He’s the man of the Multiverse.

Kang has been the topic of conversation since his variant’s first appearance in Loki in the summer of 2021 (yes, it has been almost 2 years). And we have only seen a few versions of him since that time, the most recent being in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. But that movie has established quite a few versions of Kang, so we thought now was the time to break into his character a little more and understand where this next Big Bad will take us. As always, if you haven’t had the chance to listen to the podcast episode, take a second to click the button below to listen on your platform of choice or listen live in this blog post.

The Jonathan Majors Situation

Before I start us on the Kang train, I want to take a second to address the situation that the actor who portrays Kang, Jonathan Majors, is involved in. In all cases, domestic assault allegations need to be taken very seriously and the victim should be given support. While we do believe in someone being innocent until proven guilty, it is also critical to understand, especially in this situation, that the victim did show signs of abuse. We are not here to give a verdict in our court of public opinion, but we want to be clear if Majors is guilty, that we do not and will not further support him in any way.

The only reason we will be raising the question of how his arrest affects the MCU is due to the nature of our podcast. Otherwise, we want to ensure people worry about the well-being of the victim during this time. The future of Kang being played by Majors seems dismal, as recent updates have allegedly claimed Majors has been dropped by his manager and PR team. He has also since been taken out of several other projects he was involved in. He did meet with Marvel a few days back, prior to these latest developments, but there didn’t seem to be any decisions made at that time. Due to the changes outside of Marvel, I think it is anticipated Marvel will be dropping him as well, although we will still be seeing him appear in things he has filmed, such as Loki Season 2, as I’m not sure the plot may allow for him to be cut out. This means we can likely expect a recast coming our way long before we reach Kang Dynasty. As of now, this is only our own thoughts on the matter and where the situation stands, but we will be keeping you all updated as more information comes to light.

Who is Kang?

Starting off, here are a few quick cheat sheet facts to know about Kang.

• He is most commonly an opponent of the Avengers and the Fantastic Four
• He is actually a descendent of Reed Richards
• As a single character, he has the most known variants
• Kang, over the years of comic book stories, has become a mantle more than one singular person. Other characters to take on the Kang moniker are his three wives Ravonna (yes like the one from Loki), Mantis, and Nebula. His two sons also become Kang at one point, along with Sue Storm and Kamala Khan.
• The story of Kang begins when he first finds Victor Doom’s (with who there might also be a relation) time-traveling technology

Major Variants of Kang

Iron Lad – Not Yet Seen

I won’t go into too much detail about Iron Lad, as he was spoken about and covered in several recent episodes and posts, including Quantumania Predictions and Young Avengers. He is Nathaniel Richards, the young version of who would eventually become Kang. He is made aware of his future and the evil person he becomes and forms the Young Avengers to try and stop his future self. He eventually succumbs to his fate of becoming Kang after realizing there is no other way to beat fate. This is, of course, the whole story in a tiny nutshell.

Rama Tut – Seen

Rama Tut is one of the versions of Kang that we see in the end credit scene of Quantumania. He is technically the first variant of Kang, as he becomes Rama Tut after he travels back in time for the first time to Ancient Egypt. Unfortunately, he runs into two semi-ironic situations, the first being that he actually interacts with our frenemy Khonshu in his time there, and the second being that bad luck happened to leave the Fantastic Four stranded at the exact same place and time. This was the first time they would defeat our buddy Kang, but certainly not the last.

Scarlet Centurion – Seen

Another of the three we saw in the end credit scene, Scarlet Centurion sort of just sucks as a Kang variant. He creates some chaos and makes it everyone’s problem. His big storyline is when he goes back in time to change the outcome of an Avengers battle and convinces the Avengers that more enhanced individuals would destroy the world (think what Vision was saying in Civil War). To fight this, the Avengers became almost evil, neutralizing and imprisoning all enhanced individuals in their timeline. Later, the 616 Avengers end up in this screwed-up timeline (689) and the two groups battle until 616 is able to build the time machine they would need to leave and also defeat the Scarlet Centurion. I actually could see this coming true in the MCU just due to the concept of Secret Wars coming up. It could be a cool way to wrap Kang more fully into it.

Immortus – Seen

And finally, the third Kang variant we saw at the end of Quantumania was Immortus. Talk about a complicated variant, this guy can’t decide what level of bad he wants to be. In a nutshell, this guy didn’t start as the worst. He was actually Rama-Tut and reinvented himself as Immortus to help the Time Keepers (like the real comic ones not the weird robots from the MCU) in preserving the timelines. He runs into the Avengers and spends many comic books messing with and battling them. At one point he helps to defeat another version of himself, but then also tries to use the Scarlet Witch to make him the absolute master of time. So as you see, he kinda can’t decide when he doesn’t want to be the worst and when he does. But one important fact to remember is that Immortus still doesn’t like his variants and is the one who wants them all to die. Because of this, he uses the Council of Kangs, led by Prime Kang, as an opportunity to trick Prime Kang into killing all the other Kang variants, as Prime Kang becomes Immortus later. For your own sanity, I need to ensure you you aren’t crazy, just that a lot of Kang variants shift and become other variants.

Victor Timely – Seen

I chose arguably one of the most important variants to go last and that’s our buddy Victor Timely. He’s the variant from the second end credit scene, the one relating to Loki. Victor is best known for creating a small town in Wisconsin in which he’s the mayor and pulls a Kingo, pretending to be multiple generations of Timelys to continue his rule of the town. He uses the town to create Chronopolis, which is a weird time Limbo that can act relatively similar to a time machine. He also creates the original Human Torch during his time. Funny enough, Timely’s company eventually is in charge of security in both the Baxter building and Avengers Tower. And here is that weird circle of Kang once again, as Victor eventually takes on being Kang Prime, and we all generally know how that goes.

So that’s that! This is of course not an exhaustive list of all the Kang variants, but it is a good start to some of the more important ones and some of the ones the MCU seems to be singling out. From the looks of it, our buddy Victor Timely seems to be the next variant of Kang we encounter in Loki Season 2, expected right now in late summer/early fall. As far as where we are going next, GotG3 is right around the corner, believe it or not, so purchase those movie tickets if you haven’t, and get ready for something that looks like it’s going to hurt my feelings. We will of course be covering it, so keep an eye out for our predictions episode which will be coming very soon. As always keep up with all this great content, as Marvel just blew your mind, so let’s talk about it.

Image: “Kang Variants”, Jamie Dunkin, We Got This Covered