Talking about one of the most important villains in the Marvel Universe in a comic is a challenge of considerable height, not only for not presenting him directly as the bad guy in the story. Panini Comics offers a new visit to the origin of Kang the Conqueror and the life he has had.
Kang the Conqueror: Clarifying a little who we are talking about
You open this paperback tome and the first thing you come across, pretty much, is Kang’s identity under the armor, a young man named Nathaniel Richards. But wasn’t this Reed’s father from the Fantastic Four? The one who, along with Howard Stark and Leonid, actively participated in the great work SHIELD by Jonathan Hickman and Dustin Weaver? The one who, as a time traveler, kidnapped his grandson Franklin and brought him back as an adult during the stage of Tom DeFalco and Paul Ryan? ?… And so we could keep asking questions everywhere and trying to figure out how to fit all of that together. No, this Nathaniel is not the one we know as the father of Mr. Fantastic, he is a descendant of his who, due to twists and turns of fate, ended up becoming Kang (please, Trekkies followers, do not confuse with Khan).
A Kang who throughout the pages is going to be indoctrinated by himself, by his own history already lived previously, because if there is something a time traveler has, it is that ease of trying to amend his own mistakes even at the cost of committing others. new, but that helps to improve and get to know each other better, both to highlight the strengths of your person and to realize the weaknesses that lead you to trip over the same stone even if it is from different periods in time, a weakness that even has a first and last name, Ravonna Renslayer and his love for her.
More personalities than Moon Knight
Rama-Tut, Immortus, Iron Lad, Scarlet Centurion… Kang. Trying to track him down through thousands of publications is really a task only within the reach of a few scholars, students of his wanderings through the many Marvel headers. Let us remember that despite being one of the most recognized villains of The Avengers, his journey began in the Fantastic Four series, in the guise of the Egyptian god-pharaoh Rama-Tut. Back then, the imagination of Stan (Lee) and Jack (Kirby) already endowed him with a time machine whose external structure is the same as that of the Sphinx (in fact, it is its outer casing that was left abandoned), which can be found next to to the set of great pyramids of Cheops, Kefren and Micerino, on the Giza plateau.
But it is Kang who prevails over the others, who monopolizes the most prominence in all the time lines, the others are a reflection of his evolution, of the need to adapt to certain moments. Kang who has dedicated his life to getting out of the ostracism and boredom of the time he was born to live in, who in the conquest of any other world enjoys putting his skills at the service of his purpose of plunging others into slavery and a time they are slaves push them to be the slavers of the following conquered. And despite this, he does not lose the identity of a man who fears himself and maintains an internal struggle with what he was, is and could become.
Not that Nathaniel Richards himself would have done it
The screenwriters Jackson Lanzing and Collin Kelly together with the cartoonist Carlos Magno become chroniclers of the life, work and miracles of a complex character, who as soon as you hate him for his desire for domination as you pity him, his suffering due to the loss of love so beautiful that he shared with Ravonna, although then that has a lot of fabric to cut afterwards. Reinventing an origin, forming itself through its different incarnations and relocating it within the multiple timelines to put a tyrant back on the comic map who is designated as the future great opponent within the Marvel Audiovisual Universe.
And they do it with tact, with love, giving the character all the attention he deserves, with a great comic that is full of splash pages for greater veneration of Kang and any of his identities. A work that helps to understand who he is, what he needs, what he wants to avoid to achieve his purpose of conquest, the escape from the boredom of his bland XXX Century, precisely what led him to start a journey through time and space. that have made him fearsome, uncontrollable, unpredictable but also very necessary, even in the small moments in which he has had no choice but to let out a hero who is also inside him, although buried quite deep within his black soul .