Marvel Comics: Kang The Conqueror Explained | Comics Explained

what's going on guys this is rob a lot of you guys have asked me to make a video about king the conqueror and that makes sense he's a pretty complicated character and the purpose behind this channel is to make you an expert on complicated things right to make them simple to understand and so before we get into actually explaining king what i want to do here is i want to take a minute and explain the relationship between king the conqueror and other characters or other versions of king like rama tut kida mortis immortus himself iron lads scarlet centurion different things along those lines the reality is all those different characters are basically versions of k they are all rooted from what you could call kang prime that's what marvel calls them anyway so here's what i want you to do i want you to imagine that at the time that we're recording this video july 1st 2021 i want you to imagine that you somehow found a way to go back into the past and you went back to the year 1901 and you crafted an entire life for yourself right you made up a new name gave yourself a new identity all that kind of stuff and while you do know that you actually come from july 1st of 2021 as time progresses that becomes your personality that becomes you right that becomes who you are as a human being that's basically how the relationship between kang and the other versions of himself work and we'll make more sense of this as we kind of go through but there are a few different places where kang's origin is found now one of the more popular ones that people cite which in reality i think over complicates things it's fantastic four issue number 273 and what this does is kind of establish the identity of kane the conqueror as being nathaniel richards from the main marvel universe that he basically ended up going into the future and kind of ending up in an alternate reality of sorts that was designated as earth 6311 where humanity had never experienced the dark ages and then found themselves involved in what was called a lunar war now the way this worked is that because society had never experienced the dark ages that there wasn't really any kind of suppression of science and technology so humanity was far more advanced in this alternate reality than it is right now and what this did is it actually led to humanity basically developing colonies on the moon now as time progressed these colonies formed their own governing bodies and in turn defected from earth they quite literally seceded from the planet earth and so this sparked what was in reality a civil war among humanity and basically left humanity in an almost completely extinct state especially when it came to science technology different things along those lines nathaniel richards ending up in this future basically allowed him to become a kind of savior by bringing humanity back from the from its near extinction and then kind of ushering in what was essentially a golden age of science and technology and so while that is kind of a cool origin in and of itself the reality is it's not really necessary instead probably the best origin that you could go with is in avengers issue number 269 which makes sense because kane the conqueror originally appeared in avengers at number 8 and 1964 by stan lee and jack kirby so the way this origin played out is we were basically told that at some future point in time kane the conqueror or nathaniel that's what you want to call it had basically come across a future version of himself who was in effect king the conqueror right this conquering individual who's moved across the time stream and all that kind of stuff and a desire to keep from becoming that guy what he had done was kind of gone through a series of escapades which led to him becoming iron lad kinamortis different things like that the important thing about this is in this in his true form and in terms of how kang became who he was the king basically got bored with the with the reality he was living in which was basically a peaceful earth there wasn't really any conflict there was no struggle or strife people were able to live complete and fulfilling lives and a desire to find more satisfaction from his life specifically by basically conquering things he ended up creating a time traveling machine for himself in the form of a sphinx and then traveled back into the past and adopted the moniker of rama tut now ramat becomes a little complicated here and the reason why is because while he did initially have this particular part of his origin over the years in marvel comics they've released stories that have built on that the original appearance of rama todd and the fantastic four's involvement with him was a fantastic four facing off against ramitat after having been time displaced themselves over the years marvel has released stories like the rise of apocalypse which has basically tied the origin of the villain apocalypse into ramatat different things along those lines there have been stories that have involved west coast avengers and things like that that also involve ramatat honestly those are unnecessarily complicated just because of the fact that those stories don't necessarily have anybody interacting directly with the fantastic four and ramatan himself outside of like apocalypse or maybe doctor strange or somebody like that now of particular importance with this particular action of rahmatut was really built on with the idea of of the rise of apocalypse in the sense that as most comic book fans know apocalypse is by all standards of measurement a demigod right his natural power is immortality as well as the ability to take on mass so to have some high level of durability in the future he made a pact with the celestials that allowed him to use their technology and that's where apocalypse basically gained the ability to have pretty much any superhuman power outside of universal or even planet-wide reality warping but kang the conqueror in the future had come to the realization that that was where apocalypse began to rise to power and believed that he could use apocalypse as a pawn if you were to capture him at an early enough age and then basically brainwash him and induct him into becoming an agent of kang and then helping kang to basically conquer the world that's why he went back to the point of being rama tut because if he could go back far enough then it'd be easier for him to conquer humanity just because egypt at that point in time was still in a lot of ways kind of the cradle of civilization and so ultimately being defeated by the fantastic four led to king fleeing back or at least trying to go back to his own timeline only to end up in the 40th century now being caught in this future point in time basically led to the kind of fantastic four origin you saw in 273 which went a little bit further and then actually had him essentially conquering the world and then after conquering the world expanding outward and then conquering all these different worlds that exist across the universe and then finally conquering the universe itself in the far-flung future the biggest issue with this is that if we look at something like avengers issue number 267 this introduced the idea that while there is king prime in the future every time he goes into the past and does something in the time stream he's basically creating an alternate reality and that alternate reality has its own version of kang with its own campaigns and its own desires and its own experiences right so which event that king is engaged in takes part in the main marvel universe versus an alternate reality universe really just depends on what story marvel wants to write so if you go back and you look at avengers number eight when he originally appeared and kang fought against the avengers that he lost against the avengers in that story but because he went back in time and fought the avengers there's now an alternate reality where kang won against the avengers right or there's an alternate reality where he killed all the avengers instead of defeating them and imprisoning captain america right just things along those lines that's kind of how that works and as you guys could probably imagine all these possibilities creating all these different universes basically have all these versions of kang in these universes who have just done different things that's important because in the future marvel would actually use that to create something called the council of kings now one of the big issues that marvel created when it came to kang is creating something called divergent kings and so if ever kane goes back into the past and just creates an alternate reality by virtue of just doing anything what marvel also did is they said even in the main marvel universe there are different versions of kang the reality is i ignore that because i think it just over complicates things makes it unnecessarily complicated and it doesn't really serve any useful purpose i mean you have characters like victor timely who's basically just a version of kang uh who is considered to be divergent honestly i think it's unnecessary so in truth you can just ignore that right especially because it largely is contained the events of avengers forever which is the story that marvel and fans just haven't referenced in forever because it doesn't really matter probably one of the biggest and most notable moments especially for those of you guys who are coming from the uh from the loki tv show came in a combination of different stories uh the first one came with avengers issue number 23 then you go into thor annual issue number 17 and despite what i just said avengers forever issue number nine and you had the introduction of a character named princess ravana rinslayer now she is incredibly important to the entirety of the king mythos so the idea behind this was that despite king the conqueror ruling this particular point in time there were other kingdoms who existed on earth now all of them were largely subservient to kang or just outright subservient right in the sense that he just straight ruled him with an iron fist and kang was kind of a dick right like he ruled in a pretty hardcore way but ravana rinslayer had a father named uh king corellius and the whole point behind this was that he was in love with ravana rinslayer and so the bargain that was made is that because of his love for her he would allow her father to kind of rule with autonomy in the sense that he would answer to kang but king would also allow him a lot of leeway in terms of how he ran his own kingdom and wouldn't really micromanage anything but the other part of this is that because kang loved ravana rinslayer the idea was he tried to pressure her into marrying him now ultimately she rejected him and this led to kane the conqueror snatching up the avengers and then bringing them to that point in time and then trying to defeat them as a display of his kind of masculinity i guess or his capabilities to ravana in the hope of winning her heart ultimately it didn't work now the big thing about this this is probably one of the most significant moments to happen in this story is that because kane the conqueror had shown kind of a softness or kindness to ravana rinse layer and because of the fact that in a chance where he could have killed the avengers he chose not to and actually chose to simply let them survive that one of his members or at least a member of his army by the name of baltag had seen this as a sign of weakness and baltac had long since been trying to use serp control of kang's armies by killing kang himself and attempted to do so he tried to launch a rebellion it was initially quashed eventually he broke free and when he tried to kill kang ravana jumped in the way now she didn't necessarily die per se but with her throwing herself in front of kang was really kind of display of how much she cared about kang right how much she actually had kind of fallen in love with king now ball tag was killed right king just had him executed and so what ended up happening is king the conqueror had actually found a way to put ravana in a kind of suspended animation where she was never really alive and never truly dead she just kind of existed there until such a time as he could find a way to basically bring her back now something that i do want to specify here is the nature of a mortise right something that i said we would kind of gloss over over the course of this video so immortus is the future end result of king right a mortise is what king will become think of it like king's final form more or less that's kind of how immortus works the biggest issue with this is that immortus looks at kang and sees kang just running throughout the entirety of the time stream and spawning a whole litany of alternate reality versions of himself and the concern of immortus was that if this continued to happen that eventually one king would rise up or possibly all the kings would band together and destroy immortus and immortus wanted to be the last version of kang to exist and so in order to ensure this happened that what ended up taking place is that in an alternate reality that there was a version of kang that had kind of gone through and looked at the history of really the multiverse itself and came to the realization there was a universe where the events of of ravana renaissance are dying had not played out yet and so what he had done is that alternate reality version of kang had taken ravana rinslayer from the other alternate universe and that other alternate universe version of kang had basically died right this was all kind of a manipulation by the hand at the hands of a mortis in order to remove one of the kings across the multiverse and that's happened multiple times there have been a lot of instances where stories have played out that alternate reality versions of kang have died at the hands of mechanation schemes of a mortise or even by a mortise's own hands to reduce or control the number of kings that exist across the multiverse to make sure that kang does not become a credible threat to the existence of a mortise himself one of the more important elements of kang's history right kind of focusing back on the main marvel universe version of kang one of the more important elements of its history came as something called the game of galaxies now the game of the galaxies was a pretty significant crossover in marvel comics right i can't really you know overstate how important this was and the reason why is because what you had was the grand master and the elders of the universe who had approached kane the conqueror with the possibility of finding a way to bring ravana wren slayer back but the only way they would do that is if kang got himself involved in one of the grand masters games and so what you ended up getting was a grand master creating something called the squadron sinister now a lot of you guys have probably heard of the squadron supreme the squad of supreme is by all standards of measurement marvel's version of the justice league and i would question anybody who told me with a straight face that it wasn't and what grandmaster had done is that after encountering the squadron supreme in avengers number 69 that he had desired to create his own as part of a game with king the conqueror and so he ended up just grabbing a whole bunch of different people and then basically turning them into what were in essence an evil version of the squadron supreme and then in turn challenging kane the conqueror and kane the conqueror had to assemble his own group of superheroes now the reality is this was long in coming because a lot of fans wanted to see what it would look like if the squadron supreme or some version of the squadron supreme that was basically evil fought against the avengers the story was cool and it was interesting for what it was but it had huge impacts on the character of king and the reason why is because the deal that was struck was that if he defeated grandmaster he would have the power over life and death but because he experienced a kind of draw in the first round instead he was given the choice of life or death and because of the fact that he hated the avengers so much he chose to kill the avengers but was ultimately defeated instead of bringing ren slayer back and so ravana rensselaer basically stayed dead that was important because it focused on what you could call the human element of king basically making a poor decision and then having to live with the consequences of it but following that there were a few different stories that were kind of interesting here right you had things like fantastic four annual number 25 where kane the conqueror was caught in what was basically a time storm which was another attempt by immortus to uh to basically prune or to eliminate some of the kings across the the multiverse and that while this version of kang was essentially lost in the time stream and should have been dead instead he just transferred his consciousness to a new body that was the kind of things that you you saw unfolding there now one of the stories that you saw coming out around this time albeit an unnecessarily complicated story which i still have a hard time getting through was the celestial madonna now celestial madonna is one that a lot of old school comic book fans know about and they probably agree probably one of single uh steve engelhardt's more complicated pieces of work but this has had huge impacts on the marvel landscape not necessarily just for kane the conqueror it did the idea of the celestial madonna is that it would give that she would end up giving birth to like the most important person or possibly even the most powerful person in existence who would have control over time and space and so naturally cain the conquerors sought this person out in order to basically mate with them and then have this child that would have control over time and space the reality was it basically revolved around mantis banging a tree it's really all it was but it also had huge things that were involved here right one of the biggest things to come out of this is this one you learned for the first time in marvel comics that kane the conqueror and mortis and rama tut were all basically the same person it was one of those kind of paradigm shift stories that dealt with a lot of different things but after celestia madonna i'm not aware of any major significant uh changes or or impacts for the character of kang he appeared in a lot of stuff right you know secret wars different things like that but then you get into the council of kings now despite having appeared multiple times over the years in marvel comics the council of kangs is exactly what you think it is a whole bunch of different kangs who all just kind of exist as a singular council now in avengers 267 through 269 you ended up having this event where pretty much all the kangs except for three of them prime kang and two others were wiped out by those three particular kangs of course again this was all just kind of a manipulation of the hands of a mortis to reduce as many kings as possible but it was also one of those things where the concept of kang had just become so unnecessarily complicated and so many alternate versions of himself that marvel just wanted to just prune them all right they just wanted to to literally cull as many kings as they possibly could and it worked right they ended up just reducing them down by a huge number now in truth the actual destruction of pretty much all the variant versions of kang or the other versions of kang outside of prime king didn't really come around until fantastic four 339 through 341 which actually dealt with it being called the black celestial and in essence the black celestial had betrayed the other celestials and so in making its escape it basically resurrected galactus after his um pretty much near death at the hands of terrax the tamer and then increased galactus hunger at the same time a time bubble was created which would have essentially consumed everything if galactus hadn't done it based on his own individual hunger and so by virtue of a handful of different situations all that ended up happening here is that the ultimate nullifier was used to destroy galactus and the time bubble along with the with the black celestial itself and the other versions of kang were kind of pulled into this time bubble and destroyed as well so it was one of those stories where it largely focused on the fantastic four uh but marvel just kind of rolled the other kings in it as well as a means to just kind of reduce their number even further kind of sending kang all the way back to just being one singular guy who exists out there and so at that point all you had was kang immortus and rahmatut and that was it that's all you really had those three guys which was admittedly a lot easier to manage now another story that king had which is one that wasn't really well received i don't think at the time that it came out but i loved it uh was avengers the terminatrix objective this story was not bad at all and i thought it was it was pretty interesting this largely dealt with the return of ravana wren slayer albeit in the form of a character by the name of revelation basically a future version of herself who had actually married kang and it was it was kind of wonky it was a weird and wonky story but the important thing behind this is she actually ended up kind of going back to the past and then sort of showed up in the present day and just kind of resided there actually allied herself with the avengers to try to take out a version of kang but the bigger things about this outside of stuff like preston john which was a weird story arc in and of itself any old school comic book fans will tell you that's true one of the other things that went on is it actually introduced and really focused on kane the conqueror in relation to other organizations that were out there specifically the time variance authority now what was really interesting about this is that despite the fact that the council of kangs had largely been destroyed the realities or the universes that they lived in and the the universes they'd conquered were still somewhat intact and this kind of elevated king prime to being this character that almost saw what was in effect a multiversal empire where he literally ruled entire universes and what this did is it stood in direct contrast to the time variance authority which sought to kind of control the multiverse and so you ended up finding out that like the empire of kang was massive in comparison to almost anybody else outside of the tva the tva was huge as well but you also had things like the coalition of realities and things along those lines but it was huge in terms of how it elevated and moved king up to a much larger role in so far as how he functioned on the multiversal level now what was really kind of interesting about this is that by the time you got to the end and especially when you got into avengers forever and things like that that ravana this alternate reality version of ravana and and kang prime had actually kind of put their differences aside they've gotten back together again as a couple they went back to the 40th and 41st centuries and they basically ruled together and then ken got bored and went back to basically take take over his role as rama tut again it was a little wonky but it was still kind of cool but one of the bigger things that came out of this was king's relationship to a mortise that again if a mortise was a future version of kang basically what he was guaranteed to become then the events of avengers forever basically removed that and changed that when kang came into direct conflict with a time variance authority but the long and short of this and really kind of the quick explanation since we don't have a ton of time left it was basically severing the connection between immortus and king that kang was no longer guaranteed to become immortus instead they were just completely different characters now it was a way for marvel to try to make immortus a little more interesting by removing him from just being the guaranteed version of kang to kind of solidify this idea that they were individual characters that had their individual stories and so on and things could unfold with one without directly impacting the other uh so that was kind of interesting for people who were kang fans but following this one of the coolest things that happened with kang really came in the form of iron lad there is kang dynasty but honestly that's probably a story we should just do because king dynasty would take us 10 minutes to explain but iron lad is one of the cool things there's a character we haven't really talked about yet so i want to kind of hit on him for a second in the early days of of marvel's kane the conquerors stories they established this idea that kang had basically met a younger version of himself when he was 16 years old and that the desire was to ensure this younger version of himself would actually go on to become kink instead the exact opposite happened now the whole idea of the introduction or the full-on introduction of iron lad in the young avengers was designed to actually bookend into that old school origin that was done back in the 1970s and so the point behind this was that when kang had gone to visit his younger self iron lad and said like i'm the person you're going to become and my goal is to ensure that you stay this way by actually protecting him from bullies and so on and so forth that iron lad actually swore a vendetta to never become king and that's why iron lad despite being a version of kane the conqueror is an enemy of kane the conqueror because he's basically his teenage self who never wants to become that version of himself now the reason why avengers forever was so important is because it allowed stories like this to be written which basically established that iron lad is not guaranteed to become kang any more than kang is guaranteed to become immortus it did offer a bit of complication because it brought in things like well i mean are they like their own characters now right if iron lads not guaranteed to become kang then if he doesn't does it just become an alternate reality where he never becomes king marvel never answers those questions instead it's just kind of like he's his own character now and able to do his own thing but then you also went into the story of the apocalypse twins now the apocalypse twins were cool the apocalypse twins were basically what happened when one of apocalypse's horsemen got with the the horsemen archangel warren worthington and then they had some kids but the idea of the apocalypse twins in relation to to king himself is that he saw them as what would become a credible threat to his rule just because of the level of power they possess and much like he wanted to do with apocalypse when he was operating his rama tut the goal was to get his hands on the apocalypse twins whisk him into the future and basically turn them into his servants to a degree and so during uncanny avengers there was this amazing moment when like the kids are born he appears and then snatches them away and like that's it right he basically just disappears for a long time now they eventually come back and you do see some pretty cool stories the death see different things along those lines but the story as it unfolded and uncanny avengers was amazing so here is a crazy thing behind this right the whole idea here is kang like his motivation always has been was to conquer all space and time and he used the apocalypse twins to do it and what they actually started doing is they started going through and wiping out all these different alternate realities right these various worlds and so on but kang was gathering people from all these alternate futures that had been obliterated now along the way king's timeline itself had been wiped out which actually took place uh back in uncanny avengers issue number 12. but the cool thing about this is you ended up seeing like alternate reality versions of strife venom doctor doom and they were basically referred to as kang's chrono chord the whole just behind this was to basically target exotar the celestial and the idea here was that with yarnbjorn having previously been enchanted when thor fought uh fought apocalypse and was imbued with the ability to damage celestials that with uh with kang and the apocalypse twins getting their hands on yarnbjorn it was used to attack exotar and then in turn king started absorbing all these cosmic energies of exotar the celestial himself which briefly allowed him to basically really kind of control all of space and time across the universe but with kang on the verge of basically conquering everything ultimately he was defeated by a mortise and his infinity watch which those of you guys who we call the infinity watch are basically individuals each of which possesses an infinity stone as well as the avengers themselves and so kang along with his chrono chord just kind of disappeared into the time stream the reality is that kang as we knew him basically began to vanish and the reason why was because marvel was winding up to secret wars so the next time that you saw him and really the only time that you saw him that was any real significant measure here was during original sin when captain america had basically get you know gained the the time stone following its disappearance and the destruction of the rest of the infinity stones during the first incursion that captain america had appeared in the far-flung future in front of iron lad immortus and king and the reality is despite the fact that the three of them all hated each other they came to the realization that captain america's quest to stop the illuminati from destroying incursive worlds would lead to the collapse or the destruction of the universe the captain america was actually kind of fast moving towards the end of things now the reality of this was that there was nothing anybody could do to stop the collapse of the multiverse that's one of the things that we learned and so they took the infinity stone they put it in a kind of no time space right where the time stone just simply wouldn't work and then they intended to keep captain america locked in the future so he couldn't prevent uh iron man and doctor strange and all those guys in the illuminati from destroying alternate worlds of course captain america ended up breaking the time stone free went back to the modern era and then that's where you basically pick up with eight months later when he is the head of shield and he's hunting down all the different members of the illuminati and then trying to stop them right again at the end of the day there was no way to stop the collapse of the multiverse and the incursion of worlds but that's basically it right i mean there is a little bit going on with kang i mean it does kind of appear a few times here and there but the reality is that kang's one of these characters where he was really really huge back in the 70s 80s and kind of in the early 90s and then by the time you got to the mid to late 2000s he just kind of dropped off so with that being said guys hopefully king the conqueror makes a lot more sense to you all if you guys are interested we could do a video on immortus and iron lad and those characters but thank you guys for watching and i will catch you all later peace

Channel: Comics Explained

Views: 806,215

Keywords: comics explained, comicsexplained, marvel explained, fluidic beats, comics, comic books, marvel, dc, infinity gauntlet, world breaker hulk, crisis on infinite earths, comic explained, infinity war, the batman who laughs, doomsday clock, Kang the Conqueror, Nathanial Richards, Reed Richards, Fantastic Four, Avengers, Captain America, Loki, Time Variance Authority, Ravonna Renslayer, Iron Lad, Immortus

Id: 4NtPYpaXYXc

Length: 24min 53sec (1493 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 01 2021