Who and what is MODOK in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania?

Quantumania: Ant-Man and The Wasp is the first film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Phase Five, promising to kick off a three-year arc of adventures centered around the threat of the villainous Kang the Conqueror.

Kang’s shadow is however, Quantumania, there’s another character in his shade. He’s an evil genius, a grotesque laboratory experiment, and he’s among the best-beloved Marvel supervillains (for being the absolute worst).

He’s MODOK.

MODOK is who? Quantumania: Ant-Man and The Wasp?

Image: Stan Lee, Jack Kirby/Marvel Comics

Marvel Studios’ trailers for Quantumania have been light on MODOK sightings — we’ve seen him all armored up, whizzing around firing lasers, but aside from blink-or-you’ll-miss-it moments, the full glory of how weird MODOK looks has been kept under wraps. However, it seems likely he’ll be allied with Kang in some way, one of the foes over which Scott Lang will have to triumph.

MODOK’s role is played also by Corey Stoll. It gives us a clue as to how he may have come about in the MCU. Stoll was the villainous Yellowjacket, Darren Cross. Ant-Man (2015). He was seen shrinking violently into nothing when Scott Lang destroyed his shrinking suit in an attempt to stop him killing Cassie and his new stepdad. Thanks to Ant-Man and The Wasp(2018). It is known that you can shrink down enough to reach the Quantum Realm. The Quantum Realm is an alternate universe hidden in subatomic structures. Stoll may still be playing Darren Cross, it seems probable even. Quantumania, and whatever’s happened to him in the Quantum Realm since last we saw him, it’s turned him into the MCU’s version of MODOK.

What is MODOK?

Image by Cully Hamner/Marvel Comics

MODOK first appeared in 1967’s Tales of SuspenseStan Lee and Jack Kirby created #94. As a test subject for the mad scientists of AIM, he was a lowly human being. AIM’s scientists transformed that human into the perfect weapon and furnished him with his own acronym-based name: the Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing.

And, as MODOK himself bellowed at Captain America in his first appearance, the scientists did their work “too well.” MODOK subsequently took over AIM, and reigned the organization supreme for many years. His original incarnation is all about playing up his grotesque look as being the consequence of his enhanced intelligence (he’s all brain and no brawn — you get it). All the threat of a supergenius and a pretty decent psychic, packaged up in a hovering harness that allowed him to focus his “mental energy” into laser beams that shot from his forehead.

Nowadays, nearly everyone doesn’t do a serious MODOK story. It’s just hard getting around the fact that his design looks pretty silly in the art style of today’s comics. And so his modern niche is as one of Marvel’s foremost joke villains, a character who lets writers and artists indulge in the bombast of classic comics speeches and explosions, and give their heroes a chance to bulldoze over a total pushover.

And then there’s the joke of the MODOK Varianten. When content standards look down on using the word “killing” in a kids’ show, MODOK has become become the Mental Organism Designed Only for Kicking-butt, or MODOC — the Mental Organism Designed Only for Computing (or Conquest).

We’ve seen MODOT (Talking), MODOG (Genocide), MODORD (Roller Derby), MODAM (a lady MODOK, mother of a MODOK baby), and the handsome, shirtless BRODOK, the Bio-Robotic Organism Designed Overwhelmingly for Kissing, whose head was only SimplyNoticeably higher than the human standard.

So it’s no wonder that’d he’d crop up in Quantumania: Ant-Man and The Wasp — he’s the perfect butt of a joke for one of the MCU’s jokiest sub-franchises.