The people running the Marvel Cinematic Universe are incredibly canny in how they adapt Marvel source material. I wouldn’t have thought you could have an alternate-reality Loki who was an alligator or a Thanos who wasn’t a vaguely silly adolescent character idea of a monster who was in love with the abstract universal spirit of Death herself. But they went there with Loki and they made Thanos work as a character.
They do it by cleaning away some of the wretched narrative excess that collects on long-running comic-book characters like rust. They do it via casting talented actors and then working towards their greatest strengths. (Look at how shrewdly Taika Waititi identified Chris Hemsworth’s abilities as a comedic actor compared to early Marvel director Kenneth Branaugh asking him to play Muscles McHamlet.) They do it with a house style of blending humor and seriousness. They do it by increasingly audacious staging of really comic-book scenes like Thor forging a new hammer or the big battle in Endgame.
Even with all that, I’m pessimistic that they can work their magic with Kang the Conqueror, who is maybe the worst major recurring villain in all of comics. They got a good start by casting Jonathan Majors, who managed to make the first appearance of some version of Kang pretty compelling in the recent Loki miniseries. That gave us a pretty good hint about where they’re going to go with the character, at least initially—and casting Majors suggests that they’re planning on having him around for a while as a major adversary. He’s going to be in the upcoming Ant-Man film, and many observers suspect he’ll at least make an appearance in The Eternals.
If you’re the unusual soul reading my newsletter who doesn’t read comics and you’ve gotten this far in today’s entry, you may be hoping I’ll explain who this character is. Just trying to explain the character makes me feel justified in my dislike for him.
He’s stems from a fairly familiar 50-70s pulp trope that was particularly popular in comics: the time-traveller from the future who has exotic weapons and maybe soldiers drawn from every era of human history: laser pistols in each hand, commanding cavemen riding dinosaurs, stealth bombers, Boston Dynamic dancing robots with pulsar guns in their nipples and disco balls for heads, you name it. The conqueror from the future was a close cousin of the mutant man who has evolved into a future human form with a gigantic brain and the mad scientist or exotic mercenary who can summon weapons from the future — they’re all all straight out of an Atomic Age interest in futurity. As brief one-offs, these characters are fine, especially if they don’t have all that much control over their access to the future. The Justice League’s enemy T.O. Morrow is the mad scientist type—he can’t really see everything that’s going to happen, but he gets just enough of a glimpse of possible future technologies that he can use them in the present. Even that’s a causal loop that doesn’t bear close thinking (it was the major plot point of Terminator 2, after all) but it’s a fine gimmick for a once-in-a-while bad guy.
Kang, though, didn’t end up on the minor villain sidelines. He became a regular presence in the Marvel Universe. Trying to recite his history as a character is one of those oh god do I really read these things experiences. His Wikipedia entry sorts it out as clearly as it is humanly possible. He’s the future descendant of the leader of the Fantastic Four, Reed Richards. Though it’s also been suggested he’s somehow related to Doctor Doom. He’s pretended to be an Egyptian pharoah using the name Rama-Tut, with a time machine hidden inside the Sphinx. He’s had a different suit of armor in which he calls himself the Scarlet Centurion (also worn by his cloned son). His older self is called Immortus, who seems to exist in a limbo outside of time, where he manipulates events. And he’s Kang, who rules over the future as a conqueror but periodically drops into earlier time periods to try and conquer them—and who has a thing for fighting the Avengers. He’s also a younger self using the name “Iron Lad” who hangs out with the good guys to try and stop his future self as Kang. And whoops, he actually kills his future self, but these things happen.
Time-travelling characters almost always create narrative diarrhea in any long-running serial or story, especially if the setting wasn’t expressly created with time-travelling in mind. Doctor Who has never stopped struggling with the problems that time travel creates (which the relaunched show has cleverly hand-waved at by having the Doctor refer to various paradoxes and complexities as “timey wimey” mysteries that they cannot really explain to their human friends).
Kang is essentially lethal narrative cholera in those terms.
Marvel settled with a time-travel ruleset early on that if you change the past, all you’re doing is creating an alternate timeline that branches off at that moment. That is storytelling catnip in a shared intellectual-property universe where the characters only rarely can be allowed to change meaningfully and can really never be allowed to age. Marvel in the 1970s and 1980s used to be very proud of its promise that its continuity was inviolate, that the characters’ past adventures would continue to have really happened. But at some point, that plainly became impossible, because Reed Richards and Ben Grimm were originally World War II veterans, because all of Marvel’s superheroes had occasionally referenced events in the real world that would make all of them relatively elderly by 1980 (even Peter Parker would have to be around 35). So the only way to tell stories where characters aged, made dramatic decisions that changed everything, died, etc. was via alternative realities and time-travel. (That’s where the comic series What If? that’s now animated show on Disney + came from.)
So what about Kang bopping around all over time trying to conquer the world, sometimes causing consequential changes? The writers eventually decided that meant he was creating alternative branching versions of himself every single time, across an infinite multiverse. This eventually led to a multiversal “Council of Kangs” with lizard Kangs, female Kangs, tall Kangs, short Kangs, you name it. Which in turn led to the “original” Kang getting annoyed and killing off all his multiversal duplicates (how that didn’t lead to yet more duplicates each time isn’t clear). Then writer Kurt Busiek, who has terrific skills for trying to wrap up a messy continuity, did his best in Avengers Forever to get Kang back to his essentials and clean up the massive storytelling mess around the character and proceeded to tell the only genuinely good Kang story to date after he had finished the clean-up, collected in trade paperback as “The Kang Dynasty”.
And then other writers like Brian Michael Bendis and Rick Remender started making a mess again.
The problem with the character really is not time-travel per se. It’s that he has almost no consistent personality or core motivations. What little he does have is just kind of stupid when you stop to think about it a bit. In a medium that is obsessed with origins as a renewable source of motivation and identity, Kang comes from a setting that is vague (some alternate 31st Century that has been depicted in a wide variety of ways, a point that Kang himself makes in “The Kang Dynasty”) and so we really have no sense of his formative circumstances into his adulthood.
I ought to like him because he’s usually portrayed as a devoted amateur historian in a time where nobody cares about the past, but even that doesn’t endear him to me. The major motivation tied to his beginnings seems to be “he’s bored and he thinks the past looks more interesting, plus he thinks he’s the descendent of someone important and he happens to get his hands on some time travel technology that just been left lying around”. So basically he goes on 31st Century Ancestry.com and gets excited and then decides to go LARP in Egypt, whereupon he gets a taste for being an autocratic military leader and adopts that as a career.
That’s pretty much it. In “The Kang Dynasty”, Busiek tries to establish him as someone who has a real ethos—he refuses to use time-travelling tricks to defeat enemies (“time is our canvas, not our weapon”) and who just plain enjoys battle (but also wants to win). He wants to go out fighting rather than eventually turn into the more scholarly, reflective Immortus, so he’s also trying to train up a son to take his place. (We find out eventually that he’s gone through many clone duplicates of his son because they all disappoint him sooner or later.) But even this deeper cut on the character leaves Kang as a kind of fetishist hobbyist who has a thing he enjoys that has to be just so or it’s no fun: he’s really into foot porn but high heels and latex only, or he’s got an Instagram for woodcarving but only bamboo carved with special Japanese knives that you don’t touch with your hands while you carve it.
He comes off almost like an incel—a person with no real human ties in his real world who goes looking in time for a woman who will love him, a son he can raise, soldiers who worship him, peers who respect him. He gets the woman, but she variously doesn’t really love him, dies just as she might love him, stabs him in the back, plays him for a fool, works with his other selves. He gets the son but he ends up murdering him over and over again because he has too much of a mind of his own. He gets the soldiers who worship him but that’s just because he can dump them in some temporal backwater any time he gets bored with his toys. He gets peers—mostly superheroes—but his personality is different enough each time that they regard him as dangerous but don’t respect him or even really talk to him as such. He doesn’t have an individual archenemy, he’s never had a story where he’s intimately connected to an antagonist or where the background of his previous stories carries over meaningfully. In “The Kang Dynasty”, he destroys Washington DC and kills millions, as well as forces the Avengers to sign an unconditional surrender. The next time they run into him, nobody even mentions it and it’s unclear whether it actually happened in any sense.
So nothing compounds emotionally or narratively in Kang’s appearances, even the lack of that accumulation doesn’t accumulate. The Avengers never seem to really notice that each Kang they encounter isn’t really the same as the last one in terms of personality or goals or outlook. The one who shows up after “The Kang Dynasty” is suddenly playing tricks with time-travel and isn’t at all into honorable conquest—and also seems to have shed the legions of troops and the clone sons and the vague sense of being tired of it all. Nobody notices, including Kang himself. If he’s going to work in the MCU, they’re going to need more than a great acting job: they’re going to have to decide who this character actually is, something that hasn’t happened in sixty years of previous storytelling.
Image credit: "Kang" by sharkhats is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0