Today, we look at how Marvel has handled the question of how many Kangs have the Avengers actually faced over the years and the answer is...confusing.
In Abandoned an' Forsaked, we examine comic book stories and ideas that were not only abandoned, but also had the stories/plots specifically "overturned" by a later writer (as if they were a legal precedent).
My friend Fraser S. wrote in to suggest that I cover this one, and I guess I will, damn him! Damn him to heck! I kid, Fraser, you know I like talking about this stuff, even when it is incredibly confusing...like pretty much everything to do with Kang, really.
Okay, to recap, in 1963's Fantastic Four #19 (by Kirby, Lee and Dick Ayers), the Fantastic Four traveled to the past on a wild goose chase for a cure for blindness and then met Rama-Tut, a pharaoh who was actually from the distant future!
A year later, the Avengers ran afoul of a new time-traveling villain, Kang the Conquerer, in Avengers #8 (by Kirby, Lee and Ayers).
That same issue has Kirby and Lee make the incredibly unusual decision of having Kang be a future version of Rama-Tut.
Two issues later, Don Heck and Stan Lee (with Ayers) then introduced ANOTHER time-traveling villain, Immortus, the Master of Time...
In Avengers Annual #2 (by Roy Thomas, Heck, Werner Roth and Vince Colletta), we also learn that before he became Kang, Rama-Tut briefly became the Scarlet Centurion, but that whole experience was allegedly wiped from his memory after he was defeated by the Avengers in an alternate reality.
Kang became a regular villain for the Avengers. A decade after his debut, Kang the Conqueror returned to attack the Avengers, as he had determined that one of the Avengers was the Celestial Madonna and was going to give birth to a powerful child and Kang wanted in on that. Kang captures the Avengers easily and things look bleak. However, at the end of Avengers #129 (by Steve Englehart, Sal Buscema and Joe Staton), the Sworsdman was directed by the captures Harkness to go find....Rama-Tut?!?
In the next issue, Giant-Sized Avengers #2 (by Englehart and Dave Cockrum), Rama-Tut teamed up with Swordsman and Hawkeye (who was not on the Avengers at the time) to help defeat Kang and in the process, Rama-Tut and Kang came face to face and their fight literally BROKE TIME LOOSE FROM ITS HINGES!!
Then, in in Giant-Size Avengers #3 (by Englehart, Roy Thomas, Cockrum and Joe Giella), Immortus lets the Avengers know that he, Kang and Rama-Tut are all different versions of the same guy!
So the concept was now well-established there are variants of Kang out there in the Multiverse. However, Roger Stern was about to kick things up a notch. In Avengers #267 (by Stern, John Buscema and Tom Palmer), he reveals that there is a Council of Kangs that get rid of all of the incompetent Kangs from alternate timelines...
The introduction of the Council, of course, also brings up the question of which Kangs have the Avengers actually fought. Were they fighting a different Kang each time? We then learn that the Council, itself, is designed to get the most powerful Kangs to think that they are working together so the better to attack each other and at the end of the story, in Avengers #269, there is allegedly only one Kang left...
That story, though, ended with the "one true" Kang exposed to the minds of all of the dead Kangs...
However, in Avengers #292 (by Walter Simonson, Buscem and Palmer), we see that there is a MUCH BIGGER Cross-time Council of Kangs...
Eventually, though, in back-ups during the Citizen Kang crossover in the Thor, Captain America, Avengers and Fantastic Four Annuals of 1992, Peter Sanderson wrote a series of back-ups that have Kang reveal the ability to leap from body to body before death in a back-up story by Peter Sanderson, Rich Yanizeski and Ray Kryssing in Fantastic Four Annual #25...
And therefore, the implication is that there has only ever really been ONE Kang who has ever fought the Avengers...
It was just a dude jumping out of bodies whenever he was about to die.
We also learned in Avengers Annual #21 (by Sanderson, Yanizeski and Fred Fredericks) that this Kang formed and manipulated the so-called Cross-time Council of Kangs and so they really weren't an alternate reality group of Kangs at all...
It all serves the purpose of making it clear that there really is just one MAIN Kang, and a bunch of other variants mucking things up, but the Avengers have just been fighting against this one guy over the years.
When Kurt Busiek and Roger Stern tackled this problem in Avengers Forever #9 (by Busiek, Stern, Carlos Pacheco and Jesue Merino), they cleverly just had Kang say, in effect, that he has jumped so many times that even he can't keep it all straight.
I think that that is almost certainly the way to go here, as you're never going to keep it all straight otherwise. That same Avengers Forever issue also cleverly had Kang get rid of the ability to switch his mind into other bodies, as Busiek and Stern correctly ascertained that that really takes away pretty much all drama from a Kang encounter if you know that Kang literally can't die. I mean, we all know villains are EFFECTIVELY immortal by virtue of there always being a new writer down the line who will want to use them, but that's better than literally writing it into the story that Kang CANNOT die.
0 Comments