"[1] Mantis first appeared in The Avengers #112 (June 1973), drawn by Don Heck and created by writer Steve Englehart, beginning the "Celestial Madonna" saga.

She encounters the Star-Stalker,[12] battles Thanos,[13] Klaw and Solarr,[14] Nuklo,[15] and then alongside the Avengers, Fantastic Four, and Inhumans, she faces Ultron at the wedding of Quicksilver and Crystal.

However, Mantis (whose body was now green and had begun to manifest new powers of invulnerability that allowed her to survive in space due to side-effects of her pregnancy) grows bitter with her life and the way she was forced to abandon her child.

[volume & issue needed] She survives, but the strain of the previous years causes her to literally split into multiple versions of herself, each representing conflicting aspects of her psyche that could no longer co-exist inside her mind.

[volume & issue needed] The fragments arrive on Earth and one version of Mantis rejoins the West Coast Avengers team, with portions of her memories missing.

[23] Kang pursued Mantis, not realizing she had lost her power and hoping to use her to attack the Dreaming Celestial, and in the process the Surfer was summoned to Earth.

In "The Crossing", Mantis returns as the villainous bride of Kang the Conqueror with the intention of bringing death to the Avengers; her father Libra (who by now was going by the name "Moonraker" as part of Force Works); and the Cotati alien who had possessed the Swordsman's body and married/impregnated her.

[volume & issue needed] Eventually, Mantis reappears in the Steve Englehart written Avengers: Celestial Quest limited series.

Thus reformed, she and a group of the Avengers go into space to stop "Thanos" from killing her son, Quoi, who by this time is a rebellious teenager desperate to leave the isolation of the Cotati home-world and travel the stars.

[volume & issue needed] Mantis appears in the 2007 miniseries Annihilation: Conquest: Star-Lord, where she is shown as a Kree prisoner who volunteers for a mission led by Peter Quill, a.k.a.

[27] During the Secret Invasion storyline, it was discovered that Star-Lord had Mantis use her mental powers to manipulate the members of the Guardians of the Galaxy to join the team against their will.

Though she refuses to join his new incarnation of the Guardians, she helps him track down the source of mysterious "time quakes" that have been plaguing him in the wake of the Age of Ultron storyline.

[31] During the "Empyre" storyline, Mantis returns to Earth upon being contacted by Black Panther about the Cotati invasion and plans to reason with her son.

[32] Mantis has attained a mastery of meditational disciplines, giving her an unusual amount of control over her body, including autonomic functions like heartbeat, bleeding, and breathing, as well as awareness of pain, allowing her to more quickly heal injuries through sheer force of will and affording almost superhuman reflexes and reactions.

[34] Mantis had the ability to separate her physical and astral forms, projecting her consciousness from her body, allowing her to travel interplanetary distances.

Her fighting skills remained intact, and her empathic abilities were heightened to a superhuman degree and extended to the planet's flora and biosphere.

During her confrontations with a powerful Thanos clone, she displayed superhuman strength, a talent to simultaneously inhabit multiple simulacra, and the ability to project strong blasts of energy.

[38] Additionally, Mantis was trained by the Priests of Pama to become a grandmistress of the martial arts, demonstrated as capable of defeating opponents as skilled as Captain America (although he was distracted while fighting a dragon).

[39][40] In her first appearances, Mantis represents the "Dragon Lady" archetype, that of a mysterious Eastern seductress whose sexuality causes tension among the male Avengers.

This version is the daughter of Ego the Living Planet and half-sister of Peter Quill who initially serves the former before helping to stop him and joining the Guardians of the Galaxy.

[64] Mantis, based on the MCU incarnation, appears in the Guardians of the Galaxy – Mission: Breakout!, portrayed again by Pom Klementieff.