At the end of the first Ant-Man film, Scott Lang was forced to alter his suit's size regulator to shrink to such a small size that he entered into the Quantum Realm, a sort of microscopic universe that is outside of time and space. Hank Pym, the original Ant-Man, lost his wife, Janet Van Dyne, the original Wasp, to the Quantum Realm when she had to alter her suit's size regulator to defuse a nuclear missile. Pym assumed that she had died when she entered the realm, but when Scott was able to return to the normal, microscopic world after his quick sojourn to the Quantum Realm, Pym realized that Janet might still be alive.

Therefore, the upcoming Ant-Man sequel, Ant-Man and The Wasp, will likely deal with an attempt to bring Janet back from the Quantum Realm. This, of course, brings up the question of what exactly is the Quantum Realm. Is it something from the comic books or is it new to the movies? As it turns out, it is something that has had a long history in the comics, but under a different name. Here, we will give you the comic book history of the Quantum Realm, under its comic book name, the Microverse!

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Technically speaking, if you look into the entire history of the Marvel Universe, the idea of the Microverse was introduced in a 1943 issue of Captain America Comics, where acclaimed science fiction pulp writer Ray Cummings adapted his 1919 story about a microverse (then described as a world within an atom), "The Girl in the Golden Atom," into a two-part Captain America Comics story called "The Princess in the Atom," where Captain America and Bucky end up traveling to a sub-atomic world known as Mita.

This is mostly interesting because it is rare that a comic book of the era to do a knock off of a science fiction story and actually be written by the writer who they were knocking off. So that's an interesting little piece of comic book history there.

Seriously speaking, though, the Microverse really showed up in the Marvel Universe in Fantastic Four #16 (by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers). You see, in Fantastic Four #10 (by Lee, Kirby and Ayers), Doctor Doom tried to kill the Fantastic Four by using a shrink ray on them that would reduce them to, well, nothingness. He accidentally got blasted by the ray himself, though, and seemingly dies...

Six issues later, though, we see that he just shrunk down into a Micro-World, which he quickly conquered (this is Doctor Doom here, after all)...

With the idea established, Lee and Kirby soon would re-visit the Microverse repeatedly, including introducing a new villain in Fantastic Four Annual #5 (by Jack Kirby, Stan Lee and Joe Sinnott), the Psycho-Man, who hailed from the Microverse (note that the term "Microverse" had not yet been coined, so they just used stuff like "Micro-Galaxy", "Micro-World, etc.) ...

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The Silver Surfer also once hid in the Microverse when Galactus returned to Earth to try to get his old herald back.

Famously, the Hulk also visited a sub-atomic world (that existed on the Hulk's pants) and fell in love with a princess there named Jarella...

The Microverse was visited a few more times over the years, but it was not until 1979 that it was really defined in a new Marvel comic book series that is the reason why Marvel can't call the Microverse the Microverse in the films...

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In Micronauts #1 (by Bill Mantlo and Michael Golden), Marvel did a comic book based on the Mego toy line of the same name, which was, in turn, based on the Japanese toy line, Microman. The toy series was about rebels fighting against the evil Baron Karza in the Microverse. Mantlo introduced a bunch of new Microverse heroes, including the lead of the book, Commander Rann , who woke up after 1,000 years to help lead a rebellion in the Microverse against the evil Baron Karza...

Since Rann (and the other heroes, like Marionette and Bug) were Marvel inventions, Marvel is able to continue to use them even after they lost the license to make Micronauts comic books (the toy line only lasted a year, but Marvel kept making the comic book until 1986!). As Marvel doesn't own the rights to the Microverse itself, though, they couldn't use it in their movies, so they came up with the name "Quantum Realm," instead. I believe the science adviser for Ant-Man coined the name.

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The Micronauts were a pretty popular series for a while there, even leading to an X-Men/Micronauts crossover miniseries where Charles Xavier's evil side tried to take over the Microverse (Charles Xavier has a dark, dark side to himself). For a moment there, Xavier's dark self even took over Xavier's body and then totally perved on Dani Moonstar. Yikes, this is unsettling.

Once the Micronauts ended, the Microverse would pop up just on rare occasions, either when people were fighting the Psycho-Man or when they were teaming up with the Micronauts characters that Marvel still owned (they couldn't call them the Micronauts, but the basic point got across).

In 1999, Peter David cleverly began using the Microverse as the new area where Rick Jones and Captain Marvel would switch bodies when they switched bodies with the Nega Bands (in the original comics, the one who was not on Earth was stuck in the Negative Zone).

Back in 2013, at the end of his run on the Avengers, Brian Michael Bendis had the Avengers travel to the Microverse to rescue Janet Van Dyne (which is eerily similar to the upcoming plot of the Ant-Man and The Wasp movie, right?) who was trapped there ever since she seemingly died in Secret Invasion...

Beyond that, there are always occasional stories set in the Microverse, like a crossover between Venom and Scarlet Spider that saw Carnage escape into the Microverse. It's a regular part of the Marvel Universe and it seems like it is set to be a major part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as well!