The Madonna-Whore Complex…in Sp-a-a-a-ace!
The key figure for any discussion of character growth in Englehart’s Avengers is also the most problematic: Mantis, the half-Vietnamese, half-white “bar girl” (i.e., sex worker) who joined the Avengers, was proclaimed the Celestial Madonna, and married a tree.
As Englehart himself admits in several interviews, Mantis was originally designed to be a “slut.” That is, she was attractive and sexually adventurous, and would sow discord on the team by hitting on all the men. And, indeed, very soon after becoming affiliated with the team thanks to her romantic relationship with their sometimes foe, sometimes ally the Swordsman, her eye wandered towards men who were stronger and more impressive than her current paramour. In particular, she flirted with the Vision, thereby complicating his budding romance with Wanda the Scarlet Witch.
Her attraction to the Vision made thematic sense; as it turned out, among the things they had in common was a set of mysteries about their own pasts. Libra, a former member of the villainous Zodiac cartel, not only declared himself to be her father, but claimed that she had been raised by the Priests of Pama, a mysterious sect who helped her develop both her martial arts and her “empathic nature” (a kind of generalized psychic talent). Initially convinced that Libra is lying (she remembers growing up on the streets of Saigon), she eventually comes to doubt her own memories. To complicate things further, a star appears above Avengers Mansion, which, according to Kang the Conqueror, means that one of the women residing there is the “Celestial Madonna,” who is destined to give birth to the next messiah. Mantis is revealed to be the Madonna, the Swordsman sacrifices his life in battle with Kang, and now she and the Avengers have to work out what it all means.
Mantis’s discoveries about her origins run in parallel to the Vision’s; each of them has been sent on a tour of the past by the time-traveling Immortus, guided by a “Synchro-Staff” whose job is to narrate the events. The Vision travels alone, but Mantis is accompanied by several of her teammates. And where the Vision’s origins go back decades before his activation, Mantis’s, much to everyone surprise, go back millennia. In order to tell her story, the Synchro-Staff has to show them the rise of the Kree from caveKree days to their never-ending war with the shape-shifting Skrulls. The result is more than the localized continuity implants that connect the Vision to the original Human Torch; here, Englehart develops a mythology that Marvel exploits to this very day.
The Skrulls, initially a peace-loving, scientifically advanced species, land on the Kree homeward of Hala, and offer the opportunity of uplifting the natives to their level. For reasons that are never explained, the Skrulls will only work with one species per world, so they organize a competition between the humanoid Kree and the telepathic plant people known as the Cotati. The Kree build the mysterious city on Earth's moon that later becomes home to the Watcher, while the Cotati grow a garden. When the Skrulls choose the Cotati, the Kree massacre them to the point of near extinction, slaughter the Skrulls, steal their technology, and initiate the seemingly-unending Kree-Skrull wars.
What does all this have to do with Mantis? A few of the Cotati survived, allying themselves with a pacifist faction called the Priests of Pama. The Kree Supreme Intelligence allowed the Priests to disperse throughout the galaxy, bringing the plants with them on the sly. One outpost was on Earth; or, to be more precise, in Vietnam. Mantis was trained by the priests, and developed her empathic abilities under the influence of the Cotati. She was raised to be the "perfect human,” and therefore had her memories erased so she could experience humanity among ordinary humans, on the streets of Saigon.
In other words, Mantis has a destiny. Grand as that may sound, it also means that very little about the course of her life has to do with choices she herself makes. In this, too, she is like the Vision, who, in both his lives, has too often been a puppet in the hands of various Gepettos. But for the Vision, the exploration of his past teaches him that he can be more assertive and live as a “man;” Mantis, whose assertiveness has always been one of her most salient characteristics, must accept that she is the product of millennia of planning and fulfill her destiny. Earth's eldest Cotati has reanimated the Swordsman’s corpse (“a gift,” he says), and provides her one last lesson to which the reader is not privy: Mantis touches her forehead to the tree’s bark and suddenly understands everything. Of course she will marry the tree.
While Mantis’s story unfolds, Englehart is also writing Captain Marvel, a character whose passivity he found so frustrating that he wrote the problem into the story (the Kree Supreme Intelligence says that Mar-Vell’s lack of ambition forced him to be more active behind the scenes). Unlike all the others characters discussed in this chapter, Mantis is Englehart’s own creation; no one at Marvel could have cared about her as much as he did. But Englehart also has a high comfort level with gendered essentialism (see the discussion of “womanhood”in the Dormammu storyline of Doctor Strange, for example). Mantis grows tremendously from her first appearance, at least in part because all Englehart initially knew about her was that she was a “slut.” But everything about her destiny results from her femininity. She flirts with the various male Avengers in order to better understand her humanity, and her value as the Celestial Madonna is entirely dependent on men. She will marry a powerful man (not Kang, but the Cotati), bringing together two species, in order to give birth to the (male) messiah. In her early appearances, Mantis comes off as self-confident, if not self-absorbed (her bizarre verbal tic of referring to herself as “this one” in stead of “I” notwithstanding). Her path toward greater complexity is, unlike that of everyone else in this chapter with the possible exception fo Doctor Strange, a matter of kenosis (emptying out). Her transcendence downplays her individual ego in favor of what she represents: a gender, a species, and a possible better future.