Avengers Forever #3

A justification of intervention by time-travel:- The theory of alternate realities Kang decribes in this issue means that time-travel to prevent a bad event from happening in the past doesn't actually prevent the event in the timeline you left. If successful you just split off a new timeline where the bad event doesn't happen. Kang's frequent time-travelling has created multiple alternate copies of himself. I believe that in the Marvel Universe alternate realities are normally created without the use of time-travel. I will ignore questions about how frequently timelines split, and what causes the splits. I will just say that such alternate timelines are constrained by possibility.

When you appear at a point in space-time from time-travel you create a situation that is impossible in cause-and-effect terms in the timeline up to that point. Thus the alternate reality you create by time-travel (and the ones it then spawns naturally) couldn't exist without your time-travel. So even though time-travel doesn't destroy 'bad' timelines, it is still worth doing because it creates 'good' timelines that wouldn't otherwise exist. But this is fictionally unsatisfying. The hero goes back in time to save the world and those he loves, and then returns to the new present where they are saved. But the old timeline still exists where not only aren't his loved ones saved from whatever it was, they have the added burden that the hero *doesn't* come back to them! Some writers use the 'secret history' approach. The thing you go back into the past to do actually already happened in the past of your timeline, it just wasn't recorded. So you go back in time and actually create the timeline you came from, and thus you come back to it safely. A variant of this is the 'multiple histories' approach which says that the present can have multiple pasts as well as multiple futures.

Your tampering with history has just switched from one of these multiple pasts to another. This is sometimes described in terms of the timeline being resilient. Small changes just deform it a bit in a small patch of time. It takes a large change to really change the future. The 'go back in time to prevent another time-traveller from changing the past in a bad way' scenario implicitly makes use of this idea. The bad-guy wants to change the past in a big way. The hero goes back and prevents him. The combined actions leave only small changes which the timeline absorbs. Kang's theory ignores all these extra ideas.

Terminatrix was originally Ravonna, whom Kang desired in Avengers #23. They have had a convoluted love-hate relationship since then. The Anachronauts were first seen during the Citizen Kang crossover in Fantastic Four Annual #25. Rama-Tut and his time-Sphinx was the first recorded appearance of the multi-identitied Kang way back in Fantastic Four #19. Avengers West Coast #62 was the culmination of Immortus's plot to use Scarlet Witch as a nexus being to preserve the timeline which produced the Time-Keepers. When the Witch rejected the power it raged free, threatening the multiverse. The Time-Keepers intervened and redirected the power to Immortus, who became frozen in Limbo protecting reality. Immortus freed himself in What If #35-39, but his appearances here were in alternate realities. He subsequently appeared in the Terminatrix story in Avengers Annual #21 and in Avengers: The Terminatrix Objective #2-3, but as far as the Avengers were concerned this was all behind the scenes. Thus Wasp is correct in saying that they haven't seen him since AWC#62.