Last night I finished The Kang Dynasty, spanning sixteen issues of The Avengers comicbook, written by Kurt Busiek and illustrated by Alan Davis, Kieron Dwyer, Ivan Reis and Manuel Garcia (among others). It originally came out in 2001 and 2002, long after I’d stopped collecting comics, myself. Marvel recently announced a big screen adaptation of The Kang Dynasty to lead into Secret Wars, the finale of their Phase 6 filmography.

In this series, Kang The Conqueror tries to conquer Earth (duh) with an immense sword-shaped spaceship known as Damocles Base, capable of wiping out large cities with a single blast. Lo and behold, this time he actually succeeds and the Avengers formally surrender… or at least, most of them do…

I enjoyed this series, by and large. It goes on a bit long and the art isn’t really to my taste, but the story was pretty decent. Of course, Marvel takes only what they want from the original comics, so who knows what they’ll go with here? If the Master of the World subplot appears, it could leave a door open for Alpha Flight to be introduced.

The biggest single moment in the comic, something pretty certain to be included in some way, shape or form in the film, is a fight near the end wherein Kang becomes giant-size out in space, only to have Captain America grow larger as well, and they go at it like battling constellations. It’s totally ridiculous of course but it’s nice to take a mental break now and then in this world. If I were going to make Avengers films, I doubt very much I’d have taken this particular story on, but the die is cast. We’ll see what we get.