M095--Kang The Conqueror

Real Name: Nathaniel Richards

First Appearance: The Avengers #8 (September 1964)

When pressed on his story, the man from the future called "Cable" said that time was fundamentally broken.  Something had ruptured numerous holes through the fabric of all possible realities, which the people of his era called 'stitches in time,' linking timelines together in an impossibly complex web.  While Cable had come through a stitch with the best of intentions, this opened up the possibility of something using them for nefarious purposes.  And unfortunately they didn't have to wait long.

Annihilating SWORD's orbiting base known as the Peak, an incomprehensibly large fleet of ships headed by a flagship calling itself "Damocles" appeared through one such stitch.  Utilizing technology so advanced as to appear completely alien, the autonomous fleet was headed by just one man.  He claimed to be the final survivor of Earth from the end of time.  A descendant of someone his people called "the maker," he referred to himself by the honorific the final vestiges of humanity gave him--KANG, the word in their language that meant "conqueror."

The world of his timeline had repelled apocalypse, resisted the inevitable assimilation into the dominion, and had averted the end of the Earth time and time again, but the final catastrophe was to be their undoing.  KANG conquered the last vestiges of humanity in an attempt to stop the end of time itself, but the fraying from the multitude of stitches had become too much.  In a last ditch effort, KANG and his fleet utilized one stitch and traveled to the twenty-first century, when it was believed the timestream had been first broken.  To prevent time's demise he would conquer the Earth of the twenty-first century to halt it by force.  After all, who would stop him?

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The Avengers would, of course.  By KANG's time humans are nigh unrecognizable--the blue skin with the lines all over him is quite natural.  He utilizes some sort of shape shifting hard light armor system that gives him access to a myriad of defenses.

I rather kind of liked Kang's depiction in Earth's Mightiest Heroes, making him into a somewhat well intentioned extremist instead of just some dick with a time machine, so that's basically what he is here.  I dunno if I can say much else about him--I don't know if there's any Ravonna involved or if his real name is actually Nathaniel Richards or if Rama-Tut exists or what.  I wanted to give off the feeling that he's just so far advanced from what humanity is now that he comes across as almost biblical in his arrival, like some sort of god descending onto our time.  This is also why his name in my continuity is specifically in all capital letters, KANG.  He's just unexplainable to modern people.

And this is kind of what motivated the design here.  I was always disappointed with Kang's basic design because he doesn't really look like he's from the future, he just looks like any other bad guy that might have fought the Avengers back in the day.  But it's really hard to imagine something looking futuristic when the Marvel universe is already pretty futuristic in many aspects, so this was my attempt here.  He has some sort of basic skintight green spacesuit, and his face is blue with these weird lines all over him.  And then I had the purple parts of Kang's uniform transformed into this sort of shapeshifting holographic armor system.  How I've depicted it here it is supposed to kind of look like the armor is in the process of forming around his body, giving a pattern that's reminiscent of his normal design.  On his left hand he's got some sort of shield array or maybe a computer array?  One way I imagine him attacking is by utilizing parts of the armor to open up tiny portals in the air, unleashing beams of energy from other dimensions or something.  Just completely out there compared to a normal supervillain.