Marvel Comics: Kang/Immortus Explained | Comics Explained

what's going on guys this is rob and a lot of you guys coming off the tales of kane the conqueror asked me to make a video on immortus and so we're going to do that we're going to explain immortus now in order to make this explanation super simple in terms of how to understand immortus we talked in the last video about kane the conqueror with regards to the fact that he's constantly moving around the time stream and has created all these different alternate versions of themselves marvel calls them divergent kings uh those are guys who are coming from loki you can call them varian kings if you want to it's all basically the same thing just alternate reality versions of kang himself who at one point actually formed the council of kings so let's take loki in the marvel cinematic universe for a second whenever marvel cinematic universe movies come out you go to the movie theater and you watch those movies right so you know how loki's timeline plays out up into the events of loki right that loki appeared in the marvel cinematic universe in the early days he fought along thor but you always knew there was something kind of off about him he ultimately launches the attack against the avengers or at least it leads to the formation of the avengers in the the original avengers film you then go into like thor the dark world you go into thor ragnarok you go into his death in infinity war you know the life and times of loki now let's say that as you're watching this movie unfold you actually stop loki dying during the events of infinity war and instead you ensure he survives into the events of avengers in-game that's how immortus works that immortus is basically outside of time but can intervene throughout the time stream at any point in time and actually change things and he serves a far more grandiose purpose than what kang does we'll make more sense of that as we go through this but the origin of immortus is essentially the exact same as the origin of king of course he originally appeared and avengers number 10 back in 1964 with stan lee and don heck but while he did appear in avengers 10 it wasn't until we got to avengers forever that we actually got a real tried and true origin of a mortise we got little bits and pieces along the way but it all sort of came together in amalgamated in avengers forever which gave us a more significant and really full-on depiction of how this guy works so to kind of touch on this a little bit let's talk about what the the significance of avengers forever was so let's you guys never saw our video on king so while this story does split the comic book community down the middle in the sense that you'll find marvel comics fans who detest this story and then you'll find marvel comics fans who absolutely love it the significance of it cannot be overstated but the whole purpose and really one of the biggest things about about avengers forever it gave us this idea that when it came to the time keepers that of course the time keepers and the time twisters were basically the exact same beings the difference is that the time twisters decided to conquer all of reality and the time keepers wanted to preserve all of reality and they were two possible futures and so the time twisters were always working to make sure the future whereby they were the ones who reigned supreme instead of the time keepers came into existence and the timekeepers were looking to do the exact opposite ensure that their future came into existence which is why the timekeepers were largely shown to be selfish in a lot of ways they were literally just trying to preserve their own existence and so when you got to the events of avengers forever one of the big things that happened is that one revealed that kang and ramatat and immortus were all basically the same person and two it revealed that immortus was the end result of what kang would become that when you follow this kind of chronological timeline that you have rama tut then you have kang then you have immortis and you got a few characters in between iron lad kita mortis people like that but uh those are kind of like the big three and that immortus was the person that kang and rama tut would ultimately end up becoming and so the reason why this was significant is because all their destinies were basically intertwined together it was a guaranteed thing right that king in his early days would go into the past he would adopt the moniker of rama tut he would do some things and then rama tut would go back into his timeline so basically the 30th century and then adopt the moniker of kang and then kang would screw up and mess up the time stream and then at some future point immortus would basically come into existence right we didn't really know how a mortise came into existence we just knew that he would the reason why i talk about avengers forever here is because what ended up happening is that during this story when their destinies were basically you know ripped away from each other meaning one was not guaranteed to become the other this largely impacted rama tut and what this ended up doing was it led to rama tut basically entering the realm of limbo now that's where things got a little bit wonky because when you go into avengers forever issue number nine one of the things that you learn is that when ramat had gone to the realm of limbo and then basically was designed to achieve immortality and then ultimately gave himself the name of immortus that when you're in limbo and we'll explain more about limbo here in a second but when you're in limbo you can see all these different realities that are there and you can actually see divergent realities right so possible alternate realities that can come into existence rahmat observing all these looked into the future and saw that somewhere along the line that immortus would basically become an agent of the time keepers and so desiring to keep that from happening rama tut left limbo or at least a version of him left limbo and then went back to his native universe and became kane the conqueror and so that's kind of where you get rama tut becoming kane the conqueror and the reason why he chose to become that character we left that out in the last video that we did because honestly i felt like it would overly complicate things it was a complicated video already i didn't want to make it even worse but that's where these things all kind of tie together and all sort of get involved now one of the big questions a lot of people are going to ask is how does limbo work in marvel comics okay so you do have a mortise's realm of limbo which is considered true limbo and then you have limbo which is basically ran by ileana rasputin they're two distinctly different places originally we didn't know this but when you go and you read the magic series one through four back in 1983 or you go read uncanny x-men 160 or you read avengers forever issue number eight what it establishes is that the realm that magic basically rules right that that kind of limbo dimension is more on more kind of defined by chris claremont as being quote unquote on the edge of hell right that's why you have like demons and stuff like that there where immortus resides is true limbo so it's basically a place that's outside of time and that's why when you look at characters like king the conqueror or rama tut while they do have different variations divergent versions of themselves with immortus there's only one version of him right and he literally just exists in his chronopolis giant city right in his castle called tenebre out there in limbo now the important thing about this is that as time progressed specifically when you get into uh avengers forever issue number eight again kind of explaining all this that when ramatta basically decided to become immortals right that version of rama tut went on and fully became the character of a mortise and agreed to basically become an agent of the time keepers because the time keepers were always working to ensure that the reality where they reigned supreme instead of the time twisters came into fruition that this basically led to immortus acting as a servant of them and what he was given was kind of like this 70 century long area to manage so imagine you've been given like a giant piece of land to till and to farm and to grow and make sure that it grows crops as it's supposed to and then imagine that on like the time stream and that's basically what a mortise was given the bigger purpose that this really served as far as the timekeepers were concerned was to ensure that the timekeepers would come into existence or at least their future was maintained because it was believed that somewhere between 3000 bc and 4000 ad a person would rise to power that would threaten the the existence of the time keepers that person of course ended up being the scarlet witch and that's the reason why between fantastic four annual number two avengers issue number 269 uh really going all the way up to avengers west coast number 61 that immortus had basically been quote unquote tasked with killing the scarlet witch now the important thing about this is that immortus also had his own goals and his own ambitions and so while the timekeepers tasked him with killing the scarlet witch the reality was that as far as immortus was concerned he could kill two birds with one stone that not only could he keep the scarlet witch from basically preventing the time keepers from coming into existence because you know her hex abilities had to have the power to alter the outcome of the universe which is what made her a nexus being in the first place but that he could also use that for his own ends and so what he started doing was kind of operating behind the scenes and sort of nurturing the progression of the scarlet witch's existence and so when you go into avengers west coast number 61 it was basically one of these stories where marvel essentially gave us the idea that immortus was the reason why scarlet witch and vision got together in the first place now the reality is that it was more the children of scarlet witch that would cause all kinds of different problems but the important thing here is that immortus basically saw a means by which he could prevent the scarlet witch from having any kids in the first place and so when you go with avengers west coast number 61 then you look at avengers number 81 the whole idea is that if scarlet witch had a kid with like a biological guy then those kids would prove to be insanely powerful and it would fulfill the prophecy that the offspring of the scarlet witch would basically destroy the future by which the timekeepers ruled everything and so by getting her together with vision of course scarlet witch and vision can't have kids vision is a robot so kind of organizing that the hope was that scarlet witch would never have any kids at all of course we saw how that played off when she basically ended up just taking the shards of mephisto and making kids out of them and then they were ultimately taken away but the early days of immortus largely saw him facing off against the avengers team right avengers issue number 10 those various stories going forward and a lot of that was because at the time when marvel comics was writing stories they would usually introduce new villains villains that could potentially have a lot of impact on the marvel comics universe and popular stories which made sense right it wouldn't really make a whole lot of sense to introduce somebody like immortus in the pages of like marvel two-in-one or marvel premiere or marvel feature or something along those lines and so by featuring him in the avengers and having like these kind of time travel escapades it was kind of interesting but the initial real big explosion here the kind of first thing that popped off which really led into a mortise was a conflict with a character by the name of the space phantom now the space phantoms are a little interesting because they basically exist in limbo with immortus they're really more servants of a mortise he kind of took the place over when he arrived there and then they all started working under him along with uh tempus who he basically controls but the origin of the space phantoms is a little bit wonky the long and short of this at least in terms of how marvel kind of explains it to us and then changes it all the time is that space phantoms can largely be believed that they are people who were trapped in true limbo and then basically forgot themselves but then when you go back and you read other stories it's that these space phantoms actually came from some other location and then arrived in limbo and had been there for a long long time maybe forgot who they were maybe remember who they were but they couldn't escape or just liked it there and chose to stay there but regardless of the motivation space phantom was introduced as a villain of the avengers by immortus because space phantom had the ability to duplicate the bodies of others all this came to a head when he faced off against thor and then of course thor was immune to his abilities and the space phantom was defeated and that was really immortal's first realization that the avengers were a credible team and so in the early days with stan lee don heck a few other writers here and there roy thomas and so on you basically saw immortus facing off against the avengers and then occasionally stepping in properly working with characters like the masters of evil trying to help baron zemo defeat and destroy the avengers different things along those lines and that's something to keep in mind here immortus was not nearly as active as king the conqueror was in terms of his goings on with with regards to the various characters who were there again avengers being the main focus avengers 107 avengers 108. these were stories where vision was a little hesitant about having a relationship with the scarlet witch and so the idea was that immortus actually sent space phantom to earth to essentially kind of give vision a bit of a confidence boost when he had a space phantom team up with grim reaper and then kind of off revision a human body potentially the other side of that story the way it was written was that the vision lacked confidence uh much like what you saw in the marvel cinematic universe he didn't really see himself as somebody that could actually have a real meaningful relationship because he wasn't human so he would seemingly outlive everybody and even then he lacked the emotional components it was largely just a story that focused on the vision as a character it became a really significant moment when you get into the second volume of vision and scarlet witch really more so than the first by bill mantlow because that focus on magneto being you know scarlet witch's father but uh that focus was huge when it came to the old school avengers stories by roy thomas and then later on in avengers west coast but kind of solidifying this idea that like you know scarlet witch can't have kids now a lot of that really began to change and things in and immortus himself really began to have a far more prominent role by the time he got to avengers 129 and giant size avengers number two and the reason for this and we talked about this during the our video explaining kang was the celestial madonna and the whole idea behind the celestial madonna for those of you guys who never saw that video is that it was a being who existed in the the marvel comics universe that if they ever had a child would prove to be the most powerful being in the entirety of the universe of course we knew that person ended up being mantis but the important thing is that much like kane the conqueror and rama tut that immortus wanted to take the celestial madonna for himself and then procreate with her so that his child would basically become the most powerful being in existence and then of course he would take that child away whisk them off to the realm of limbo and then train them for their own ends and then of course most likely conquer all the universe but that's why he's a little bit wonky when it comes to marvel because he's not really a bad guy but he's not really a good guy he's kind of like this in-between thing right where his allegiance is more so to ensuring that he that no other version of kang ends up you know ruling the end of time except for himself but then also serving his role as part of the timekeepers because the whole bargain that was made between him and the timekeepers was if you fail to prevent our timeline from coming into existence we'll wipe you from the time stream and then will destroy everything on earth and basically allow humanity to start over or something along those lines so it was kind of wild and the reason why i say this is because this is one of those times when a mortise basically became a good guy that at the end of the celestial madonna story arc that because kang was so close to capturing mantis that immortus came to the realization there really wasn't any hope for him to succeed and the enemy of his enemy is his friend and so he basically allied himself with the avengers to essentially ensure that kane could not succeed he kind of went forward as a friend of the avengers from there and a lot of his stories really just dealt with him just kind of hopping and skipping through the time stream helping the avengers you know retrieve somebody like hawkeye or something along those lines there wasn't a whole lot that was going on there but there was a massive moment with the character of mortis and anybody who knows anything about his character knows exactly what we're talking about probably one of the weirdest and maybe worst decisions that marvel ever made so the whole idea behind this was that jim shooter was editor-in-chief of marvel at the time and this guy made a lot of less than stellar decisions he made some great decisions like crafting the original secret wars event but a lot of the decisions that he made were not that great and so what had happened was that in avengers issue number 200 that immortus had in effect grown bored with his time in in limbo and the whole idea behind this was to basically write him out right to get rid of immortus as he existed and replace him with a younger more vibrant version of himself and so what ended up happening is he had to kind of search the time stream looking for a soulmate and found a woman who was destined to die after basically drowning on a ship he whisked her away to limbo romanticized her got her knocked up and then ultimately she had a son named marcus now eventually she was removed from the equation and then marcus existing inside limbo was really like the sole occupant there when a mortise had seemingly vanished right again marvel with the intention of writing him out the reason why this is so important and the reason why this is one of those stories that people look at like this is weird is because depending on how you look at it people interpret it different ways some people interpret it as basically marvel writing a story where the body of uh carol danvers was completely violated others see it as just a weird story that marvel wrote somewhere along the line but the important thing is that marcus sought to be reborn in the universe seemingly with a with all of his powers and everything intact but he couldn't just leave the realm of limbo it didn't work that way because if he just left he would basically die so what he ended up doing was whisking carol danvers to the realm of limbo and then tricked her slept with her got her pregnant and then the idea was that when she gave birth to her baby on earth that she would give birth to marcus so marcus would essentially give birth to himself now at the time marvel wrapped that story up with a quickness and marcus basically went back to limbo and then died of old age so marvel got rid of that fast it was nuts but it still lingers on people don't forget marvel and so following that and really for like decades going forward immortus would just kind of operate behind the scenes largely serving the purpose that was given to him by the time keepers to essentially prune the timeline of realities that are not supposed to exist or realities that are a threat to the existence of the time keepers themselves realities just never really mattered and the stories were okay and they were kind of interesting because you'd see you know these alternate reality depictions of characters where like you know lee harvey oswald never assassinated john f kennedy and things along those lines but the constant theme with immortus was this obsession with the scarlet witch because realizing that the hex powers of the scarlet witch and her ability to manipulate the time stream is something the timekeepers were so concerned of especially when it came to her kids that immortus was always looking to find a way to basically ensnare the scarlet witch and then use her for his own ends initially a lot of this came during the original or really during the second vision scarlet woods story west coast avengers some follow-up stories when her and vision kind of gave birth to billy and tommy when they used the shards of mephisto of course mephisto himself had sent master pandemonium forward to kind of get his shards back and so at that point there wasn't really a lot of concern from immortus because it was kind of like okay you know like these kids this is this is a great huge thing everything's gonna pop off and then the problem basically seemed to solve itself with master pandemonium serving on behalf of mephisto took those shards back and basically billy and tommy were you know by all standards of measurement killed and then that kind of you know had the the whole memory wiped from the mind of scarlet witch by i get the harness and all that kind of stuff so there wasn't really a whole lot for a mortise to do there you saw some events some things going on acts of vengeance for example when loki gathered together all the various villains are the most notable villains of marvel and then switched around what characters they were fighting in the hopes that it would lead to a great big huge conflict and the villains would reign supreme and defeat all the different heroes so think like old man logan before old man logan but again the main focus was always on the scarlet witch now all this really came to a head when you got to the events of what was really avengers west coast number 62 and even going into stories like 61 and so on and so forth but the whole thing about this is that immortus had basically made his move to capture the scarlet witch along with the rest of the avengers and bring her to the realm of limbo for the purpose of bestowing on her the ability to seemingly manipulate time and then use that in order to control the entirety of the time stream which would actually allow him to usurp the authority of the time keepers themselves the reality was that scarlet witch rejected that she rejected all that power and the timekeepers gave him mortis what they what he wanted when they bonded him with the ability to manipulate the entire time stream now the truth about this is that marvel sought to just write right and mortis out yet again right to get rid of him by having the ability to manipulate the whole of the time stream but not being able to do anything with the ability to manipulate the time stream he was quite literally just frozen just just stuck there and there was nothing he could do marvel wanted to write him out and get rid of him in his entirety and so that's why between avengers west coast issue number 62 and marvel what if volume 2 issue number 35 for that two-year period you didn't see anything from immortus now eventually marvel brought him back and when they brought him back in a what if story it was a little interesting because normally what if stories in marvel comics never really deal with a crossing over with the main marvel universe outside of the purpose of the what if story which is to say what if spider-man kept the venom symbiote what if doctor strange was a student or disciple of dormammu that's the only real crossing over that you saw instead what you saw here was a story that kicked off called what if the watcher saved the marvel universe say the entirety of the universe and what you ended up learning is that the time keepers as they've been depicted were not actually the time keepers those individuals who had basically led to the defeat of immortus then instead what had happened is the time keepers had been replaced with the time twisters and the time twisters had basically moved the timekeepers out of the way and by virtue of everything that had gone on with west coast avengers had actually imprisoned immortus and the whole thing was to get him out of the way so they could kind of go through and start conquering the timeline which really brought in a lot of older stories with the time twisters in terms of how they were able to run awry through different points in the time stream and so ultimately you ended up having the watcher who was kind of manipulated to a degree from behind the scenes by immortus and then in turn immortus made himself really revealed his identity to the avengers once he grabbed everybody together for the purpose of launching a kind of final attack against the time twisters and essentially saving all of existence and so what the timekeepers freed and then realizing what it was immortus had done at the end of the day they saw it as somewhat of an honorable thing so they sent him back to limbo they restored him back to his normal form and the whole purpose was to basically prevent a point whereby the time keepers would cease to come into existence now with the whole idea of the scarlet witch having kids which would threaten the reality of the time keepers since that had kind of been nullified during the uh during the whole story arc with master pandemonium and all that kind of stuff that the new threat that would that had really come up was kind of the return of an old threat which was something called the destiny force now the destiny force was this idea whereby humanity would tap into its true potential and then basically conquer the universe right humanity would be exceedingly powerful and so to prevent that from happening that went into the avengers forever story which basically saw that immortus killed rick jones who was the original possessor of the destiny force and would basically spread it to the rest of humanity of course that leads to the whole avengers forever storyline and the idea of cain the conqueror and rama tud and nemouritas all having their origins revealed and all that kind of stuff and there were a few other stories that came out around that time for example you had the crossing that story sucked no one likes the crossing so we're not even gonna worry about covering it here but the big thing is that immortus was just kind of a background character right there wasn't a whole lot going with him that almost all the focus on this alternate reality version of nathaniel richards that would go on to become rahmatut kane the conqueror immortus that a lot of that emphasis was put on king that was the big focus of of really marvel comics at the time and so what you ended up seeing were a couple of things that went on which was really largely immortus trying to prevent king from rising to power in that way trying to prevent king from expanding throughout the entirety of the time stream and keeping him from being a credible threat or a person who really could dominate and control the entirety of the multiverse now one of the more interesting examples of this came in uncanny avengers for those of you guys who are not familiar with uncanny avengers this came in the aftermath of avengers versus x-men right so those of you guys who aren't familiar with that story the whole idea of avengers versus x-men is that the phoenix force was basically coming back to earth and the mutant population was celebrating it because they believed it would kind of lead to the return of a messiah which would really come in the form of hope summers the other part of this is humanity was terrified because they they were afraid that something like the dark phoenix saga would happen again where whoever the phoenix force possessed would go absolutely crazy and possibly even destroy the world or the whole universe and so what you ended up getting was the great big huge conflict between the avengers and the x-men well in the aftermath of all that captain america had the idea that they all had kind of have to work together and so you got what was in effect the avengers unity squad which was basically a team that was composed of one part avengers and one part x-men they ended up of course using the name avengers because of the avengers and they used uncanny because of how long and and prolific the uncanny x-men run of chris claremont had been regardless one of the big things that had happened here was the actions of the apocalypse twins and the apocalypse twins were basically the offspring of of of warren worthington archangel who you might be familiar with uh and they were taken by king the conqueror into the future so kane the conqueror could raise them based on his own philosophies and then bring them back to initiate what they call the rapture of the mutant population on earth and so immortus sought to stop this from happening because of the legitimate threat that came the conqueror post and so while you had the avengers teams that formed and the various superhero teams that got together to try to find a way to stop king you had immortus who was forming something called the infinity watch now the infinity watch has a very lengthy group in marvel comics in reality the affinity watch started off as basically a group of individuals that guarded the infinity stones over the years this kind of changed in this instance it was really more of just a team that was kind of called the infinity watch because the in the infinite nature of the time stream and it was basically a team composed of different people from different times throughout the time stream itself but ultimately the efforts of immortus the avengers all those guys ended up failing and so what you got was basically this alternate reality version of kang along with his uh his core that basically showed up and then took the minds of the avengers back to their bodies in the present days so they essentially have all the memories of how everything unfolded and then they'd be able to stop it which they successfully did they ultimately stopped the destruction of earth that was done in one part by the apocalypse twins and then also cleansed by exotar the executioner and so with that with that day kind of being saved and mortise went back to his process of just kind of monitoring and watching and operating from behind the scenes now following that there were a few stories like when he appeared in paradise x universe x it really was more just paradise x and the possibility of him becoming king things like that but the truth of the matter is that marvel just met like a mortar's just gone right marvel just stopped writing him one day and the reason why is because the death of a mortise had actually happened in 1993 it happened in a story called the terminatrix objective and the whole idea behind this was that immortus had basically married an alternate reality version of ravana rinslayer and then in turn they adopted another alternate reality version of ravana and that version of kang their child named marcus immortus or at least renamed him to marcus amortis and so like old people they quite literally retired to limbo and then just met their demise when they brought in six versions of ravana and then had one of them destroy kang and his wife and then following that they were dead right they've just kind of been out of the picture ever since and it's a weird way to do things because normally when you kill off a character it's just like you know this event happens and then they're dead you don't normally stop writing a character because somewhere along the line they had already died but that's the complicated nature of the character of a mortise it's because they exist throughout the time stream and different things that happened to them throughout the time stream that you might see them in the year 2030 but they may have actually died 500 years prior they just haven't gone back to the point when they die right and that's why when you look at characters like immortus you'll see him in what if stories you'll see him in just alternate reality stories like universe x or paradise x or something like that because he's a guy that functions throughout the multiverse so there's only one of him throughout the entirety of the multiverse in the same capacity that you would see somebody like the living tribunal show up in an alternate reality it's the exact same living tribunal you've seen up here in the main marvel universe it's just only one living tribunal throughout all of creation immortus is the exact same way there's only one immortus throughout the entirety of the multiverse so no matter what story you see him in in marvel comics that's the main marvel universe immortus right there's only one of him so again i know it's wonky it's a it's a weird character it's one of the reasons why i held off on explaining him for so long uh if we do explain another character like another version of kang it's gonna be a little while because my brain is fried but thank you guys for watching and i will catch you all later peace

Channel: Comics Explained

Views: 246,029

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, Iron Lad, Immortus, Scarlet Witch, Wanda Maximoff

Id: Truf-QX0fQU

Length: 26min 1sec (1561 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 06 2021