As a giant-headed dork in a robotic Doomsday Chair, MODOK is one weird dude… but without a doubt, his second female counterpart, MODAM, is even stranger. We’ll leave the story of the ill-fated Ms. MODOK for another day.
The story of MODAM starts in Avengers West Coast #36 when Hank Pym finds a lady who he thinks is his first wife strapped into a machine in an AIM base. Bummer for him, his wife’s brain has outgrown her head and she needs a special apparatus to just keep her business together. By the end of the issue, Hank departs to take care of the gross weirdo full time, dumping his current wife, The Wasp, in the process.
Only it turns out that the lady isn’t his wife. The next time we see the future MODAM, it’s in Solo Avengers #16, when Hawkeye and Black Widow face off against Hank Pym’s robot double and his weirdo wife, now called SODAM. At this point, the brain lady is stabilized and functional in a mobile tube that keeps her brainmeats safe. She admits that she was never Pym’s actual wife, but rather a product of AIM made to look like Mrs. Pym. AIM needed a smart guy to fix their half-baked supervillain, and Pym was just the guy to do it, so they played on his sympathies to make it happen. By the end of the issue, a battle ensues, and SODAM has escaped.
She reappears in 1990’s Quasar #9. AIM has realized that they can’t really compete as a world-dominating force and has decided instead to manufacture weapons for villains, so they hold a convention. Rolling out the most hideous weaponized human ever made, they showcase MODAM as a special agent who can work for anyone, if right price is right. Since MODOK is out of commission, she’s as good as it gets when it comes to disgusting monsters with killer brains. This time, MODAM is super ugly, having fully gone though the horrible transformation to a more MODOK-like creature. In addition to having all of MODOK’s mental powers, she has the added bonus of telescoping arms which end with claws.
She plants a trap in the Statue of Liberty, totally ruining Quasar’s date, and tries to steal his quantum bands. Quasar tears her arms off and beats her with a baseball bat.
MODAM makes a few more appearances, tangling with Captain America and Iron Man. She even shows up an antagonist in 1995’s strange ClanDestine miniseries, but ultimately, she’s killed off completely in Captain American #440, during that absolutely awful period when Captain America is wearing goofy armor and has decided to be edgy in every way. In a completely unceremonious event, MODAM (now apparently a high-tech janitor) is sent to fix a crack in a Cosmic Cube containment box at an AIM base, and simply flashes out of existence offscreen. They could have sent in any AIM moron, but they sent her instead, and literally no one cares that she’s dead forever.
MODAM. Born 1990, died 1995.
And while there have been a dozen or so MODOK action figures, they’ve never really given MODAM her time in plastic. She’s not just a female translation of MODOK; she has a completely different Doomsday Chair that her predecessor. It’s more of a full-body containment unit than MODOK’s “just keep my neck from snapping” deal. Plus? Her chair has skis, just in case she has to go on any high-speed mountain missions in freezing climates. Or maybe they just didn’t want her falling down all of the time, like MODOK tended to do.
Either way, here’s a 3D MODAM that you can make at home out of paper, scissors, and a bit of glue. Enjoy.
And in case you missed it, here’s a free MODOK papercraft as well.
C. David is a writer and artist living in the Hudson Valley, NY. He loves pinball, Wazmo Nariz, Rem Lezar, MODOK, pogs, Ultra Monsters, 80s horror, and is secretly very enthusiastic about everything else not listed here.
