The Lord of Lies. Master of the Realm of Lost Souls. Hell-lord. Simply put, Mephisto is one of the most relevant villains in all of Marvel Comics history and pretty much Evil Incarnate. Mephisto is a being from another dimension and its ruler. “Mephisto’s Realm” poses as a sort of “hell”, or another realm of the dead so to speak. He often tends to pose as Satan but he’s not really “the devil” that people often tend to think, so try not to get those confused.
A little backstory
Mephisto has existed for nearly hundreds of millions of years and his power rivals and goes beyond that of any magic-user in the comics. He has the ability to alter space and time, possess the souls of those who hand over them willingly, godlike strength and durability, and unlimited ability in the mystic arts. His most unique trait is that Mephisto is known for cutting deals with many of our Marvel heroes. He tends to strike deceptive bargains with beings whose souls are either extremely powerful or exceptionally pure. Those deals usually tend to backfire or hurt the heroes in some shape or form, even binding someone’s soul to another demon to create the hellish Ghost Rider.
His ultimate desire is to capture as many living souls as possible to dominate the world. His most famous rivalry is that with the Silver Surfer, as he considers his soul the purest of them all and has repeatedly tried to claim it. He’s also gone toe to toe in the comics with the likes of Thor, Ghost Rider, Doctor Strange, Daredevil, Scarlet Witch, and so on.
Mephisto is surely bound to make his appearance in the MCU at some point. The question is when?
Rumors and speculations of Mephisto appearing in the MCU have grown over the past few days, with the appearance of a devil creature in a stained glass window, and many suspect that it may be Mephisto being depicted on that glass design. While I believe that Marvel could be teasing the character in this shot, I suspect that Mephisto may play a bigger role than we realize in this phase of the MCU, particularly an arc of this phase which I dubbed “the Multiverse Arc.” Now, I’ll be explaining later on in another article what I suspect Multiverse Arc to be, but simply put, a character with such an interesting backstory, powers, and repertoire such as Mephisto has to take his time to be built up, so I suspect that Mephisto might be appearing in a number of Phase 4 projects and a lot of these projects have very deep ties to Mephisto.
WandaVision (2021)
WandaVision definitely could have the seeds for Mephisto’s first appearance in the MCU. In the comics, Wanda aka The Scarlet Witch used fragments of Mephisto’s soul so she could conceive her children; Billy and Tommy aka Wiccan and Speed. When Mephisto came to reclaim the fragments of his soul (and by consequence, remove her kids from existence), Wanda went insane, which resulted in her altering all reality. The events of this comic precede those of House of M, a storyline that is very well known and is expected to be adapted in WandaVision. Our very own Joseph Aberl actually presented the theory that we may have already gotten our first look at Mephisto in the WandaVision trailer, in the form of a certain ominous beekeeper. So check that out if you haven’t already.
Loki (2021)
The idea of the God of Mischief facing off against the Lord of Lies definitely is an interesting one, to say the least. Both of these characters have such similar qualities that in the end, the only thing that could differentiate them is their morals, where Loki may indeed have a set of beliefs while Mephisto has none. There are a lot of fans who speculate Mephisto could make his appearance in the upcoming Disney+ series. This is due to the tease of a devil creature in a stained glass window that we saw earlier in the article. There is a connection to the comics between Loki and Mephisto where Loki intervened with Sigurd the Everglorious to avoid having him be trapped in Mephisto’s Realm forever, so it’s interesting to see whether we’ll see that play out or if we’re setting up something else entirely.
Spider-Man 3 (2021)
Once again, Joseph Aberl presented another potential way for Mephisto to make his presence known in the MCU, and that’s through a loose adaptation of One More Day. To quote Joseph on what exactly happened during that comic; “One More Day may play a small part in the story. Plus, the whole point of the original was that Mephisto made a deal with Peter. He took off his mask in front of the world during the Civil War storyline. It ended up getting Aunt May shot in the process. It came at the cost of his marriage to Mary Jane. MJ also makes sure that Peter’s identity would remain a secret.” We all know that Spider-Man’s identity was pretty much exposed at the end of Far From Home and with everything confirmed and rumored to be happening in this film, adding in Mephisto seems like a bit of a stretch, but it’s entirely possible to have the dealmaker appear for a short cameo in the series and offer Peter the opportunity to fix everything, but Strange may advise against it due to the nature of Mephisto.
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022)
Stephen Strange and Mephisto have gone tow to toe many times in the comics. Both are incredibly powerful in the mystic arts and their abilities rival each other. The most recent encounter was in Doctor Strange: Damnation, where Doctor Strange travels to Las Vegas to resurrect the people that died there during the events of Secret Empire, but Mephisto had already gotten there first and took many of those souls, including some heroes’ souls and turned them into Ghost-Rider like creatures. Seeing Mephisto take on Doctor Strange in this film would truly be an antagonist worthy of the Multiverse scale this film is trying to set up and a worthy successor to Dormammu’s appearance in Doctor Strange (2016).
