King Kosmos = Kang Klone?

[JulianPerez]

Nobody is a bigger fan of Elliot S! Maggin than yours truly.

Most people would list him beside the "average" and "sufficient" talents of the Silver or Bronze Age, beside Mike W. Barr or Gerry Conway. Not me; Elliot's strong, correct characterizations, insights into worldbuilding cohesion, and brilliant plots mark him amongst the giants of that (and any) era, along with Steve Englehart, Cary Bates, John Broome, and Steve Gerber.

All that said, is it just me, or is King Kosmos a fairly transparent clone of time-travelling Avengers villain, Kang?

1) Both have as their main "gimmick" the use of time travel to manipulate history;

2) Both are despotic monarchs obsessed with conquering the Earth of the present;

3) Both come from bombed out, ruined earths (King Kosmos from a destroyed parallel earth, Kang from a desolate earth of the 41st Century)

4) Both make frequent allusions to their role in history with a Napoleon-esque megalomania, and have dialogue like "history will remember things differently" (Kang even mentions how he will detail his conquest in his memoirs)

5) Both come to the present armed with incredibly high tech weaponry that can lay low even the present's heavy hitters (Thor or Superman, respectively)

6) Both are armed with a suit of armor that contains various battle gimmicks;

7) Both had a recently created and powerful female figure that was instrumental in their defeat that had an unlikely identity revealed in the course of the story; with King Kosmos, it was Superwoman; with Kang, it was the Celestial Madonna.

8) Both attacked America in the middle of the 19th Century - King Kosmos attempting to take over in the absence of Lincoln's death, and Kang attacked the Old West.

It would be enough if the similarities are merely conceptual, but King Kosmos even LOOKS like Kang (at least with his mask off; they have the same black goatee), and his armor has a yellow and green coloration that is merely the reverse of the outfit Kang wears as Rama-Tut.

To be fair, the two are different in many ways. For one thing, Kang could summon giant armies from the past to fight for him, including Cherokee Warriors and 21st Century laser tanks, something King Kosmos could not do. And King Kosmos has something Kang doesn't, which is an enviably slick time/dimension battle cruiser: poor Kang's time machine was disguised as a Sphinx.

[Uncle Mxy]

Think of King Kosmos as a future version of Per Degaton, much as Immortus is a future version of Kang.  

[JulianPerez]

Think of King Kosmos as a future version of Per Degaton, much as Immortus is a future version of Kang.  

 

Well, with Maggin's Lifetime Ban from the DC offices, we'll never really know how far he would have taken it, will we?

If the King Kosmos = Kang thing is so obvious that everybody picks up on it instantly, and are sighing when they read this post saying, "Did you pick up that comic like, YESTERDAY?" Then I'll shut up.

But it's surprising what you assume everybody knows that they don't. I thought everybody picked up on the fact that the main character of STAR WARS was named Luke, when the creator and writer was named "LUCAS" - what, at least to me, was a Marty Sue self-insertion. But apparently when I mentioned it people were surprised.

Interesting however, that on an interview on this site from 1971 or so, Maggin and Bates were irked by Marvel's approach and yet adopt it themselves - for instance, giving Luthor a strong characterization as a sympathetic misanthrope and misfit instead of a truly wicked and antisocial personality, and further, how Maggin worked to incorporate the Guardians of the Universe into the Super-Legend, AND, to top it off, created a character obviously inspired by Kang...Maggin may say one thing, but really, isn't imitation the sincerest form of flattery?

[dto]

But it's surprising what you assume everybody knows that they don't.

I confess to being an example -- since I'm not a Marvel reader, I have no clue about Kang.  Also you mentioned about Maggin being under a "lifetime ban" -- I never heard of this before.  Do you mind elaborating on this?  (Sorry for potentially derailing the topic thread, but I find this intriguing.)

Thanks!

[JulianPerez]

I was making a facetious comment about how ever since Maggin was fired to make way for our buddy Johnny Byrne back in 1986 or whenever, he has not been able to really find work at DC, with the exception of the KINGDOM COME novel done at Mark Waid's insistence. I have no idea if there REALLY is a lifetime ban, but coming on the heels of a million bad decisions DC's made over the years, it would be perfectly in character.  :roll:

[Gary]

I was making a facetious comment about how ever since Maggin was fired to make way for our buddy Johnny Byrne back in 1986 or whenever, he has not been able to really find work at DC, with the exception of the KINGDOM COME novel done at Mark Waid's insistence.

I believe he also edited the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons comic for DC after that. I remember seeing him at GenCon (circa '89 or '90) with other DCers promoting the book. So if he'd had a falling out with DC, it couldn't have been that bad of one.

Then again, maybe being sentenced to work on stuff like this is the punishment for people who step out of line....

[JulianPerez]

Further piece of evidence supporting the theory that King Kosmos was a Kang  the Conqueror analogue:

The Marvel Universe sports a dimension, known as Kosmos (mentioned as far back as the Roy Thomas THOR, but first actually SEEN in Kurt Busiek's THUNDERBOLTS) that is the origin of the mass shunted and lost by growing and shrinking individuals like Giant-Man and the Wasp.

Kosmos is the origin of Kang's greatest servants, the Growing Men, who respond to any damage or force used against them by growing even larger. The Kosmosians view anyone from earth as being agents of Kang the Conqueror.