had any idea at this early stage that he was multiplying Kang’s identity yet again.

And yet, despite themselves, they were, which brings us to the next absurd thing we need to understand about Kang: No matter how much continuity-loathing readers might hate him, it’s not nearly as much as he hates himself.

The passage of time can make me change

Captain America confronts Immortus, who is seated upon a throne wearing a tall-ass hat. “You may approach the presence of... Immortus!” he cries, in Avengers #10 (1964).

About a decade has passed since Kang & Immortus were introduced for the first time in AvengersSteve Englehart, an author, chose to connect the characters by stating that Immortus was actually the future iteration Kang. He is now more mature and determined to stop the irreparable mistakes made by his younger, braggart self.

Englehart explained his reasoning to Polygon via email: “When I wrote my first Kang story, people told me no one had ever written a coherent time travel story; there were always things that didn’t connect. I tried my best to solve that myself, and I think any Kang story that connects all the dots has the potential to be good, while any story that hasn’t been thought all the way through is never gonna get there.”

Englehart’s editor and predecessor as Avengers writer, Roy Thomas, concurs, explaining via email, “Any time travel story mostly just has to involve the reader in either solving an historical question or in bringing about (or avoiding!) A particular historical result. It was that basis. […] of the handful of Kang stories I wrote.”

No surprise, then, that writers have increasingly made halting his own alternate selves one of Kang’s central preoccupations from Englehart’s day to our own. Years later (or maybe earlier, this is Kang we’re talking about, after all), writer Allan Heinberg and artist Jim Cheung would introduce the character of Iron Lad in their 2005 Young AvengersTo the surprise and delight of his teammates, he was actually an alternate junior Iron Man. He is a teenager version Kang who wants to avoid becoming a villain.

“Iron Lad is Kang the Conqueror?” Jessica Jones, Captain America, and Iron Man question Iron Lad/Kang. “No!” Iron Lad insists. “Well, not yet. It’s hard to explain. I’m supposed to become Kang. In the future,” in Young Avengers #2 (2005).

While Kiddie Kang might not have succeeded, with timelines turning out to be cruel and incontinental in the end for many, the story of his struggle against adulthood remains one the most enjoyable Kang stories. And if all of this twisting and turning through the timeline is starting to sound like more trouble than it’s worth, don’t worry: Kang has a solution to that, too.

Kangdom come

From Kang’s earliest days, Marvel has had the wisdom to embrace the contradictions and time loops in his biography for what they are: gloriously stupid and perfectly bizarre. Consider the early instance (from Kirby and Lee’s Fantastic Four Annual #2) Rama-Tut encounters Doctor Doom, a time-lost antagonist while floating in space-time. The two men briefly consider killing each other, but then they are stopped in their tracks when they realize that the person in question might be one from different parts of the timestream. It is the Kirby/Lee sci fi version of your worst stoned room conversation. This could be the most famous Marvel Comics sequence.

In fact, there were so many Kangs that they ended up populating Marvel’s timelines and multiverses. Many writers used the trope to shorten or escape stories, making it increasingly difficult for both character and publisher. With this in mind, Roger Stern and Walt Simonson introduced the Council of Cross-Time Kangs. This Kang Gang was made up of members from all time periods and is dedicated to keeping unruly Kangs and their universes under control. The gathering turns out to be big enough to fill a whole-ass arena, hootin’ and hollerin’ their way to world domination.

Kang stands before an arena filled with “thousands” of Kangs from other universes in the multiverse, all gesturing, clapping, and talking. “Wonderful!” “Superb!” “He’ll make a fine addition to the ranks!” in Avengers #292 (1988).

It’s the most bonkers concept in a career devoted to them, and it exemplifies the Kang ethos in a nutshell: Kang is everything, everywhere, and everybody he needs to be. It’s always, constantly, too much, and therefore doomed to failure, but that doesn’t matter. It’s the absurdity that makes it fun.

So when Kang stories fail, it’s because latter-day comic writers, working in the shadow of WatchmenAnd Dark Knight and the conviction that comics aren’t just for kids, can’t wrap their heads around the notion of stories becoming beautiful by grace of their unabashed stupidity. Kang is embarrassed of them and they get a little too excited.

They might do well to remember Busiek’s words of wisdom when it comes to the character. “He’s not Dr. Doom, he’s not the Red Skull, he’s not Magneto,” Busiek says. “He’s Alexander the Great in purple pinstriped hip boots at the head of a sci-fi army. And every battle is do or die, because otherwise you ain’t really alive.”

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