In episode 6 of Loki, we learned that the entire TVA was masterminded by a version of Nathanial Richards known as He Who Remains. Richards told of a multiversal war that had almost wiped out all life in existence because his variants couldn’t decide who had the nicest shoes and thus he had wiped out entire timelines in order to avoid facing up to himself.
He Who Remains gave Loki and Sylvie a choice, either they could take over his role and carry on the TVA’s fascist regime or they could kill him and allow the multiverse to spring into action, ushering forth an infinite amount of versions of Kang.
He Who Remains final words were “I’ll see you soon” and with Johnathan Majors propped to appear in Ant-Man Quantumania it’s pretty clear that Kang will be coming sooner rather than later.
But who is Kang and which variants should be worried about? Well throughout this post we’re gonna be breaking down Kang as well as his best and worst versions from across the Marvel Universe.
Character’s Origins
Now before talking about all the variants of Richards I think we have to discuss the prime version of the character’s origins. This will go over the main thing storyline of his life and how he came to be established as one of the biggest marvel villains ever.
Nathanial was born in the 31st century and he was a descendant of Reed Richards aka Mr Fantastic. Obsessed with history and time travel, Richards studied how to manipulate the timestream and after mastering this he decided to journey through it in order to conquer different timelines throughout the universe.
Now as we learned in Avengers Endgame, every time you travel back in time there is the possibility that you can create a branch in reality in which a timeline travels off in its own direction. Each and every time Richards journeyed to the past and affected events there he in turn created an alternate version of himself and this is how there are so many variants.
Now the first major one of these is Rama Tut.
Rama Tut
Richard’s first major journey through time was to ancient Egypt and the character traversed the timestream on a Sphinx-shaped ship which allowed him to blend in…because yeah…if there’s one thing everyone did back then, it’s ride around in a big space ship.
Hints towards this could actually be seen in the void in Loki episode 5 when we saw a Sphinx with its nose intact and this is actually very similar looking to the one that Tut had. Side tangent, it is possible that the artefacts and locations we saw in the void were pulled from culled Kang timelines and this is why we also saw that Avengers Tower had the Qeng logo on it.
Anyway as Tut he wanted to claim En Sabah Nur aka apocalypse as his heir. The character debuted in The Fantastic Four 19 and he quickly established himself as a powerful Pharaoh during the time.
Tut’s rule seemed like it could be everlasting however he was defeated by the Fantastic Four who had been displaced out of the timeline.
Speaking of four and time…how do you know when a clock is hungry…it always goes back four seconds.
It’s the way I tell ’em.
Defeated, Richards ended up travelling to the 20th century where he came face to face with Doctor Doom who he believed might also be an ancestor of him.
Richards was obviously bitterly disappointed with his defeat at the hands of the Fantastic Four and thus he ended up trying to become more and more like him.
Scarlet Centurion
Kang’s fascination with Doom is something that would continue for years in the comics and the next phase of the character was the Scarlet Centurion which had armour that was based on Doom’s designs.
The pair first met in the Fantastic Four Annual #2 and it was one of the most important moments in Richard’s life as he became highly influenced by the supervillain.
Years later, several variants of Richards would end up fusing together to create Doom’s The Annihilating Conqueror. This is by far one of the most terrifying and fearful versions of the villain and it combined Doctor Doom, Annihilus and Iron Lad, who we’ll talk about later.
Now as the Centurion, he attempted to defeat the Avengers but the character was bested and forced from the timeline. Richards tried to return to the 31st century, however, he ended up overshooting by a thousand years and he came across an Earth that had been decimated by war. Luckily for Kang because of the need for soldiers, scientists had sort of died out and the humans were forced to use weapons and technologies that they knew how to use but didn’t know how to create.
Kang The Conqueror
Kang ended up conquering this world easily and it’s here that he became Kang The Conqueror, the most infamous version of the character.
He developed his technology and armour, which allowed him to gain increased strength and durability. It’s at this time he ended up setting up the Damocles Base, which, like its namesake was shaped like a sword. Onboard were his legion of footsoldiers and he used these to ravage anything he wished to take over.
During this time the character fell for Ravonna Renslayer who was a princess in one of his many kingdoms. They were part of an uprising and after Kang refused to execute her this led to a revolt and thus Kang has sort of gone from timeline to timeline attempting to restore his former glory. Now Kang did return to Egypt and he ruled as Rama Tut for 10 years before placing himself in suspended animation to wait it out until the 20th century.
This all built towards the Celestial Madonna story in which Kang ended up attempting to marry Mantis because she was apparently destined to bear a child who would be one of the most powerful beings in the universe.
Immortus
Now it’s also during this that it was revealed that the character Immortus was actually an older Variant of Kang and most of the versions that live long enough end up becoming him. The design of He Who Remains was actually based heavily on Immortus and the MCU version is somewhat of an amalgamation between Immortus and well…he who remains.
Immortus is somewhat of a good guy that has actually helped the Avengers from time to time and he’s basically you when you watch videos of yourself from 10 years ago. He finds himself super cringe and doesn’t really want the past version of himself to take over the universe as he was young, foolish and greedy for power. Thus Immortus and Kang have been trapped in an almost everlasting war and the most notable happening of this occurred in the comic Avengers Forever in which the two went head to head.
Immortus is basically a more powerful and far more knowledgable version of Kang and he learnt a wealth of things from the Time Keepers who you will of course be aware of due to the series.
They taught him a lot of cosmic information and embued him with power that allowed him to prune and delete his numerous variants. However, Immortus’ worse nature got the better of him and we learned that during this that he was actually also trying to establish himself as the ruler of all time which no doubt hints at what may have happened before the events of what we see in the show.
Either way, he and his younger self have been locked in an infinite war and because of this several versions and variants have come forth.
Kamala Kang
Now the first majorly interesting one I wanna touch upon is Kamala Kang. Ms Marvel is of course coming down the line and there is potential that we might see her one day. During the events of the Infinity Wars comic book storyline, Gamora ended up bending and folding reality and this meshed several characters together.
Kamala possessed all the technical and scientific knowledge that Kang had and on top of this she brought with her the ability to shapeshift. By far one of the most powerful versions of Kang I would absolutely love to see her pop up in the MCU at some point.
Iron Lad
Now another young version of Kang is Iron Lad who ended up forming the Young Avengers. With the likes of Wiccan and Speed as well as Eli Bradley all popping up in the shows, it’s possible that Iron Lad too could be coming down the line to form the team.
He wears a suit of Armor similar to tony starks and its ability to change shape with a thought. He’s definitely one of the strongest in the Young Avengers team and it makes a lot of sense that he could pop up at some time too.
Victor Timely
Other notable versions are Victor Timely, a version of Richards who journeyed back in time to 1901 and here he set up the town Timely in Wisconsin.
Get it…because he’s called timely and he messes with time…lee.
The name Victor is also a nod to Victor Von Doom and he’s got a lot of cool easter eggs attached to him.
After first showing up in Avengers Annual 21, Timely has appeared from time to time and he actually was the character whose experiments led to the original android Human Torch who you may know from Timely Comics.
Timely Comics eventually changed its name to Atlas Comics and Atlas comics ended up becoming the Marvel comics that we know today. So Victor has several meta things surrounding him and I think it would be a great wink to the audience to have him show up.
Mr Gryphon
Now the last variant I think that has a big possibility of being in the MCU is Mr Gryphon. Gryphon actually ended up purchasing Avengers Tower from Tony Stark and out of it he ran his company Qeng Industries.
Using his technology skills he managed to possess the Vision something that we already saw Hayward do.
Potentially it could turn out that he was the one who helped to fund SWORD with their experiments and with the Qeng building already showing up I think it would be great to see him appear.
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