Three members of the Fantastic Four were writhing and gasping for air in a gray dungeon, while the fourth — trapped behind a wall, tied up and invisible — agonized over her helplessness to save them.
Overhead, on a giant television globe, a green-hooded, metal-masked mastermind gloated over his dials.
My 8-year-old self calculated that yup, this situation was definitely worth 12 cents.
So I bought Fantastic Four 5 (July 1962) and met the greatest of the comic book super villains, Dr. Doom.
From the start, creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby emphasized Victor von Doom’s dominant characteristic, his overweening ego, which would always be both his strength and his downfall. Doom was arrogant enough to tackle the whole FF alone, dropping a net over the Baxter Building from his hovering shark-faced helicopter (Doom did enjoy his little touches of colorful villainy).
Reed Richards recognized Doom’s voice as that of a supposedly dead university classmate — a brilliant student who, fascinated by both black magic and science, had engaged in “forbidden experiments” in an attempt to “contact the nether world.”
The resulting explosion disfigured him and got him kicked out of the university. “When last heard of, he was prowling the wastelands of Tibet, still seeking forbidden secrets of black magic and sorcery,” Richards recalled.
Holding the Invisible Girl hostage, Doom forced the other members of the FF to travel through time to secure the treasure of the English pirate Blackbeard.
“Gosh! A chance to actually visit the past! Who could refuse!” exclaimed the Human Torch.
“I could!” replied the Thing. “What if he doesn’t bring us back?”
“I want that treasure!” Doom said. “I shall bring you back!”
“Despite his other faults, Doom is not a liar!” Mr. Fantastic said. “He will keep his word!”
“He’d better!” said the Thing.
So despite his utter ruthlessness, Doom’s monumental pride gave him a perverse sense of honor. He agreed to release Sue Storm if the other three failed to return from their dangerous mission.
Kirby’s feeling for visual appeal and surprise was on display in Doom’s time machine, which turned out to be a glowing yellow rectangle that moved vertically through the three superheroes.
Their colorful exploits in the 18th century Caribbean provided an adventure-within-an-adventure, with the Thing discovering that he himself was the source of the Blackbeard legend. He decided to stay in the past among the boisterous pirates, where he was not shunned for his hideous appearance.
Ben Grimm’s dissatisfaction with his fate was one of the running themes that gave the title more depth than earlier superhero comics. He effectively hated his own super powers.
Deft bits of ironic characterization defined the series. For example, when the stalwart Mr. Fantastic stretches himself into a bridge for a boarding party, he also complains about his aching back.
The Thing turns on his teammates and has them bound, but a waterspout wrecks the ship and brings back him to his senses. Richards and Johnny Storm immediately forgive Grimm his moment of angry madness.
Unlike Dr. Doom, the members of the Fantastic Four always had someone there to help them when they went off the rails.
The Fantastic Four’s fractious team spirit would always reassert itself, and stand in contrast to Dr. Doom, who could never trust or rely on anyone but himself.
That’s symbolically illustrated by the fact that when Doom required teammates, he built robot duplicates of himself. The Thing smashed the first of them in this issue. Otherwise, Doom formed only temporary alliances with those he intended to betray, such as the Sub-Mariner.
“Doom’s steadfast refusal to subordinate his will to others renders him inimical to the organization mentality,” noted Micah Rueber in his essay The Man in the Gray Metal Suit. “(D)espite his successes, Doom is neither happy nor, at least when facing the Four, successful, and The Fantastic Four suggests that this is due, in no small part, to the fact that Doom is, by temperament and happenstance, a loner.”
“Doom rarely thinks small: although he occasionally acts for financial gain, most often he hopes to gain forbidden wisdom and/or world domination,” Rueber observed. “These themes again demonstrate the importance of the group, which can act as a check on the individual members.
“Like Doom, the members of the Fantastic Four possess incredible powers — Mr. Fantastic, a formidable intellect to boot — but by acting as a group, they can turn their awesome talents to ‘good’ ends. Doom, unhindered by peers, demonstrates the dangers of unchecked individualism. Dr. Doom and the Fantastic Four thus neatly encapsulate the tensions between the individual and the organization as expressed in the early 1960s.”
The FF thwarts Doom’s quest for mystical power by replacing the gems in Blackbeard’s treasure chest with chains, and they’re imprisoned in an airless chamber for their trouble. Rescued by Sue, they force Doom into retreat, and he escapes because his rocket harness can outlast the Human Torch’s ability to fly.
The best super villains have their own style, their own idiosyncrasies. They were distinctive. Dr. Doom would treat you to a sumptuous feast served by robots in a cavernous banquet hall — third-person lecturing you about how great he is the entire time — and then have you up locked up in an elaborate death trap in the dungeon, whereas the Joker would just giggle because he’d already poisoned your drink.
Doom’s ego was the constant in his character as the decades passed. I remember thinking how fitting it was when Doom once announced that all his remarks must be recorded for posterity. Despite his horror at what lay beneath the mask, this guy saw his true love in the mirror every morning.
Dr. Doom had a distinctive visual appeal, and a later an even more famous super villain, Darth Vader, would owe a lot to it.
Oddly enough, that same month in 1962, an alien creature with an identical mask — riveted, harsh and forbidding — appeared on the newsstands in Tales of Suspense 31 as The Monster in the Iron Mask.
Kirby knew a killer design when he came up with one.
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