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SON-DAR and TERESS

Real Names: Son-Dar and Teress

Identity/Class: Extraterrestrial (Pink Kree) technology-users (Distant Past)

Occupation: Priests, colonists

Group Membership: Pacifist Kree (later known as the Priests of Pama)

Affiliations: The Cotati (especially the elder who accompanied them to Earth)

Enemies: Most of the Kree race; the Star-Stalker (Varanus), the Supreme Intelligence

Known Relatives: None

Aliases: None

Base of Operations: The Temple of the Priests of Pama in Vietnam, Earth;
   formerly a barren prison planet to which they had been exiled;
   originally from Hala, the Kree homeworld in the Pama star system within the Large Magellanic Cloud

First Appearance: (Unidentified) Avengers I#124 (June, 1974);
   (named) Avengers I#134 (April, 1975)

Powers/Abilities: As Pink Kree, Son-Dar and Teress possessed all of the standard capabilities and weaknesses of normal members of their species. Specifically, Son-Dar had enhanced strength, durability, endurance and speed (compared to a male human of his size and age) and Teress had enhanced strength, durability, endurance and speed (compared to a female human of her size and age).

   As members of the pacifist Kree, Son-Dar and Teress were presumably both well-trained to defend themselves in various styles of unarmed combat.

   Son-Dar and Teress had both mastered the mental training of the pacifist Kree and were thus among the only "humans" with whom the Cotati could communicate telepathically.

   Son-Dar and/or Teress were presumably also capable of piloting the Kree starship that they used to transport themselves and their Cotati companions to Earth (unless its course was preprogrammed on Hala before lift-off).

Limitations: As Pink Kree, Son-Dar and Teress SHOULD have required an atmosphere with a higher nitrogen content (similar to that of Hala) in order to breathe comfortably. However, the two of them appeared to be able to survive an extended stay on Earth without using either a special chemical or an apparatus to breathe in Earth's atmosphere. How this was accomplished has not been explained.

Transportation: A saucer-shaped starship capable of intergalactic travel

Height: Unrevealed (neither seemed particularly tall nor short, so perhaps 5'9" to 6' for Son-Dar and 5'6" to 5'8" for Teress)
Weight: Unrevealed (Son-Dar - perhaps 170-200 lbs.; Teress - perhaps 120-140 lbs.)
Eyes: Unrevealed
Skin: Pinkish-white (like that of light-skinned humans)
Hair: (Son-Dar) Light Brown; (Teress) Dark brown or Black

History:
(Avengers I#133 (fb) - BTS) - Thousands of years ago, Son-Dar and Teress were members of a Kree religious order who believed in pacifism instead of militarism. These pacifist Kree had been secretly allied with the last of the Cotati plant-people for over a century and during that time the pacifists had learned much of the Cotati's knowledge of the mind.

(Avengers I#133 (fb) - BTS) - Sometime well after the Kree Year 600, members of a Kree Security Squadron dressed in civilian clothes attacked the priests in their temple. When the "citizens" began firing upon them without provocation, the priests defended themselves but by doing so they provided the Supreme Intelligence with the excuse it needed to order them to be exiled to a barren prison planet. The Supreme Intelligence and the Kree military remained unaware of the continued existence of the Cotati who lived in hiding in a secret second cellar beneath the temple of the priests.

(Avengers I#124 (fb) - BTS) - The pacifist priests were a small group exiled to a tiny prison planet without sunlight, minerals, or vegetation.

(Avengers I#124 (fb) - BTS / Avengers I#133 (fb) - BTS) - During the priests' time in exile, the alien Star-Stalker came to their planet, unaware of the fact that he had actually been drawn there by the telepathic call of the Cotati. When the Star-Stalker had transformed into his ionic combustion state and begun to rampage, destroying everything in sight, the priests were forced to discover a means of countering it, as the Cotati were confident they were clever enough to see. Realizing that the only thing they could summon in their defense was heat, the priests all struck the ground in unison, creating a fissure deep enough to enable molten lava to come to the surface. Being vulnerable to great heat, the Star-Stalker was forced to flee for his life.

(Avengers I#124 (fb)/Avengers I#133 (fb) - BTS) - The pacifist Kree begged an audience with the Supreme Intelligence in order to warn it of the presence of the Star-Stalker in that quadrant of space but, never having heard of such a creature, the ruler of the Kree Empire initially dismissed their warning as a ploy to get it to bring them back from their prison planet. The priests countered this refusal by asking to be allowed to offer protection to the inhabited worlds of the galaxy by dispersing in groups of two to every world, a course of action that would ensure that they never bothered Hala again and ended the cost of keeping them on their prison planet. The Supreme Intelligence granted their plea but demanded that four of them remain on Hala just in case the Star-Stalker actually existed.

(Avengers I#124 (fb) - BTS) - The pacifist Kree traveled in teams of two to every inhabited planet (see comments) in order to protect them from the Star-Stalker.

(Avengers I#133 (fb)) - By manipulating the Supreme Intelligence into making that decision, the priests and the Cotati had made it possible for (almost) all of them to secretly escape to freedom. The priests dug up (most of) the Cotati and secretly brought them aboard the starships that were to be used in the voyages to their new worlds.

 

(Avengers I#134 (fb)) - Son-Dar and Teress were one of these pairs of priests, and they and the group of Cotati who accompanied them traveled to the planet now known as Earth. Searching for good tropical terrain, they eventually chose the area that would be known, after many major earthquakes in the following millennia, as Southeast Asia, more specifically: Viet Nam. The landing of their starship scared the few native humans who witnessed it and they fled.

(Avengers I#134 (fb)) - After exiting their starship, Son-Dar said, "Imagine, Teress: A land of men and plants living in simple harmony! I propose that this surround our new temple!" Teress replied, "I cannot help but agree, Son-Dar. We build here!

   Later, as the two Kree began to replant their Cotati into the soil of Earth, Teress added, "But first, we must introduce our friends to this world." The young Cotati that she was then replanting telepathically said, "Thank you, Teress. Hello...Earth|"

   Later still, after all of the Cotati had been replanted, Son-Dar put his arm around Teress and said, "There: It is done! Our eternal garden -- and the home of our fellow pilgrims! They will be happy here -- All the little ones, nestled near their Elder"

   No specific information about the lives of Son-Dar and Teress after they planted their Cotati companions has ever been revealed, but...

(Avengers I#124 (fb) - BTS) - Over the centuries, this team propagated themselves, becoming a small group that secretly protected Earth from the Star-Stalker. At some point, the group on Earth came to be known as the Priests of Pama. The Star-Stalker hungered for revenge but could not challenge them because they knew his sole weakness.

(Avengers I#123) - Millennia later, Mantis, an ally of the Avengers, was told by Zodiac Cartel member Libra (Gustav Brandt) that she was his daughter and that she had been raised from infancy in a temple in the jungles of Vietnam by the Priests of Pama. Within hours, all of the Priests of Pama then living at the temple were murdered by the minions of a Vietnamese crime boss, Monsieur Khruul. Mantis, Libra and four Avengers (Black Panther, Iron Man, Thor and the Vision) soon arrived, found the murdered priests and quickly defeated the assassins. Khruul briefly escaped but encountered the Star-Stalker who slashed his body to ribbons and left him to die. Mantis and the others found Khruul who managed to whisper, "Beware...the Star-Stalker..." before he died.

(Avengers I#124) - Only minutes later, Mantis, Libra and the four Avengers had their own encounter with the Star-Stalker, this time in a hidden room within the temple. The alien revealed that he planned to destroy Earth and that he could only do so now because the Priests of Pama, whose ancestors had been the pacifist Kree who had defeated him millennia ago, had been killed by Khruul. However, the Star-Stalker was killed less than a day later when Mantis, after deducing that it could not withstand great heat, told the Vision to fire his solar rays at the alien before it could carry out its plan to destroy the world.

(Avengers I#130) - Days later, at the request of Mantis, the body of her lover, the Swordsman (Jacques Duquesne), was buried in the grove within the walls of the then-abandoned temple of the Priests of Pama.

(Avengers I#133-134) - Soon afterwards, following an encounter with Kang, Immortus offered Mantis and the Vision the chance to observe their hidden pasts. Guided by a Synchro-Staff (see comments) held by Thor, Mantis, Iron Man and Hawkeye were apparently transported millennia into the past where they were invisible and inaudible observers to several significant events in the history of the Kree and the Cotati, beginning with the origin of the Kree-Skrull War and ending with Son-Dar and Teress planting their Cotati in the garden on Earth. A shocked Mantis now recognized that this garden would, far in the future, still exist and be the place where they had recently buried the Swordsman. After voicing this realization, Mantis and her three companions were transported to that garden in the present where they were greeted by Libra and a glowing green apparition of the Swordsman.

(Lords of Empyre: Swordsman#1) - Years later, that Cotati Elder returned to the temple of the Priests of Pama so that his spirit could return to his original form and find peace. Unfortunately, only hours later, the Cotati grove that had existed in the temple for millennia was cut down by mercenaries working for Alchemax Asia Pacific. The only Cotati to survive was the Elder who resumed his mobile form as the Cotati Swordsman and killed all of the workers but not in time to save any other members of the grove. The fact that this grove had been so callously killed by humans helped to radicalize the half-human/half-Cotati hybrid Sequoia (a.k.a. the Celestial Messiah) and convinced him to begin a genocidal crusade to eliminate all animal life in the universe.

Comments: Created by Steve Englehart, Sal Buscema and Joe Staton.

   Although Son-Dar and Teress first appeared in Avengers I#134, an unidentified pair of Kree pacifists who look VERY similar to them appeared in the Star-Stalker's account of his history with that group in Avengers I#124. This is a bit odd since there's no way that the Star-Stalker could have known what the two Kree pacifists who settled on Earth looked like. On the other hand, since the story in issue #124 doesn't actually identify that pair of pacifists as the ancestors of the group who settled on Earth, built the temple seen in the following panel and came to be known as the Priests of Pama, maybe it's just a coincidence.

   Still, I can't help wondering if John Buscema and Dave Cockrum, the artists who worked on Avengers I#124, maybe deserve the credit for "creating" Son-Dar and Teress.

FIVE PROBLEMS
   Son-Dar and Teress were introduced as part of the origin of the Priests of Pama that was shown to Mantis and three of her Avengers allies in Avengers I#133. It was the second part of "The Origin of Mantis" storyline that had begun with the origin of the Kree-Skrull War in the preceding issue. I generally liked this origin but it does have some flaws that, oddly enough, I've never seen mentioned anywhere. So, here's a list of the five problems that I have with this story.

Problem #1: How did the pairs of priests (and their secret Cotati companions) get to their various outpost worlds?
   Yes, we were shown that they traveled in starships but I can't help wondering exactly where they acquired those vehicles. After all, starships capable of traveling across inter-galactic distances at many thousands of times the speed of light are VERY advanced and I have a hard time seeing the militaristic Kree Empire being willing to just give away dozens of such starships to beings they considered pacifist scum. It also seems highly unlikely that the empire, after exiling these dissidents, would allow them to retain vehicles that they could use to escape from the planets to which they had been exiled. Perhaps the Supreme Intelligence just allocated one starship to transport all the pairs of pacifists to their respective planets? And maybe that starship was programmed to automatically return to Hala once it had delivered each pair of priests to their chosen planets?
   Okay, it's not a BIG problem but it was something that seemed odd.

Problem #2: How did the pairs of pacifists manage to survive the non-Hala conditions on their outpost planets?
   Early issues of the first Captain Marvel series established that members of the Kree race could not survive in Earth's atmosphere without using either a short-lived breathing potion or battle-helmets that could provide them with the correct mixture of gases that they needed to breathe. The Kree entries in the Official Handbooks of the Marvel Universe later explained that this weakness was due to the fact that, since the Kree race had evolved on a planet with a higher nitrogen content in its atmosphere, they could not breathe naturally on planets whose atmospheres contained less nitrogen. Considering that about 78% of Earth's atmosphere is made up of nitrogen, the idea that Kree needed even more nitrogen seems a bit odd but that remains canon to this day.
   So, with this restriction in mind, how did Son-Dar and Teress manage to survive on Earth for years? Did they bring a massive supply of breathing potion with them? Or perhaps a device that could produce that potion out of native materials? Their story really should have explained something so important.

   Of course, after having said that, I should point out that, aside from in Official Handbook entries, this need for Kree to use a breathing potion has been COMPLETELY ignored for decades. In fact, since Mar-Vell was last shown needing to "renew (his) Kree air supply" in Captain Marvel I#10, in only THREE of the over SEVEN HUNDRED stories to feature Kree characters has this weakness been a plot point. Based on these numbers, I would suggest that maybe the time has come to "explain away" this weakness as something else. For example, maybe it's an artificial weakness, something that only exists because Kree commanders sometimes secretly alter the physiologies of subordinates whose loyalty to the empire is suspect, thereby creating a life-threatening dependency on the breathing potion that forces them to remain "loyal" in order to survive?

Problem #3: How did the pacifists manage to propagate if they were the only two Kree on each planet?
   This is an example of that the TV Tropes website calls an Adam and Eve Plot in which only two beings are supposed to be the ancestors of a large population. According to that website, real population genetics requires that there be a certain minimum number of genetically divergent (i.e., unrelated) individuals in a gene pool in order to maintain a healthy genetic diversity over the generations, and that for humans that number is estimated to be 497 individuals but that 1,000 or more would be preferred. The website mentions that a population founded by 50 genetically diverse humans in isolation would last about 2,000 years before inbreeding did them in, while 500 or more could last indefinitely, assuming that everything progressed well.

   So, with these figures in mind, how could Son-Dar and Teress have produced the descendants needed to maintain the presence of the Priests of Pama on Earth? If they wanted their descendants to be fully Kree, then that would mean that they could have children together but then those children would have to mate with each other in order to produce anything beyond the second generation. Assuming that this option would have been unacceptable, their only choice would have been to have their children mate with members of Earth's human race to produce Kree/human hybrids (like Carol/Car-Ell Danvers). Although I dislike the idea of members of species that evolved on different worlds being able to mate and produce viable offspring, it is something that has been established as being possible in the Marvel Universe and other fictional continuities. However, each successive generation would become less and less Kree. For example, if first generation Kree/Human hybrids wished to avoid mating with their close relatives and chose humans instead, their offspring would only be one-quarter Kree and the offspring of those offspring would only be one-eighth Kree.

   Of course, given the highly advanced technology possessed by the Kree, it's possible that they could be capable of employing some form of genetic engineering to artificially retain the "Kreeness" of the offspring that they produced with human mates.

Problem #4: Color problems
   One of the problems that I had with the origins presented in Avengers I#133-134 was that the ancient Kree in those stories, who should have been blue-skinned, were depicted as pink-skinned because the colorist for those issues made a mistake. I was going to argue that that meant that Son-Dar and Teress should be (or have been) Blue Kree. However, a 2019 retcon introduced the idea that the Pink Kree were NOT created by inter-breeding between Blue Kree and genetically-compatible humanoids but were the result of experiments conducted on the Blue Kree in their racial infancy by an alien race known as the Progenitors. This retcon established that, by the time that the Skrulls arrived on Hala, the planet was inhabited by Kree who were not either all Blue or all Pink but a mixture of both Blue and Pink Kree. Although I'm not 100% in favor of this solution, it does somewhat resolve the problem created by the miscolored Kree and makes it plausible that Son-Dar and Teress could have been Pink Kree after all. So there's that.

   However, there is one color-related problem remaining. When the priests at the temple in Vietnam where Mantis had been raised appeared in Avengers I#123-124, they were depicted as having ORANGE skin. This was said to be due to that fact that, at that time, Marvel's printer could only offer about three tones that could approximate the skin hue of Orientals/Asians and they were the color used for Caucasians, the pale yellow color used for Fu Manchu and others, and the golden (or bronze or orange) color then used for Shang-Chi. In contrast, Monsieur Khruul and his henchmen were orange in Avengers I#123 but their dead bodies were depicted as being pink-skinned in Avengers I#124 while the corpses of the priests remained orange. Fortunately, flashbacks in more recent stories have given them more realistic skin tones.

   There is one other wrinkle. In Fantastic Four I#325, when the FF and the Silver Surfer were trying to help Mantis to find her son, the Cotati sent some Priests of Pama to attack them. One of them was L'ai Sau, the Priest who had trained Mantis in the martial arts during her time at the temple in Vietnam. The odd thing about this was that he was depicted as a blue-skinned Kree. I suspect that this was meant to be a retcon by writer Steve Englehart, an attempt to correct the error introduced into his original story by that colorist's mistake. And then, that 2019 retcon made this small retcon unnecessary.

Problem #5: When did Son-Dar and Teress arrive on Earth?
   For several reasons, establishing a chronology of events in the Marvel Universe is a MASSIVE problem. Over the decades, many writers have been incredibly vague when it comes to providing dates for their stories, especially if those stories took place in the distant past or someplace other than the planet Earth. Events are often described only as occurring "centuries" or "millennia " ago, and sometimes even "millions of years" ago. Alien villains in particular like to brag that their races have existed (or been conquering) since before the planet Earth even existed.

   Another reason for the chronological chaos is, ironically, The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. One would expect that any "facts" presented in such an encyclopedic guide could be relied upon to be completely accurate but this has not always been the case. Sometimes the writers included facts that were simply wrong, perhaps due to a lack of access to the original source material. In other cases, the limited space that was available forced writers to summarize in ways that distorted or omitted some elements of the stories they were summarizing. Sometimes the writers were too uncritical in their reading of certain stories and accepted data as valid even when it was massively inconsistent. And lastly, the writers sometimes made up stuff in order to fill in critical data that had not been presented in the source stories.

   The Origin of the Kree-Skrull War and the Priests of Pama was written almost fifty years ago and over that period the "truth" of what happened and where it happened and when it happened was been twisted back and forth repeatedly. Here are three conflicting ways in which the

1. Original source material. In this case, the story in Avengers I#134, as personally witnessed by four time travelers (Mantis, Thor, Iron Man and Hawkeye) while guided by a Synchro-Staff provided to them by Immortus. Here's how their journey through time breaks down:

   Using "Kree Year 476" as the starting date, I added decades (20 to 99 years) and a century (100 +/- 5 years) and X years to get a range of between Kree Year (591 +X) and (680 +X). I think it's safe to presume that Son-Dar and Teress arrived on Earth no later than Kree Year 700. Unfortunately, converting that year to Earth years is problematic.

2. Handbook data. The original volume of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe contains six entries that reference, directly or otherwise, when the Kree-Skrull War began. Unfortunately, all six of the dates contradict each other. They range from "approximately 10 million years ago" (Skrulls) to "several million years ago" (Watchers) to "over a million years ago" (Kree) to "4,538 Kree years before 990,750 B.C." (Supreme Intelligence) to "1,220 Kree years before approximately 80,000 Earth-years ago" (Sentry). These conflicting dates have never been reconciled.

   It's worth noting that Kree Year 4791, the date given for when the Supreme Intelligence was elected absolute ruler of the Kree Empire, is over four thousand Kree years later than the date that I calculated using data from the original story.

3. More recent stories. So far, by coincidence or design, there have only been three in-story references to when the Blue City on Earth's Moon was created. Oddly, although they are all from the same human source, they contradict one other.

   So, three different writers chose three VERY different dates for when the Kree-Skrull War began.

   There are a few other chronological sources to consider as well. For more than forty years, "Kree Year Zero" and "Kree Year 476" were the only in-story dates defined in terms of the Kree calendar. Then, in Guardians of the Galaxy II#2 (August, 2008), when the time displaced Vance Astro asked Mantis what year it was, she told him that it was "two thousand and eight, Christian calendar." However, before telling him the Earth date, she also mentioned that, "By the Shi'ar calendar, it is sixty-eight thousand, the cycle of Bright Wing. According to the Kree, it is four hundred and fifty-six Khen-Vell Sah. As the Skrull have it, it is Shift fifteen hundred and (something)." Since the Kree number was lower than 476, I took it as evidence that the writers had made a mistake but then someone pointed out to me that it could just have been that the Kree had updated/recalibrated their calendar several times over the millennia.

   There are two contradictory chronological references from the original story that should be considered. First, in Avengers I#133, after the Skrulls transported the 17 Kree to Earth's Moon, Emperor Dorrek told them not to let the large planet below make them feel less alone because there was life down there "but it (was) still trilling its cilia." Assuming that writer Steve Englehart did not have a wildly inaccurate idea of how life evolved on Earth, Dorrek was either lying or he was massively exaggerating how primitive life on Earth was. This is a good example of when statements made by characters should not be accepted at face value.
   Second, in Avengers I#134, when Son-Dar and Teress arrived on Earth, two natives were shown fleeing in terror from the landing starship. The two natives appeared to be human males wearing clothes made of woven fabric instead of animal skins. This would seem to indicate that the two Kree arrived sometime after humanity had started to become civilized, something that happened no more than several tens of thousands of Earth-years ago.

   There are two last things to consider, both from the Lords of Empyre: Swordsman one-shot (August, 2020). First, reading this issue reminded me that the Cotati Elder and his grove, the one that was slaughtered by humans, were supposedly the Cotati who had been brought to Earth from Hala long ago. Since I've never read even a hint that the Cotati could have natural lifespans of close to one million Earth-years, this suggests that the Cotati were actually brought to Earth far more recently. And that, in turn, could imply that the Kree-Skrull War began far more recently too.

   Second, while they were examining the temple of the Priests of Pama in Vietnam, the Cotati Swordsman told Quoi that the frescoes were "Third Empire Kree" that wouldn't be found on Hala because both the style and its practitioners had been deemed "culturally insanitary" by the Supreme Intelligence and had been destroyed. These references are confusing and contradictory. On the one hand, "Third Empire Kree" sounds like it comes from a period when the Kree Empire had been established for quite some time. On the other hand, the fact that the style and its practitioners were destroyed by order of the Supreme Intelligence suggests that the priests actually left Hala and built the temple before the Supreme Intelligence rose to power.

   All in all, there is quite a lot of uncertainty surrounding the dating of the Kree-Skrull War. Personally, from the time I first read in the OHotMU that the Skrulls had visited Hala approximately 10 million years ago, I have always been certain that it was wrong and have, in default, accepted the one million year date instead. It's only in doing this profile that I've realized that the reason why I always rejected the more ancient date is because I may have remembered, perhaps on a subconscious level, that there were civilized humans present on Earth when the Kree priests and the Cotati arrived. In my opinion, this is the most important temporal reference and the one that should be considered more valid than any Handbook entry.

   One final thought. I was just about to proofread this profile when I realized that I had totally forgotten about another group of Kree who came to Earth in prehistoric times: The scientists whose experiments created the Inhumans! Unfortunately, multiple dates have also been provided for when those experiments took place, with references in both stories and Handbook entries ranging from "millions of years ago" to "twenty-five thousand years ago." Jonathan Hickman complicated things the most by introducing the Universal Inhumans and claiming that they (and Earth's Inhumans) were created three hundred thousand years ago, creating a discrepancy that still has not been officially addressed. At present, only two facts about the early history of Earth's Inhumans are known for certain: the Kree scientists who created them stayed on Earth for twenty-five years; and King Randac was alive, empowered and ruling the island-city of Attilan thirteen thousand years ago. Every other date has been contradicted, sometimes in the same issue.

   So, with this in mind, which Kree visited Earth first, the scientists or the two priests? In Avengers I#124, the Star-Stalker did state that the pacifist Kree had traveled to "every inhabited world they knew" and that does suggest that Earth was known to the Kree beforehand. On the other hand, it is also known that the Kree surveyed Earth several times before the scientists were sent to conduct the experiments that resulted in the Inhumans. Maybe the Watcher knows but even he has been shown to be an unreliable narrator.

    As you clearly spell out, the Kree-Skrull War chronology and history of the two races has been a contradictory mess at least since the original OHotMUs, and in some ways even before then. 

The presence of woven fabric-clothed humans on Earth at the timing of Son-Dar and Teress' arrival and the calculation of less than 700 years between that time and the first Kree-Skrull conflict certainly argues that the conflict is likely tens of thousands of years ago, rather than hundreds of thousands, a million, 10 million, etc. 

HOWEVER, that information is courtesy of the Synchro-Staff, and these staffs were shown in Avengers Forever to be Space Phantoms? My understanding is that all of the staffs were actually Space Phantoms, but either way, the information comes via Immortus, who had his own agenda. 

The real world answer to the inconsistency of the dates is lack of attention to detail. 

The in-story, in-universe explanation is that the inconsistency is due to a number of factors:

And, of course, the Priests of Pama were not sent to EVERY planet...just to a select number of inhabited planets of which they had knowledge. --Snood

Profile by Donald Campbell.

CLARIFICATIONS:
Son-Dar has no known connections to:

Teress has no known connections to

starship

   The vehicle which Son-Dar, Teress and their secret Cotati friends used to travel from Hala to Earth many thousands of years ago. Very little information about the starship has been revealed but its basic appearance was similar to that of the starship in which the Skrull Emperor Dorrek first arrived on Hala.

   The starship appeared to be about 20 feet tall and its overall form was that of a "flying saucer" or a "flying disc" with a width that was greater than its height. Since much of its interior must have been taken up by its life support system, its artificial gravity system, its control systems (including navigation), its power source, supplies for the passengers, and its engines, it's difficult to see how there could have been enough space left over for two Kree, at least six Kree-sized "little ones" and a much large Cotati Elder to fit within the starship.

   Rocket thrust from the bottom of the hull enabled it to take off from and land on planets. The fact that it was able to travel from Hala in the Large Magellanic Cloud to Earth in the Milky Way Galaxy,  a distance of at least 160,000 light-years, proves that it must have been equipped with some form of faster-than-light propulsion, presumably some form of warp-drive that enabled it to travel through hyperspace at an effective speed that was at least several million times the speed of light.

   What happened to the starship after in landed on Earth and its two Kree passengers disembarked with their cargo has not been revealed. Assuming that the Kree Empire was not willing to allow the priests to retain any way to leave their self-chosen planets of exile, the starship was presumably programmed to automatically return to Hala soon after it had reached its destination.

   Or maybe it's still on Earth, perhaps buried beneath the temple of the Priests of Pama?

--Avengers I#134 (fb) (possibly also in Avengers I#124 (fb))

images: (without ads)
Avengers I#134, page 16, panel 2 (main image)
      page 17, panel 3 (duo choosing the site of their new temple)
      page 17, panel 4 (planting their Cotati in the garden)
      page 17, panel 5 (the Eternal Garden)
Avengers I#124, page 9, panels 1-2 (from the Star-Stalker's account of the pacifist Kree)
Avengers I#134, page 16, panel 3 (starship on Hala)
      page 16, panel 1 (starship in space)
      page 17, panel 1 (starship terrifying the native humans as it landed)

Appearances:
Avengers I#124 (June, 1974), Steve Englehart (author), John Buscema & Dave Cockrum (artists), Roy Thomas (editor)
Avengers I#134 (April, 1975), Steve Englehart (Author), Sal Buscema (Layouts), Joe Staton (Embellishment), Len Wein (editor)

First Posted: 07/01/2022
Last updated: 08/26/2023

Any Additions/Corrections? please let me know.

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