If you — or someone you love — watched Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, you may be entitled to compensation. You also may have clocked the post-credits scene in which TVA golden boys Loki and Mobius sport very fine hats and hang out in a presentation hall made of finest sepia, their eyes glued to an industrialist named Victor Timely and his “astounding temporal marvel.” This tease from season 2 of Loki might have seemed like a perfectly innocent night on the town for a pair of reality-hopping besties, if not for a couple of context clues, like how Loki looked like he was about to mess his jumpsuit and how Timely looked suspiciously like Jonathan Majors.
Like a lot of guys who look like Jonathon Majors in the MCU, Victor Timely is a Kang variant, one of a theoretically infinite number of multiversal reskins of Kang with a love of time travel malarkey. What makes this one special is how gosh-darned American he is.
Victor Timely and the World of Tomorrow, yesterday
The way the comics tell the story, the Victor Timely version of Kang sprang up from a bad case of the Mondays. Tired of getting his blue face thingy stomped in every time someone felt like Avenging something, he decided it was time for a change of scenery, time-hopping back to the year 1901 and founding a little town in the American Midwest. He named the town Timely. He also named himself Timely. The guy had a lot of gifts, but coming up with names wasn’t one of them.
The newly-monikered Victor then set out to start beating titans of industry to the punch, setting up manufacturing plants just a tiny bit before his new contemporaries and establishing corporate dominance. You know that movie where the kid wakes up in a world without any songs by the Beatles and gets famous by plagiarizing their music? Imagine that, but instead of innocently winding up in a universe different from his own, he went back in time and started publishing his own White Album six months before Lennon and McCartney. Timely did that, but with lightbulbs and cars and stuff instead of “I Am The Walrus.”
Timely built his empire on the back of his foreknowledge of the future, growing it over generations thanks to his technologically-backed immortality. Every few decades, he’d have one of his robot doubles stand in for him so it could age and die real casual-like, then he’d pop back in as Victor Timely, Jr. or Victor Timely III to claim his inheritance and pick up where his “dad” left off.
Nefarious? You don’t know the half of it. After close to a century of cornering the market on scientific breakthroughs, Timely Industries’ products were ubiquitous. There was Timely tech in the security systems at Avengers HQ and Timely software in all of the bionic limbs that superheroes can’t get enough of. Victor Timely became inescapable, unstoppable, and all-powerful – not through mustache-twirling, laser fists, or magic space gems, but by basically being Thomas Edison a couple of weeks early. Also, the army of time soldiers that he created helped, but it was mostly the plagiarism and entrepreneurship. He was a thinking man’s supervillain. It didn’t hurt that the whole thing dovetailed into the events of The Kang Dynasty – a 2001 Avengers story in which Kang actually takes over the world. That’s a heck of a feather in any antagonist’s blue face thing.
Comics being pretty frequently impenetrably dense and ‘90s comics even more so, there’s more to Victor’s story. The town he founded turned into a sort of time travel hot spot thanks to a vestibule of doors through time that popped up inside it, and Timely used his foreknowledge and business acumen to get the ball rolling on the creation of the original Human Torch. Maybe the darkest rabbit hole, though, is the fact that the real-life Marvel Comics wasn’t always called “Marvel Comics.” It started life back in the 1930s as a company called, wait for it: Timely Comics. Makes you think. It doesn’t make you think hard, but it makes you think.
Done right, stories about Victor Timely are mind-boggling and spooky, skewing closer to the villainous plots of guys like Ozymandias than Snidely Whiplash. What could have inspired the writers in Stan Lee’s orbit to come up with such an effective villain around the premise “a guy rewrites history and takes credit for a whole bunch of other people’s work?” Your guess is as good as mine.