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<\/a><\/p>\nPound-for-pound, Mantis may have had the greatest impact on Marvel comics of any character.\u00a0 Her initial tales cover only about 2 years, starting in Avengers #112 and ending with Giant-Sized Avengers #4, at total of 27 comic books.<\/p>\n
The brain child of Steve Engelhart, the Mantis, when she first appears in Avengers #112, is relegated to a mere 3 panels where she is in the company of a mystery man, whose identity is later revealed to the be former super-villain Swordsman \u2013 now reformed and seeking entrance into the Avengers.<\/p>\n
Her initial appearance is rather modest and she is missing her characteristic antennae.<\/p>\n
Her subsequent storyline through the Avengers over the next 2 years can only be described as \u2018Flat out weird\u2019, using Engelhart\u2019s own introduction to the book.<\/p>\n Her next appearance in Avengers #113 is also limited to 3 panels in her modest garb but by the time she appears on the cover of Avengers #114, she has now been transformed into a sensuous femme fatale whose is one part martial artist, one part empath, and one part sex-symbol.<\/p>\n Demonstrating an unparalleled ability to control her own body, Mantis is able to even lay Thor low with her martial arts techniques (as she often says \u2018strength is nothing compared with skill\u2019).<\/p>\n Her empathic abilities provide here with some rudimentary command of the mystic arts<\/p>\n And clearly Englehart and his various artists delight in depicting her in sensuous and slinky positions<\/p>\n Her situation quickly complicates.\u00a0 Her background story as a gutter snipe raised on the streets of Saigon is soon challenged when the Libra, one of the 12 super-villains in the Zodiac, confesses to being her father.<\/p>\n Libra relates quite a different story.\u00a0 He was a German mercenary working for the French in Viet Nam.\u00a0 He meets a girl called Lua (took her back to his place, feeling guilt, feeling scared), fell in love,\u00a0 and eventually married her.\u00a0 Unfortunately, her brother, Monsieur Khruul, is an infamous Vietnamese crime lord and he doesn\u2019t take kindly to his sister marrying outside her race.\u00a0 Finally catching up with the married couple, now raising a baby daughter, the maniac orders his men to burn all them alive.\u00a0 Lua is killed, but Libra, now horribly disfigured, escapes with Mantis into the jungle.<\/p>\n Libra discovers the temple manned by the Priests of Pama, who train both him and his daughter in the martial arts.\u00a0 The priests take a special interest in the girl, helping her to unlock vast untapped aspects of human existence<\/p>\n Unfortunately, the Priests keep Libra apart from his child<\/p>\n and he returns to the outside world, to take up a mantel of crime lord.<\/p>\n Mantis is quick to dismiss Libra\u2019s story as a complicated pack of lies and that may have settled it, except for a set of actions her fickle nature sets in motion.\u00a0 Her innate attraction to powerful men causes her to start flirting with the Vision.\u00a0 Mad with jealously, the Swordsman, deciding to prove himself worthy of her love, rushes to Saigon to exact revenge on Monsieur Khruul.<\/p>\n Instead, the Swordsman is bested by Khruul\u2019s men.\u00a0 Tortured, he relates Libra\u2019s story to Khruul, who then orders all the Priests of Pama killed.\u00a0 The Avengers and Libra, following hot on the Swordsman\u2019s heels, arrive at the temple where they bring Khruul\u2019s men to justice.\u00a0 However, Khruul escapes.<\/p>\n They later find him dead, ripped to shreds by an extraterrestrial entity called the Star Stalker that absorbs most forms of energy.\u00a0 The Star Stalker reveals that the Priests of Pama were in fact Kree Pacifists and that they alone knew how to defeat him.\u00a0 With them gone, he threatens to consume the Earth in revenge. \u00a0With the priests dead, all hope seems gone.\u00a0 Insisting his story is true, Libra turns to Mantis, insisting that the priests would have taught her the secret as well and that all she needs to do is recover her memories.<\/p>\n Much to her surprise, Mantis realizes that she does know the Star Stalkers weakness and she soon directs the Vision in destroying him.\u00a0 Her conflict over her past further alienates her from the Swordsman<\/p>\n and when pressed she spurns him and turns all her affection to the Vision.<\/p>\n This burgeoning love triangle is soon interrupted with the arrival of Kang the Conqueror from the future announcing that his goal is to find and wed the Celestial Madonna.<\/p>\n Kang makes short work of most of the Avengers, capturing them so that he may determine who is the Celestial Madonna.\u00a0 Considering him beneath contempt, Kang leaves the Swordsman behind.\u00a0 This proves to be a serious mistake, as the Swordsman is able to recruit other versions of Kang from other times to stop him.\u00a0 Unfortunately, the Swordsman is killed in the process.<\/p>\n Mantis insists that the Swordsman be buried in Saigon.\u00a0 After the ceremony, she begins to examine her life and finds herself in no way worthy of being a possible Celestial Madonna.<\/p>\n In the meantime, Kang beaten but not driven back, remounts his attack to claim the Celestial Madonna.\u00a0 Again his alternative selfs assist in his defeat and one of them, Immortus, provides the Avengers with the means to untangle Mantis\u2019s past once-and-for-all.<\/p>\n As the story comes, together, the Avengers discover that Mantis\u2019s origin is inextricably tied to the Kree, Skrulls, and a new race the Cotati<\/p>\n who also began their existence on the Kree Home world.\u00a0 Eons ago, the Skrulls were more technologically advanced than either the Kree or the Cotati.\u00a0 They gave the Kree and Cotati a chance to share in their technology \u2013 it was to be the prize for winning a competition as to which race could best use the Skrull technology.<\/p>\n The competition was held on the Earth\u2019s moon and, at the end of the year allotted, the Kree had built the Blue City, the future home to the Watcher.\u00a0 In contrast, the Cotati had built a park.\u00a0 The Skrulls, impressed by the work of the Cotati, are poised to pick them winners when the Kree slaughter all the plant people.\u00a0\u00a0 They then kill the Skrulls, coopt their technology, and start the eternal Kree-Skrull war.<\/p>\n But not all Kree turn out to be militant.\u00a0 The pacifists among them choose a different path.\u00a0 Shunned by their society, they train in defense and spirituality.\u00a0 One day they discover that the Cotati were not all wiped out by the initial genocidal rage of their ancestors.\u00a0 It is hard to kill a race that produces seeds.\u00a0 But these Cotati are no longer mobile, having chosen to give up action, instead focusing on their refinement of their mental abilities.\u00a0 They form an alliance with the pacifist Kree.\u00a0 Their partnership is cut short when the Kree imprison the pacifists on a prison planer.\u00a0 The Cotati are able to engineer their freedom in exile by attracting the Star Stalker and them helping them realize how to defeat his menace.\u00a0 By doing so, the pacifists are able to appeal to the Kree Supreme Intelligence, who agrees to allow \u00a0them to journey in exile to many worlds.\u00a0 Unbeknownst to the Supreme Intelligence, the exiles take the Cotati with them.\u00a0 The pair that heads to Earth found the Priests of Pama and plant their Cotati companions in the garden in Saigon where Swordsman is buried.<\/p>\n Swordsman\u2019s body is now animated by the Cotati<\/p>\n and after some adventures too long to relate, Mantis agrees to marry him, thus facilitating the first animal-plant mating from which will come the most powerful being on Earth.<\/p>\n The rest on Mantis\u2019s story is not very interesting.\u00a0 After he left Marvel, Engelhart was able to introduce a Mantis-like character in both DC and Eclipse comics<\/a>.\u00a0 Mantis eventually resurfaces in Marvel comics as both a mother to Sequoia (her celestial offspring), a lover to the Silver Surfer, and a murderous freak seeking revenge for the \u2018lies\u2019 visited upon her by Libra, the Cotati, and the Avengers.\u00a0 Unfortunately, she never again inspired the interest she had under Steve Englehart in the initial 2-year run of flat out weird stuff indeed. \u00a0Hopefully her MCU trajectory will be a lot more interesting.<\/p>\n 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