Kang the Conqueror

• 1. Introduction

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  Kang the Conqueror, the Marvel Comics supervillain whose birth name is Nathaniel Richards, first appeared in Fantastic Four #19, dated October 1963. In that issue he wore the crown of a pharaoh and went by Rama-Tut. He was a criminal from the year 3000 who had travelled back in time and taken over ancient Egypt. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created him.

  Within a year the same man would return under a new name, and later under many more. Who was he before the crown? How does one man turn into a whole council of himself? And what does a conqueror do when he keeps colliding with his own past and future?

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• 2. Doom's Shadow

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  September 1964 was the month Kang truly arrived. Fantastic Four Annual #2 brought the pharaoh back, and The Avengers #8 introduced him again under the name Kang. That Avengers issue also settled that Rama-Tut was simply a younger Kang. Immortus had debuted in Avengers #10 in November 1964, and Giant-Size Avengers #3 in February 1975 revealed him to be a later identity of Kang.

  Fantastic Four #19 had hinted that Rama-Tut was a descendant or future incarnation of Doctor Doom, a villain of the Fantastic Four. Fantastic Four #273, from December 1984, pushed the other way. It strongly suggested that Kang descended instead from Nathaniel, the father of Reed Richards, through one of Reed's half-siblings. What If...? Vol. 2 #39, in July 1992, gave Kang the birth name Nathaniel Richards, and the main Marvel continuity later adopted it.

  Avengers Forever #9 in August 1999 and Doctor Doom #6 in March 2020 muddied the question again. They allow that Kang descends from Doom, from Nathaniel, from both, or from neither. Kristoff Vernard, Doom's adoptive son and a half-sibling of Reed, is a particular candidate. In 2021, Kang finally headlined an eponymous miniseries of his own.

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• 3. A Scholar Out of Time

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  In the 31st century, a scholar named Nathaniel Richards grew fascinated with history. He descended from Reed Richards's time-travelling father, also named Nathaniel. He then discovered time machinery built by Victor von Doom, who might also be his ancestor. Aboard a timeship shaped like a Sphinx, he set out for the past and rebuilt himself as Pharaoh Rama-Tut. He planned to claim En Sabah Nur, the mutant destined to become Apocalypse, as his heir. The Fantastic Four, displaced in time themselves, ended his reign.

  Embittered, he travelled forward to the 20th century and met Doctor Doom, whom he suspected of being his ancestor. He built armor modeled on Doom's and called himself the Scarlet Centurion. Under that name he pitted the Avengers, Marvel's team of heroes, against alternate-reality counterparts. The Avengers forced him out of the timeline. A divergent version of him became Victorex Prime, archenemy of the Squadron Supreme.

  A thousand years is how far Nathaniel overshot when he tried to return to the 31st century. He found a planet ruined by endless war, fought with advanced weapons its people no longer understood. Conquering it was simple, and his dominion soon spread across the galaxy. He renamed himself Kang the Conqueror. But his future world was dying, so he turned his eyes to an earlier and more fertile Earth.

  His first foray into the 20th century under his new name would bring him face to face with the Avengers.

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• 4. Ravonna and the Avengers

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  Twenty-four hours was the deadline Kang gave the world to surrender after his first battle with the Avengers. He had captured every member except the Wasp and Rick Jones. Jones and some friends pretended to serve Kang, then double-crossed him once they reached his ship, and the Avengers went free. Kang unleashed radiation that only people from his own era could survive. Thor used his hammer to absorb the rays and hurl them back, and Kang had to flee. A later Spider-Man robot of his was destroyed by the real Spider-Man.

  In his own time, Kang fell for Ravonna, princess of one of his subject kingdoms. She did not return his feelings. To show off his power, he kidnapped the Avengers and, with his army, subdued both them and her rebellious kingdom. When Kang refused to execute Ravonna, his commanders revolted. He freed the Avengers to fight beside him against them. Ravonna was mortally wounded leaping in front of a blast meant for Kang, and in that moment she realized she loved him. Kang sent the Avengers home and placed her body in stasis.

  A Growing Man construct, which grew larger with every blow, brought Kang back to the present day. Neither Thor nor the police could stop the giant, until Kang stepped out of a time machine disguised as a boulder. His ray shrank the construct to doll size so it could be "re-hidden". Kang later reactivated it to kidnap an incapacitated Tony Stark and draw the Avengers into his game.

  To restore Ravonna, Kang struck a wager with the cosmic entity called the Grandmaster, using the Avengers as pawns. A win would grant him temporary power over life and death. The first round ended in stalemate when the Black Knight, unaware of the game, intervened. The Avengers won the second round. Because of the stalemate, Kang had to choose one power, and he chose death over the Avengers. The Black Knight, not an Avenger at that time, was unaffected and stopped him.

  One scheme sent the Hulk to France in 1917 to kill the Phantom Eagle before he could save Bruce Banner's grandfather from a cannon. That would have erased the Hulk and, with him, the Avengers. The Hulk instead destroyed the cannon, which sent him back to the present and projected Kang into Limbo. Limbo was the home of Immortus, and it would not be the last time Kang met him there.

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• 5. Kang Against Kang

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  The Celestial Madonna was the next prize Kang chased, and she turned out to be Mantis. He wanted to marry her because she was apparently destined to bear a powerful child. Help for the Avengers came from an older Kang who was weary of conquest. He had returned to ancient Egypt as Rama-Tut and ruled kindly for ten years. Then he entered suspended animation, planning to wake in the 20th century and counsel his younger self. Even so, he could not prevent the accidental death of the hero Swordsman. During an adventure in Limbo, it emerged that Immortus was the future incarnation of both Kang and Rama-Tut.

  A stray journey by Hawkeye, aimed at the time of the Crusades, dropped him and Kang together into the Old West. Kang began building a stronghold there to conquer the 19th century and, through it, the present. Immortus, the Avengers and the Two-Gun Kid stood against him. Straining to find the strength to beat Thor, Kang overloaded his own armor and destroyed himself. That seemed to erase Immortus and Rama-Tut as well.

  Years later, the Beyonder pulled Kang from the timestream to fight on the villains' side in the first of the Secret Wars. The damage from his travels soon became clear. Although that Kang had died, his time-travelling had spawned a number of alternate Kangs. The Kang who discovered them had been drawn to Limbo after Thor destroyed his time vehicle. Inside Immortus's fortress he found remains he took to be the Lord of Time. He never guessed that Immortus was a version of himself.

  He formed a council with two cunning divergents he could not easily eliminate, and the three began destroying the other Kangs. He then killed one of his partners. Against the other, he brought in the Avengers as part of a plot. That Kang uncovered the scheme, but Ravonna delayed his pursuit by saying that if the first Kang truly loved her, he must spare him. He ignored her and was destroyed. Immortus then revealed that he had faked his death and manipulated everything from behind the scenes. Only the Prime Kang remained. Immortus tricked him into absorbing the memories of every slain Kang, which drove him insane.

  One divergent Kang joined the Crosstime Kang Corps, also called the Council of Cross-Time Kangs. It gathered Kangs from many timelines who were hunting a Celestial "Ultimate Weapon". This Kang called himself "Fred", by his own admission a joke about Fred Flintstone, since a prehistoric name suits a time traveller. In a later battle with the Fantastic Four, Fred was incinerated by a Human Torch possessed by Nebula. Nebula was later rewritten as Ravonna in disguise.

  Terminatrix, a revived Ravonna, was the new foe the recovered Prime Kang met when he captured the Vision and fought the Avengers. Kang was critically injured when he took a blow from Thor's hammer Mjölnir that was meant for her. Terminatrix teleported away with him, placed him in stasis, and took over his empire. When a chronal being named Alioth attacked it, she summoned the Avengers and revived Kang. He helped defeat Alioth, but only after letting the creature kill the entire Crosstime Kang Corps.

  Flashbacks in Avengers Forever reveal the restless man under the armor. Many of his recent actions came from a wish to do something, not from a thirst for power. Trapped by the burdens of his empire, he had once gone back to living as Rama-Tut for a simpler life. As he prepared to become Rama-Tut again, and then Immortus, he glimpsed the future. Immortus served the Time-Keepers of the Time Variance Authority, and Kang recoiled from becoming that "simpering academic". He rejected the destiny and helped the Avengers protect Rick Jones from Immortus's latest scheme.

  When Immortus betrayed the Time-Keepers to try to save the Avengers, they killed him. They then tried to turn Kang into Immortus before Rama-Tut had become Immortus. In that unstable environment, the backlash of Kang's willpower split Immortus and Rama-Tut away from him. Both became clear alternate versions of Kang, not his definitive future. With the weakened Time-Keepers destroyed, Kang rejoiced, since he had technically become them while still being himself. Freedom did not make him gentle, and soon he was planning to conquer Earth again with a son at his side.

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• 6. Heirs and Younger Selves

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  Marcus, the son who took the Scarlet Centurion alias, stood beside Kang when he next tried to conquer Earth. Kang promised a place in his new order to anyone who helped, and villain after villain strained Earth's defenses and the Avengers. He seized the planet's defense systems and forced a surrender by destroying Washington, D.C., killing millions. Captain America eventually beat him in personal combat. Imprisoned, Kang was freed by Marcus, who turned out to be one of a series of clones.

  Kang killed this Marcus for helping Warbird during the invasion and hiding it despite many chances to confess. He said he could forgive treachery that let Marcus become his own man. A traitor who stayed active in his ranks was another matter. Depressed by the loss, Kang retreated from Earth.

  A coma lasting a year, after a confrontation with a bully, was the childhood wound Kang later travelled back to prevent. Meeting his future self horrified the boy so much that he stole Kang's armor and fled to the past. There he used an emergency protocol created by the Vision to recruit a new team, which became the Young Avengers. He took the alias Iron Lad. When Kang tracked him down, the Young Avengers killed him. The resulting changes to history forced Iron Lad to return to his time and erase his memory of these events. The team remained, and Iron Lad's armor now operates itself with a consciousness blended from Iron Lad and the Vision.

  After a Celestial destroyed Earth, Kang appeared to the surviving members of the Avengers Unity Squad. Temporal barriers kept him from going back himself. Instead he helped them project their minds into their past selves so they could defeat the Celestial. Kang then tried to steal the Celestials' power for himself. Sunfire and Havok took a risk by absorbing some of his energy, which forced him to burn through what he had stolen.

  Before the Inhuman king Black Bolt destroyed the city of Attilan to spread Terrigen Mist across the world, he sent his son Ahura away to be fostered by Kang. Black Bolt later released a small amount of the Mist to trigger the boy's transformation, called Terrigenesis. During the change, he asked Kang to save Ahura from the coming end of all things. Kang agreed on one condition: the son would stay permanently in his care.

  Mister Gryphon was the name taken by another Kang, who claimed that recent temporal disruptions had splintered him into many selves. Confined to the present, he attacked the Avengers with Equinox and a reprogrammed Vision. He hoped to use Mjölnir's time-travelling ability to return to his own era, but he was defeated.

  When the Vision abducted Kang's infant self, the Kang of that fractured time hit back by attacking various Avengers in their infant states. A possible future Kang pulled key Avengers into Limbo to save them. Hercules was protected by an amulet from a former Fate. In a temple in Vietnam, the Wasp placed baby Kang back where he belongs, and Kang was defeated.

  During the Infinity Countdown storyline, Kang learned what calamity would follow if the Infinity Gems were gathered in one place again. He abducted Adam Warlock and persuaded him to help secure the Soul Gem in exchange for the Time Gem. Then he sent Warlock back in time for counsel from Rama-Tut.

  In the Pottersville arc of the Doctor Doom solo series, Kang is tied to Doom by quantum entanglement and drops in at random to talk with the ruler of Latveria. The entanglement is a ploy. By helping Doom save the world, Kang makes it easier to conquer two hundred years later. In his own solo series, Kang rewrites history by pushing a younger self through every earlier identity, Iron Lad, Scarlet Centurion, Rama-Tut and Kang, to make the purest would-be conqueror. He also resurrects Ravonna by granting her the ability of reincarnation.

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• 7. Armor and Aliases

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  Forty centuries of technology are what Kang carries into battle, since his armor comes from the 40th century. He has no superhuman abilities. His power comes from genius, deep historical scholarship, and mastery of physics, engineering and time travel. The armor boosts his strength and projects energy, holograms and force fields. It can control other forms of technology and holds a 30-day supply of air and food. His time-ship gives him access to technology from any century, and he once boasted that the ship alone could destroy the Moon. As Rama-Tut, he used an "ultra-diode" ray gun that sapped human will and, at high frequency, weakened superhuman beings and blocked their powers. A second shot freed anyone it had hit.

  Timely, Wisconsin, founded in 1901, was a small, quiet town that a divergent Kang built as a base in the 20th century. He lived there at times as Mayor Victor Timely. Posing as his own son, Victor Timely Jr., he took an interest in the visiting college graduate Phineas Horton. He gave Horton the knowledge that led to the creation of the original Human Torch.

  Doctor Doom stood among Kang's future selves when a group of Avengers attacked Kang's fortress to alter the warlord's past. Doom said the Avengers had cornered them when their powers were at their greatest. That implied he was a future Kang too. He and the other Kangs were later imprisoned at the End of Time.

  Victorex Prime, the divergent Scarlet Centurion, never became Kang. Instead he ruled the 40th century of the Squadron Supreme's universe, dictator over fifteen moons and planets. Bored with success, he invaded the past, sending "temporal hard light holograms" of his Scarlet Centurion form to fight for him. He later brought several Squadron members to his era for death games against the Grandmaster. The Squadron served as the Grandmaster's champions against Victorex Prime's Institute of Evil. His loss inspired the Grandmaster to issue similar challenges to other divergent Kangs.

  Hyperion, a Squadron member who was mourning a loss and "not in the mood" for battle, warned Victorex Prime before his fourth invasion. He would be spared past defeats, but he would be executed if he invaded when any team member was mourning, as the historical record required. Daunted, Victorex Prime fled to the future and meddled in Tom Thumb's attempts to cure cancer, other diseases and aging. He sank into depression. A temporal bubble then formed around the late 20th century and its surrounding decades and kept him out.

  Thirty-five years later, his followers found a crack in that bubble. Through it appeared a massive humanoid hand, growing large enough to engulf Earth, the Sun and all of space. Emboldened, Victorex Prime sent a hologram back to confer with Master Menace, the greatest criminal scientist of his age. Hyperion was seeking the same man. After a reluctant truce, Master Menace designed a device to halt the entity's spread over ten hours. Victorex Prime carried him to the future, where he spent fifteen years perfecting it. He returned the device to Hyperion less than an hour after leaving. Victorex Prime found he enjoyed being a superhero, and he joined the Squadron's journey into space.

  The Overmind was the ally Victorex Prime retrieved, believing his power could turn the entity back. When the Overmind was killed instead, he admitted defeat and prepared to flee. Arcanna Jones begged him to save her infant son. After a moment of thought, he refused. The crack in the bubble sealed shut once he returned to the 40th century. He immediately regretted it and spent the remaining 211 years of his life in misery. He never learned that the Squadron survived because he left Arcanna's son behind.

  Chronomonitor #616 is a variation who works for the Time Variance Authority, inducted on his first attempt to travel back in time. A renegade, he lost his powers after meddling with history for personal gain during a mid-life crisis. He escaped custody, killed a version of himself, and replaced him as Rama-Tut. The Authority finally trapped him in a time loop, and he swore revenge on them and the Fantastic Four.

  Qeng Gryphon, the Mister Gryphon described earlier, runs Qeng Enterprises as its CEO. The oldest of these selves, He Who Remains, is the final director of the Time Variance Authority at the Citadel at the End of Time, the last reality of the Multiverse.

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• 8. Rankings and Screens

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  Newsarama's George Marston ranked Kang the Conqueror 2nd in a list of the best Avengers villains of all time. IGN placed him 16th among its top 25 Marvel villains and 65th among its top 100 comic book villains. Marco Vito Oddo of Collider ranked him 20th among the 20 most powerful Marvel characters. CBR.com put him 2nd among the Black Knight's strongest villains, 3rd among the most violent Marvel villains, and 7th among 13 important Marvel villains.

  Marvel's alternate universes have bent the name in odd directions. Kang Kong comes from a dimension of super-intelligent apes and is named for King Kong. In Spider-Geddon, Kang the Conglomerator is a businessman from the year 2099. Kangaroo the Conqueror is a funny-animal version in a Spider-Ham comic. In Heroes Reborn, a Kang is the lover of Mantis, and both were absorbed by Loki after fleeing to Peru.

  The 1967 Fantastic Four cartoon cast Mike Road as Rama-Tut. Ken Kramer voiced a Kang from the 41st century in The Avengers: United They Stand, where he was overthrown in a revolution and imprisoned between dimensions. Jonathan Adams voiced a 41st-century Kang who loves Princess Ravonna in The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes. Steve Blum voiced a 30th-century Kang allied with the Cabal in Avengers Assemble. In video games, Peter Serafinowicz voiced him in Lego Marvel Super Heroes 2.

  Jonathan Majors played Kang and his variants in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In the Disney+ series Loki, which ran from 2021 to 2023, he played He Who Remains, a former conqueror who founded the Time Variance Authority on an asteroid at the end of time. That version wanted to control the flow of the "Sacred Timeline" so a multiversal war could not break out again. In the 2023 film Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Majors played Kang himself, a traveller who believed the multiverse was dying because of his variants. He tried to start a war to stop them, but the Council of Kangs, led by Immortus, Rama-Tut and Centurion, captured him and exiled him to the Quantum Realm.

  Victor Timely appears in both Quantumania and Loki, with Nasri Thompson playing him as a child. This version is a 19th-century inventor who received a TVA handbook from former members of the organization. Loki producer Kevin R. Wright said it was fun to make Timely an eccentric, quiet inventor, rather than the sci-fi villain from the 31st century that viewers might expect.

  Kang also turns up in the novel trilogy X-Men & Spider-Man: Time's Arrow, written by Tom DeFalco. In 2013, the band Ookla the Mok released the album vs. Evil, which includes a song titled after him.

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