_____Hey, marvel movie rumors! That should help distract us from living in literal hell of between 6 and 10 minutes. So, absent much else going on in this specific section of the filmaking universe as the world continues showing surprising patience with the united states trying to get rid of at least one or both of its global economy stalling viral infections. The latest gossip surrounds actor Jonathan Mages apparently having been cast in a major Marvel cinematic universe multi-film role set to debut in a soon-to-shoot Ant-man 3, once again directed by Peyton Reed. Good actor, happy to hear he may have picked up a big recurring pot. The hot gossip however, concerns the rumored but not yet confirmed identity of the actual character, with deadline.com reporting sources close to the project believe he's playing long-standing Marvel villain Kang the Conqueror. (Who?)
_____All right so yeah, this is an episode I was kind of hoping I wouldn't ever have to actually do because the whole explaining-comic-book-bullshit-before-they-make it-into-a-movie thing is kind of the obligatory lifeblood of this business and still explaining Kang is just, kind of a gigantic pain in the ass. Because while he's one of those big cosmic ultra threat bad guys who's generally the linchpin of big, long term marvel stories i.e he could either be the next thanos or they want fans to think he'll be the next thanos for a misdirection. Kang himself is at once incredibly confusing and I'm sorry, very boring. Like even his general design is just very scandinavian minimalist furniture you know? "oh hey another blue and or purple person in futuristic tunic with a hat that lets Kirby avoid having to draw ears cool." and his backstory is, FRUSTRATING I think would be a nice way to put it. Another way to put it would be of course: "COMICS! ARE! WEIRD!"
_____See, Kang is basically a regular human-ish guy more or less with no special powers but he's got a shitload of tecnology tha's so advanced it's basically magic because he's a time traveller from the future, specifically the 31st century and then later, which yes sounds pretty optimistic, where he's conquered everything and he likes to zip back and forth into points in the past and make sure the future stays that way, at least that was the inital idea. He showed up as a one off Avengers villain early on int he run when pretty much every Avengers nemesis was just a super powerful person who'd show up aunannounced, challenge them, get beat, and then leave to fight another day because the Avengers was an idead the publisher kind of forced on Stan Lee and company and it took them a while to figure out what they were actually supposed to do or be about and if you're remembering, "hey wait doesn't any character good or evil having a time machine with zero defined usage limits break the universe, like, even beyond the whole why-not-just-come-back-every-30-seconds-until-the-avengers-are-just-worn-out-from-fighting-in-under-an-hour issue? (cue bill and ted clip)
_____Yeah well that's how Kang became if not interesting at least useful as the Marvel universe walikng embodiment of what I like to call, "Explainium" i.e the opposite inverse of "Handwavium," the shorthand for whichever mechanism a work of fiction deploys to skip past explaining either something impossible or a mistake, in order to get back to the plot because that's the more interesting part of the story. (cue simpsons clip: a wizard did it) "Explainium" is for the opposite situation for when your story isn't original or not very good or your mistake actually was a mistake. And so instead of skipping ahead you just try to bury in convoluted, made-up sci-fi bullshit that SOUNDS interesting or even more convoluted mythos and lore connectivity that panders to fanboys by making them feel rewarded for recognizing all the references i.e when your editor says "wait, didn't we already do Thanos sends dinosaurs to kill spider-man?" and then the writer says: "No no see that time Thanos was using the time stone to summon dinosaurs from prehistoric times but THIS TIME he used the reality stone to create the dinosaurs he knew spider-man had seen in his childhood nightmares by using the mind stone so you see this is a totally totally different story."
_____So after some recurring apperances where it got fleshed out that Kang was actually just a history scholar from the 31st century who found out Dr. Doom invented time travel once dug up the research and used it to zip around the past and set up an even further post-apocalyptic future where he could be a conqueror, Kang got repurposed as Marvel's retroactive time-travelling Scooby-Doo villain throughout the silver and early bronze age. Whenever Marvel wanted to revisit an old story and beef up its place in the mythos or just patch a hole in the continuity, it was Kang all along. The Scarlet Centurion? That was kang. And since he was revealed to have been the evil egyptian pharaoh Rama-Tut? That was also Kang. Despite having been introduced in the pages of a Fantastic Four comic a year before Kang's first appearance in the Avengers comic. Kang is also Immortus though technically he's the even-further-into-the-future version of Kang that doesn't like Kang and at one point because of all the time changing there were many Kangs who were opposed to each other, yeah, but Immortus is often thought to be the alpha dog of them since you know, the name and he's got the big hat right? Oh he's also the father of Marcus the interdimensional sleazeball who raped Carol Danvers in order to impregnate her with a clone of himself so he could be reborn in a human body and marry her. Yeah, that whole thing? That's also a Kang story, great. So was the Celestial Madonna saga which, you know what I don't have the time or drugs to explain THAT thing here and I've got a sinking feeling that another project is going to make it necessary to explain it anyway in the near future. (Memo from 2021: well I was half right - turns out I had to wait for "LOKI" to be running while I was in tthe middle of trying to explain "THE ETERNALS") So for now that was when Vision married Scarlett Witch but it was a double wedding where Mantis also married a magic tree because she was going to give birth to vegan new age christ or something and Immortus officiated. Oh yeah he's also a random small town Wisconsin mayor in 1901 name Victor Timely who seeds Phineas Horton's mind with the plans to later create Jim Hammond the original android version of the Human Torch during World War II -Oh hey do you remember that you've already seen him in the MCU? (cue clip of Captian America movie's Human torch reference) Ah hell now they got me doing it and he's also Iron Lad a teenage Kang from his original timeline who figures that he's going to grow up to BE Kang the Conqueror-Oh did I not mention Kang not his real name? Gee that seems important. And decides he doesn't want to be a super villain so he's going to fix things by going back to the 21st century dressing up like Tony Stark and Forming the teenage superhero cover band The Young Avengers in the wake of the first Civil War event.
_____Okay so the bad news is, Kang the Conqueror is kind of a dull character who makes everything more confusing, only exists to be confusing himself, and is only prominent in the first place because for a long time he was the only suitably noteworthy regular Avengers villain other than Ultron who belonged to the Avengers as a team, as opposed to being the nemesis of a specific hero who happened to also be an Avenger. The good news is if this is true, that doesn't really matter because this is for the movies. Jonathan Mages is a good actor and Marvel studios totally reworks the villains from the ground up all the time. So a guy whose basic backstory and whole deal with all the other stuff, likely including the stupid hat, stripped out would still end up letting Marvel riff on an unlicensed evil version of The Doctor, bouncing around their continuity causing trouble would have a lot of possibilities. Not just as a bad guy to fight but as a way to kick off and/or resolve storylines, especially since given that Avengers: Endgame established the MCU's version of time travel operates on an assumption of quantum multiverse branching mechanics rather than ripple effect and MCU Kang would logically have to be capable of traversing dimensions as well as time. But speaking of ripple effects one reason to cover these admittedly-just-shy-of-clickbait-casting stories is well, people watch these frankly but also because the way one role is cast can sometimes telly you how other roles are trending. Specifically in the comics, Kang the Conqueror's real name is Nathaniel Richards, and Since in superhero universes there's no such thing as coincidental name sharing. (SAVE MARTHA CLIP HERE)
Yes, at leaast the last time I was able to make coherent sense of his origins, Nathaniel Richards is meant to be the distant descendants of Reed Richards, Mr. Fantastic.
_____Bear in mind this character is apparently meant to debut in Ant-man 3 which is being directed by Peyton Reed now somewhat famously Peyton Reed was supposed to direct a Fantastic Four movie at Fox back in the 90s but the studio ultimately turned down his take which reportedly would have skipped the origin story and been a highly stylized period film set in mid-1960s of the original comics and made the two Jessica Alba movies instead and it's been rumored pretty much since the first Ant-man did way more box office than anyone expected out of Ant-man that Marvel had been considereing having reed take another shot once they got the property back which they've now done (MEMO FROM 2021: John watts, director of the two MCU "SPIDER-MAN" movies, has since been chosen to helm the project.)
_____So if Majors an african-american actor, is playing a character who's supposed to be related to the Richards family, traditionally depicted as white characters, we might have a big clue now as to how the MCU's take on the Fantastic Four might differ from the versions we've seen previously in literally every other medium. That would be a significant change and kind of a big deal. One can only imagine what internet fandom cultures; calm, measured, thoughtful, forward-looking, and broadly considered take on the matter would be were it to come to pass, right? (cue town shocked at black sheriff clip) And the abyss stares back ever deeper. I'm bob and that's The Big Picture
