Kang Is a Strange Loop
In terms of sheer impact on the evolving narrative that is the Marvel Universe, Englehart’s most significant comics of the 1970s was his run on The Avengers. Taking over from Roy Thomas in 1972, Englehart stayed with the book until 1976 (the year he left Marvel). Thomas set up a number of through lines for his successor, most notably the mystery of the android Vision’s true origins. Englehart would later say that he only started to write The Avengers well once he stopped trying to imitate Thomas [find quote], and in terms of the complexity of the comic’s plot and the intricacies of characterization, that is certainly true. But, consciously or not, Englehart did follow in Thomas’s footsteps down one particular path: in order for his heroes to develop, they had to dig into their past.
As we have already noted, Thomas was a die-hard enthusiast of the Golden Age of comics; if there was a way to connect current Marvel stories to the ones he read in his youth, he would find it. The most obvious example in Thomas’s Avengers run was when Rick Jones stopped the Kree-Skrull War by manifesting psychic reconstructions of the heroes he (and Thomas) had read about in his childhood). And it was Thomas who came up with the idea that The Vision was not created by the evil Ultron from scratch, but was instead a drastically remodeled version of the Golden Age Human Torch (who was also an android).
While this led to some very good stories (penned by Englehart, since Thomas only had the chance to drop vague hints before leaving the book), the Vision’s 1940s roots would hardly be significant on their own. But they established the model for self-discovery Englehart would use in The Avengers. If in Captain America, the writer’s task was to find a way to make this WWII holdover contemporary and forward-looking, in The Avengers, his main characters could only learn about themselves through a combination of biography and archeology, facilitated by what would become Englehart’s master trope for the last half of his Avengers comics: time travel.
Time Travel drove the plot of The Avengers from issues 129-143 (plus three “Giant-Size” issues), but its lasting effects were only felt by those who were simultaneously The Avengers’ central characters and second-tier heroes. Team books such as The Avengers and, to a lesser extent, The Defenders posed a common challenge for all their writers. Unlike The Fantastic Four, whose membership was relatively stable, and whose characters solo adventures were always secondary to the team book, The Avengers and its ilk were designed to attract readers by featuring the company’s most popular characters. [1]. This meant that the Avengers's writer had little leeway when it came to the heroes who starred in their own titles; in fact, sometimes those characters would have to leave The Avengers due to circumstances in their own books.[2]
As a result, the very characters who drove the comic’s sales were rarely allowed to develop or change over the course of The Avengers' stories. This is where the minor characters came in: Iron Man and Thor might act within very narrow parameters, but the Vision and the Scarlet Witch, for instance, were entirely fair game. The Avengers shook up their roster on a frequent basis, but, for well over a hundred issues, these two characters were constants, while others, such as Hawkeye, would occasionally leave, but eventually come back. Marvel’s successful formula was the marriage of superheroes to soap opera, and in The Avengers, the soap opera could only center around the characters who did not have books of their own. At its best, The Avengers succeeded through the tired and true technique of the bait and switch: come for Iron Man, but stay for the Vision.
With the introduction of Mantis, a character Englehart created, the soap opera quotient increased dramatically: would Mantis abandon her lover, the Swordsman, in order to steal the Vision from Wanda, the Scarlet Witch, now that the synethezoid had finally confessed his love for her? Even more important than the love triangle/rectangle was that Englehart now had three compelling characters dealing with long-term identity crises.
Wanda’s problem was relatively straightforward, especially for a heroine created in the 1960s: she needed to gain self-confidence and discover her untapped power. Finally out of the shadow of her over-protective brother Quicksilver, she chafes at the limits of her mutant hex power and finds a new mentor in the figure of Agatha Harkness, an aged sorceress who had been the nanny to Reed and Sue Richards' recently comatose mutant child. Her studies with Miss Harkness create tensions with the Vision because of the competing demands on her time, but she rather quickly (actually, extremely quickly) masters “true witchcraft” and marries her beloved. Her path is not without its bumps, but it follows a pattern familiar from Englhart’s other work: self-discovery and a drive to move ever forward.
By contrast, Mantis and the Vision have no such clear path ahead of them. Each of them has mysteries in their past that stretch back before their birth (or, in the Vision’s case, his creation), and each demonstrates the obligation to wrestle with the legacy of the past in order to create a future. Time travel will be the device that allows them to do so, but it also has significant thematic resonance, thanks to the antagonist who makes time travel necessary: Kang the Conqueror.
Kang was a Stan Lee-era Avengers foe who had not been seen in recent years, but he would suddenly become a fixture for over an entire year (in real time). Englehart wanted to explore the usually unacknowledged advantage a time-traveling enemy would have; in an interview [find], he pointed out that there was nothing stopping Kang from fleeing a losing battle with the Avengers, resting for a decade or two in the future, and then rejoining the fight only seconds after his departure. In the actual comics, Englehart did not go that far; instead, Kang was featured in issues 129 and Giant-Sized Avengers 2, followed by issues 131-132 and Giant-Sized Avengers 3, Giant-Sized Avengers 4 (at the end of a storyline running in issues 133-135), and 141-143. As one of the Avengers puts it in []: “Again? This is getting monotonous.”
But the monotony was the point. With the resources of nearly all of time and space at his disposal, Kang was determined to resist change. Englehart built on the pre-existing Marvel mythology that, in the past of his own personal timeline, Kang had spent years in ancient Egypt as the pharaoh Rama-Tut, before returning to the future and taking up the mantle of conqueror. Now he added two presumably inevitable futures that Kang found repulsive: first, that he would grow bored and return to ancient Egypt as Rama-Tut, eventually ending up in the present to thwart his past self (Kang). The second was to tie Kang to an obscure Avengers villain named Immortus, the master of Limbo. As the story progresses, we learn that Rama-Tut is fated to eventually become Immortus.
On his own, Englehart’s Kang is not particularly interesting, but as a time-traveller fighting against his own future, he becomes thematically compelling. Rama-Tut and Immortus are clearly wiser than Kang, and their disinterest in expanding their power infuriates the man who insisted on putting “the Conqueror” after his name. Unlike all of Englehart’s other character, Kang has his path to enlightenment mapped out ahead of him. Granted, it is convoluted, but that is not the point. The point is that Kang rejects this path entirely. He does not want to rise or advance; he merely wants to win.
And this is what makes Kang such an appropriate antagonist in the last years of Englehart’s run on The Avengers. What could be a more fitting counterpoint to a story in which Wanda, the Vision, and Mantis all make huge strides forward than a man whose life keeps circling back on itself as he insists on remaining unchanged? In issue 143, Kang is finally not only defeated, but destroyed, eliminating both the future Rama-Tut and Immortus from existence. [3] In his quest to conquer time and stave off his own future, Kang inadvertent chooses self-annihilation. This, too, is consistent with Engehart’s ethos: life can only be about moving forward.
Instead of progress, Kang always chooses iteration: another attack, another trip in time, even other Kangs from other points on his timeline to attack different Avengers simultaneously (Giant Size Avengers 4). Kang embodies the most retrograde tendencies in the Marvel comics of his time. Kang is not change, but the illusion of change. A backwards-looking time-traveler, he implicitly critiques the superhero temporality that, as Umberto Eco puts it, is trapped in an interactive present. He is the mainstream comics impulse to provide not better, but simply more.
Notes
[1] Members of the Fantastic Four would leave and be replaced, but always temporarily; no experience reader doubted that the team would refer to its original membership of Reed, Ben, Sue, and Johnny.
[2] This was the case with Captain America during his Nomad days, but since Englehart wrote both books, coordination was presumably simple.
[3] At least until later writers decides to bring them all back.