The Captain Marvel Kang Story That Disney Wants To Keep Buried Is One Of The Worst Ever
Long before comics were treated as a petri dish for developing new intellectual property for movies, they would routinely get weird. One of the most bizarre and disturbing involves the future Captain Marvel, Carol Danvers, and a man named Marcus, known as the Scarlet Centurion, and he’s either the son of Kang or another Kang variant…you were warned it gets weird. Disney and Marvel have ignored this story for decades, and with both Danvers and Kang becoming important to the MCU, it’s going to stay locked in the vault.
In the cancel culture era, the Captain Marvel story in which she gives birth to Kang the Conqueror will never see the light of day in the MCU.
Running from Avengers #197 through #200, the storyline starts off innocently enough, with Carol Danvers and Wanda Maximoff (The Scarlet Witch) on the beach, when Danvers suddenly gets sick. It’s revealed at the end of the first issue that she’s three months pregnant, which stuns Captain Marvel, but the rest of the Avengers are accepting of the situation…a little too accepting.
In issue #200, Captain Marvel gives birth to a baby boy, and if that seems sudden, it is; the entire pregnancy took less than a work week. The Avengers, from Wasp to Captain America, are nothing less than supportive, to the extent that all of them are gaslighting Carol and tossing aside her concerns over how unnatural the whole process was. Even artwork by George Perez can’t make the story feel icky, and it’s about to get worse.
The baby boy soon starts to grow up incredibly rapidly, becoming a fully grown man named Marcus. Suffering from the emotional trauma of what was essentially a forced birth, Captain Marvel (technically Ms. Marvel at the time) gathers the resolve to confront this strange man, who, again, she gave birth to just days before. Marcus is in the middle of building a machine with the help of the Avengers, when he finally comes clean after what’s going on.
This is where most people would throw up their hands and go “Comics!” and is why Disney will never adapt this story for the MCU, especially with Captain Marvel and Kang so important right now. Marcus explains that he was born to Immortus and a woman in Limbo, leaving him stuck in the nether dimension once both his parents went back to their own time periods. That is unless he found a way to send himself to a different dimension…which is where Carol comes in.
Marcus had taken Carol to Limbo, impregnated her, wiped her memories, and sent her back to Earth where he was able to manifest through being born there, instead of Limbo. Try to imagine Brie Larson okaying a script where Captain Marvel gives birth to the man who assaulted her. Don’t worry, because it gets even worse than that.
The Avengers, upon hearing all of this, aren’t surprised when Carol’s attitude has changed, and now she wants to leave with Marcus back to Limbo. That’s why this is the worst Captain Marvel story and one of the worst Avengers stories of all time (it might be tied with “The Crossing,” which also features Kang). The greatest heroes in the Marvel universe let their comrade leave Earth to live with the man who assaulted her mentally and physically.
Carol Danvers was written off as a character until X-Men writer Chris Claremont saved her from the trashbin, but she was still decades away from adopting the name Captain Marvel.
That was the end of Carol Danvers for a long time, as once she ended up leaving Limbo, Rogue, then a member of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, stole her powers and left Danvers in a coma for years. Upon recovering, Captain Marvel confronted the Avengers in Avengers Annual #10, written by X-Men scribe Chris Claremont, in which she takes the heroes to task for not speaking up to help her at her lowest point.
Now, as dark and confusing as that story arc was, it somehow became even more bizarre nearly 20 years later during the “Kang Dynasty” story in the Avengers comics.
The “Kang Dynasty” arc in Avengers was resolved because of the “relationship” between Captain Marvel and Marcus, The Scarlet Centurion.
Marcus was revealed to be the Scarlet Centurion, son of Kang the Conqueror (Immortus is a future variant of Kang), and his love of Carol caused him to betray his father, eventually letting the Avengers win by granting them access to Moses Magnum’s secret headquarters under the Earth which allowed them to create barriers around every major city and save them from Kang.
Comics!
We somehow doubt the MCU movie will revolve around Captain Marvel’s assaulter deciding he still has the hots for her. Especially since, as the end of Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania shows, the Scarlet Centurion is one of Kang’s variants, something that might be true in the comics, or might not, depending on who’s writing the story. In fact, Kang’s history with variants gets so confusing that there’s an argument Reed Richards is his son.
So when the Kang Dynasty finally hits theaters, you can now impress (or horrify) your friends and family with the story of Captain Marvel giving birth to Kang. After all, Disney will never touch this tale with a ten-foot pole, though Avengers Vol. 1 is available on Marvel Unlimited, so it’s not buried as deep as Song of the South…..but it should be.
