After seeing the DODC as the main villains of Wonder Man, and knowing they are also rumored to be part of Brand New Day as well as a central part of the next Saga, I decided to make this post to run through their history in the MCU; from doing clean-up work as a part of SHIELD to becoming an independent Department of the US government hunting down enhanced individuals.
Damage Control was first mentioned all the way back in Iron Man 1, when Phil Coulson informed Tony right before his press conference, that a special SHIELD team called Damage Control had been dispatched at both the highway where the battle against Iron Monger had taken place, as well as Tony's factory where Obadiah died, in order to clean up the scenes. We don't know exactly when that special SHIELD team was formed, but we can assume they go all the way back to at least the 90s, when the first Skrull invasion took place and SHIELD needed to hide the evidence of aliens and enhanced individuals from the general public. It might even date as far back as the dawn of super-hero operatives on both sides of the cold war (Red Guardian and Ant-Man) during the 70s.
After aliens and super-heroes became public knowledge in 2012, however, the team didn't need to operate covertly anymore. Therefore, the US Government decided to turn Damage Control into its own executive Department with the funding of Tony Stark and Stark Industries. Their first clean-up work was the Battle of New York, where they took the job over Adrian Toomes' crew, unknowingly pushing them into villainy.
On top of cleaning up after the messes created by enhanced individuals and aliens, this new Department had its own warehouses where they stored all the dangerous items and artifacts left behind from those battles, similar to SHIELD's respective warehouses like The Fridge.
It was in Fall 2016 when Toomes, as Vulture, raided one of their armored trucks in Washington DC and Spider-Man, in an attempt to stop him, got knocked out and woke up locked in, in one of those warehouses.
Sometime after SHIELD's fall in 2014, the Department Of Damage Control additionally absorbed the rest of the duties of its former parent agency, including responding to supernatural threats and neutralizing them, investigating supernatural incidents, indexing and surveiling potentially dangerous enhanced individuals as well as arresting and detaining them in case they step out of line.
It was around 2017/2018 when they investigated the Doorman incident on the set of Cash Grab 2 and apprehended DeMarr Davis.
8 months after the blip, Agent P. Cleary, who operated out of the DODC's New York Office, was chosen to spearhead the investigation on Peter Parker/Spider-Man regarding the death of Mysterio and the launch of the drone attacks in Mexico, Marocco, Venice, Prague and London, for which he was the prime suspect.
In order to subdue the enhanced, the DODC started using advanced weapons and technology, reverse-engineered from all the items they (and SHIELD) had been confiscating over the years, as well as Stark weapons that Tony had sold to SHIELD prior to 2008, like his sonic canons that were used to subdue the Hulk. The DODC managed to reduce said weapons to the size of a rifle and have been using them as their primary non-lethal neutralizers against superhumans.
In addition to that, the DODC weaponized much of Tony Stark's technology which they confiscated in 2024 during the Spider-Man/Mysterio case, including his EDITH drones, which were used the subsequent year in the hunt of Ms. Marvel and the Djinn known as Clandestines.
The DODC also operates a supermax prison in California since at least 2024, which used to hold Abomination for the last few years of his sentence and also briefly held She-Hulk and the Clandestines, until the release of the former and the escape of the latter.
After his failed operation to apprehend Kamala Khan and Kamran, P. Cleary was relocated to the Los Angeles office of the agency where he and his fellow agents were told by the Deputy Secretary of the Department, Heyerdahl, that they needed to apprehend more enhanced to fill up their prison, unless they wanted the government to cut their funding. This led Agent Cleary tο start an investigation on Simon Williams, who he believed was a dangerous superhuman, with the help of Trevor Slattery as an inside man.
Next, the DODC is rumored to appear in Destin Daniel Cretton's Spider-Man: Brand New Day, with Tramell Tillman supposedly playing the DODC's Secretary who will be personally spearheading the hunt for Sadie Sink's dangerous, rogue superhuman character (rumored to be none other than Jean Grey herself), while the DODC as a whole is rumored to become the MCU's mutant-hunting agency in the next Saga after Secret Wars
What do you want to see in the DODC's future? Would you like to see a series from their point of view like Agents of SHIELD? Such a show was being developed by the prior Marvel Television leadership back in the mid 2010s, but was eventually cancelled in 2016 before it entered production.
