Kang meets Merlin in Strange Tales 134, July 1965, by Stan Lee and Bob Powell. (c) 2023 Marvel Comics.

“The best laid schemes of mice and men…”

To tie-in to both Valentine’s Day and the upcoming Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania movie, the plan for the podcast was take a look at the wedding of Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne from Avengers 60. But that story, and the previous issue, the first appearance of Yellowjacket, present a lot of stuff that is very totally out-of-place for 2023 sensibilities. So, we called an audible.

Instead, we look at the long and convoluted history of Kang the Conqueror, which, as it turns out, doesn’t even start with his first appearance in Avengers 8. So, let’s talk about Kang, Rama-Tut, the Scarlet Centurion, Immortus, Ravonna, Nathaniel Richards, Doctor Doom, The Council of Cross-Time Kangs, The Time Variance Authority, Mobius M. Mobius and more. We also (for the second pod in a row) discuss Omniverse, the 1970s fanzine started by the late Mark Gruenwald and the article in issue two of that magazine devoted to all those characters, or is it just one character?

(Note: this only goes up to the late 1980s. We don’t talk about the Avengers story by Kurt Busiek and various others in the early 2000s or anything from the last few years after the characters became part of the MCU in the Loki TV show.

This is a great companion piece to the recent episode of The Winter Palace where we talked to Mark Waid about continuity in comics.