Who Is Kang? The Marvel Infinity Comic Reviewed and Origin Explained

Who is Kang? The Infinity Comic explained

Marvel published Who Is...? Kang Infinity Comic #1 as a one-shot on Wednesday, January 25, 2023, a few weeks ahead of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. The timing was deliberate. Kang was being set up as the next big threat of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and most of the audience had met him only in the Loki finale. A short comic that explains who he is and why he matters fits that need.

The creative team is small and well matched to the job. Rich Douek wrote it, Ramón F. Bachs drew it, Pete Pantazis handled the color, and Mark Basso edited. It lives on Marvel Unlimited, the subscription service Marvel relaunched on September 9, 2021, alongside the Infinity Comics line. The Infinity format is vertical and built for scrolling on phones and tablets, and Marvel presented it as its first vertical-format storytelling.

The question in the title is the whole assignment. Casual fans who know the Avengers films know Thanos, Ultron and Loki, but Kang the Conqueror is a character from the comics of the 1960s whom the movies had barely touched. The comparison that fits is Thanos before 2012: a name only longtime readers recognized, and then a figure with thousands of memes. Marvel hoped to repeat that.

What the comic covers

The story is brief. Kang is a time traveler from the future, where he was known as Nathaniel Richards. His world is stagnant and perfect, and he is bored by it. He longs for an age of heroes, with its ambition and passion, and uses the technology of his era to build a time machine so he can go back and conquer the past.

Conquest, though, leads to rule, and rule turns out to be dull. One of the comic's best jokes is that Kang conquers ancient Egypt with a flying sphinx that fires laser beams, which is a lot more fun than collecting grain taxes. He solves the boredom by committing to endless conquest, moving from era to era and from one battle to the next.

From there, Douek runs through some of Kang's famous encounters with the Fantastic Four and the Avengers, and notes the death of Ravonna, the love of his life. That loss gives his conquest an emotional source and links him to the many divergent timelines the character is known for. Film viewers may know the name from Loki, where Gugu Mbatha-Raw plays Ravonna Renslayer, a judge at the Time Variance Authority, so the comic gives that name a comics-side backstory.

The artwork and the format

The artwork is where the project makes the best use of its format. Because an Infinity Comic scrolls vertically, the page is not divided into the usual grid of panels. Bachs blends one scene into the next so that the story reads almost like one continuous panel, an approach that suits a character whose whole identity is moving between times. Panels flow into one another the way eras do in Kang's own travels.

The result is a comic that is easy to read on a phone and does not feel like a print book squeezed onto a screen. For readers who have not tried the Infinity format, this is a gentle place to start.

Kang's names and where they came from

Who is Kang in publication terms? The character is older and more tangled than a single issue can show. His first appearance was as the pharaoh Rama-Tut in Fantastic Four #19 in October 1963, created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. He returned as Kang in The Avengers #8 in September 1964, an issue that also established Rama-Tut as a younger version of Kang. Immortus, who first appeared in Avengers #10 in 1964, was established as a future identity of Kang in Giant-Size Avengers #3 in 1975.

The question of his family has also moved. Fantastic Four #273 in 1984 suggested he was descended from Nathaniel Richards instead of from Doctor Doom, and What If...? volume 2 #39 in 1992 gave his birth name as Nathaniel Richards. Later stories in 1999 and 2020 left the matter open. The infinite possibilities of his timelines make that vagueness a feature, because a character who exists in many versions at once does not need a single, fixed biography. It also explains why a short primer like the Infinity Comic can pick one clean version of his life and trust readers to accept it.

Kang's identities and first appearances

Who Is...? Kang review: the verdict and what changed since

As a primer, the comic works. It is short, clear and well drawn, it explains the one idea a newcomer needs, which is that Kang wants to conquer every time and every place, and it moves fast enough that the repetitions of his life never become boring, and it keeps the humor that a character this grandiose needs. A villain who conquers Egypt with a laser-firing sphinx has to be allowed to be a little silly, and the comic allows it, so the menace comes through as confident and not gloomy. For readers whose only exposure to the character was the end of the first season of Loki, it offers context without homework. The one complaint is that a one-shot has no room for the rest of the story: the Avengers battles are mentioned and rarely dramatized, and a reader may finish wanting a longer book.

The film that the comic supported, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, was directed by Peyton Reed and starred Paul Rudd and Evangeline Lilly, with Majors as Kang the Conqueror. It opened on February 17, 2023, and it was the first film of the franchise's fifth phase. The comic was therefore aimed at a viewer who had seen Majors as He Who Remains and wanted to know whether the conqueror on the poster was the same man. In broad terms he was: a variant of the same figure from a different timeline, which is the sort of answer the comic gives in miniature.

The surrounding plans have shifted a great deal. On screen, Kang arrived in stages. Jonathan Majors played Kang's variants in Loki, including He Who Remains, and Kang made his live-action film debut in Quantumania. Marvel dismissed Majors in December 2023 after his conviction. Kevin Feige later said that Kang "wasn't big enough" for the role and that Doctor Doom would take over as the main antagonist of the Multiverse Saga. The film once called Avengers: The Kang Dynasty was reworked into Avengers: Doomsday.

That makes the Infinity Comic something of a time capsule. It was written to introduce the villain of the next stage of the franchise, and the franchise went in a different direction. The comic itself holds up because it describes the character, not the casting. A reader who wants to know who is Kang in the comics, with all his names and timelines, gets the right answer from the book and from the publication history above. A reader who wants to know where the movies are going has to look elsewhere.

Anyone who finishes the Infinity Comic and wants more has several options. The character's convoluted history runs through the 1999 series Avengers Forever, whose ninth issue keeps his ancestry ambiguous, and Marvel published an eponymous Kang miniseries in 2021. The older Fantastic Four and Avengers issues named in the table are the place to see the villain as his creators first wrote him. Each of them rewards the curiosity that the one-shot is built to start.

Sources

• Kang the Conqueror, Wikipedia — character origin and publication history