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The latest iteration of the war between Kang the Conqueror’s variants has already claimed its first victim, and Nathanial Richards is in big trouble.
WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for Kang the Conqueror #1, available now from Marvel.
Kang the Conqueror is about to take the Marvel Cinematic Universe by storm, but that isn’t the first reality that the time-traveling tyrant has tried to stake a claim to. As glimpsed in Loki, Kang’s very existence across realities has led to multiversal war, leading to the deaths of countless variant versions of himself. And now in Colin Kelly, Jackson Lanzing, Carlos Magno, Espen Grundetjern and Joe Caramagna’s Kang the Conqueror #1, a new war between Nathaniel Richards and various versions of himself has just begun with the death of an icon and the birth of a brand new kind of Kang.
When the Nathaniel Richards of the 31st century had enough of being bullied by the other citizens of this idyllic society, he turned to time travel in order to find something greater than what this world has to offer. An excursion to unearth the secrets among the remains of Castle Doom leads the young Nathaniel directly to his older self in the form of Kang the Conqueror. Nathaniel is offered a chance to learn from him and be molded into a better Kang. Initially, this Kang seems to see their own most souring defeats coming from years away, but Nathaniel turns the tables on the older Kang with dramatic results.
Kang the Conqueror Reveals the Heartbreaking Secret Meaning of His Mask
After Nathaniel joins Kang in traveling through time, he is horribly surprised by his own eventual unrelenting cruelty. In the training grounds of prehistory, Nathaniel meets his first love. When he reveals that to Kang, he meets the monster that he would become. Believing love to be the sole factor in all of his defeats, Kang massacres the tribe in which his younger self had found romance while forcing Nathaniel to watch the carnage unfold. Whatever lesson this was supposed to impart missed the mark, and Nathaniel only took away a seething hatred towards this version of himself.
Nathaniel stole Kang’s armor the night before this era underwent an extinction event in the shape of a dinosaur-killing asteroid. As Nathaniel says to himself while donning his older self’s armor, “Time would conquer all my enemies. If only I could master it,” and the young time traveler puts that idea into practice here. Only moments before the prehistoric world was annihilated, Nathaniel stepped away into the timestream towards a new future for himself. It would be a deeply heartfelt moment of self-discovery, one of letting go of the worst parts of himself, and it was a death sentence for the elder Kang in the process.
Marvel Just Gave Kang the Conqueror’s Variant War a New Beginning
As the long-standing feud between Kang and Immortus and the MCU’s multiversal war have shown, this is hardly the first time that two versions of Kang have attacked each other. However, this is the youngest version of Nathaniel Richards that we’ve seen fighting another version of himself. Considering both his experience with Kang and his feelings for the lost tribe he saved, this may even be a version of Nathaniel Richards that grows up to be Immortus or another one of Kang’s alter egos instead.
Even without his armor, it’s hard to believe that the elder Kang doesn’t have some means of escaping this particularly grim fate, especially for someone who has ruled an empire that spanned the reaches of time itself. If that proves to be the case, Nathaniel will surely be seeing his elder self sooner than later. Beyond that, there are still a plethora of alternate and future versions of himself for Nathaniel to come across, and they might not be happy to see him either. Nathaniel Richards might have managed to rid himself of one problem, but he has only created an entire multiverse worth of new ones for himself.
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