Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania has already confirmed that Kang the Conqueror will serve as their chief villain. Kang is a famous nemesis in the Marvel world for being from multiple different times and having several multidimensional versions of himself. He first made his premier in Loki as “He Who Remains.” But the Kang seen in the Quantumania poster seems to fit the more generic comic book Kang. And he’s not the only one out there. The MCU has many different Kangs to play with, and the narratives they weave could get complicated.
Kang is a complex villain. He has a history with The Fantastic Four, Doctor Doom, and even the Young Avengers. He is a particularly qualified villain to threaten the future of the MCU, if only for the unique way in which its heroes are currently arranged. As it stands, the Young Avengers are appearing one by one but have yet to be assembled. The Fantastic Four haven’t made their entrance yet, and as far as we know, Doctor Doom doesn’t exist. But there’s one version of Kang that will eventually travel through time to assemble the Young Avengers and warn Mr. Fantastic of a very particular future. And that Kang goes by the name Nathaniel Richards.
With a complicated backstory and a difficult-to-follow time travel loop, will Quantumania be the movie to kick off the story of a Kang variant that will change the world forever?
Who Is Nathaniel Richards?
Now, this is a very complicated question. There has been a lot of information going around about Kang, and even his comic book history is full of murky, confusing retcons and ex post facto corrections. But in the simplest way possible, Nathaniel Richards is a 31st-century descendant of Reed Richards (Mr. Fantastic), who was contacted by a Kang variant and traveled to our time to save the world from himself. But in a more precise way, he is the evil Kang the Conqueror. Because, like some blue-faced Rick Sanchez, one Kang is every Kang, and his multiplicity is a symptom of the pot-holed backstory that created him.
Over the course of several comics, it’s established that Nathaniel Richards, or Kang, is both Reed Richards’ father and distant multidimensional descendant. In a strange time loop that seems it was more created accidentally by writers than it was on purpose, Kang becomes both the evil Egyptian Pharaoh Rama Tut and Doctor Doom. While it has been established that there are several versions of Nathaniel Richards, the one that helped to create the Young Avengers was contacted by his evil self slightly earlier than when he could set out on his path to becoming a conqueror.
When that Nathaniel Richards split from his own timeline, he was instantly disgusted by his own destiny. When the future Kang told him he would eventually grow up to do battle with The Fantastic Four and the Avengers, he escaped and used the neuro-kinetic armor his future self gave him to travel back in time. There he could attempt to prevent his own destructive life by enlisting the help of the Avengers.
But when this Richards landed, he found himself in a time after the Avengers had already disbanded and could no longer travel back any further. Instead, he stumbled upon a fail-safe program inside Vision’s hard drive that led him to a younger generation of super-powerful individuals that were meant to act as a contingency should the Avengers ever break up or be defeated. Nathaniel Richards reconfigured his advanced armor to take on the alias Iron Lad and formed the Young Avengers.
Nathaniel Richards in Quantumania
Now, it’s a popular theory that Marvel is currently setting up the MCU for the Young Avengers in the near future. Most of the heroes that make up the team have already made their first appearance, even if it’s only been in a cameo or supporting role. Combined with Kang being introduced as a villain, that creates the possibility for many different storylines based around Nathaniel Richards’ origin story.
Kang has a huge backstory, and he turns into many villains that appear all over the Marvel Universe. The one we saw in Loki was just a peek at an MCU version of the big bad. This one that we’ll see in Quantumania at least appears to be closer to the blue-faced, purple-armored megalomaniac that exists in the classic comic books.
It's unlikely we’ll get the entire backstory for the good Nathaniel Richards in Quantumania. It makes more sense for the writers to focus on writing a single, mostly simple to explain bad guy who will threaten our timeline with quantum technology. Then, as the story continues, it will be easier for the audience to digest Kang’s origins as they get exponentially more complex.
But we wouldn’t put it past the MCU to drop an Iron Lad-looking character out of a portal in a post-credits scene.