There was a time when I mentioned with a reasonable amount of presumption that the history of Kang the Conqueror was so convoluted that there weren't likely that many people who would want to take a crack at charting it, or words to that effect. But in a mid-1986 Avengers story, writer Roger Stern makes a respectable attempt to do so, at least up to a point. For the purposes of this three-part tale, his retrospect on Kang suffices--and for those readers who aren't up on Kang's early history, they'll find Stern's information to be concise and easy to follow, if incomplete. As part of an explanation that takes us into the climax of the story, he really only needs to take us up to a certain crucial development that helps to explain the motivation of the narrator (Kang) and his reasons for setting his plans in motion; yet in addition, Stern adds a twist to the original events that aligns the character's beginnings with revisions to Marvel's handling of time travel which have taken place in later stories down the road.
But Stern also brings a joker into this deck--and, clearly, Kang is not amused.
We've previously learned that Immortus, the so-called Master of Limbo, is another manifestation of Kang himself, so he obviously has a stake in all this--but what don't we know about him that we haven't already learned? As we'll discover, we could easily ask the same of Kang.
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