Fortunately for those folks who don’t know who he is, his basic deal is gloriously simple: He’s the dignified and megalomaniacal ruler of a small country, and he’s a genius at both technology and magic. He might not even be on the list.ĭoom would find this fact obscene, and so should we. For casual superhero-film fans, he isn’t a second choice he isn’t even a tenth. He languishes in third-rate spandex flicks about the FF, somehow less famous than the likes of Dormammu and Ego the Living Planet - neither of whom hold a candle to Victor in terms of thematic richness and iconic character traits, not to mention killer visuals. So, despite having graced the pages of Marvel’s comics output for five-and-a-half decades, he has never faced down the Avengers or the Guardians of the Galaxy on the big screen. Long before Marvel started producing their own movies in the mid-aughts, the film rights to the Fantastic Four and their related characters were sold to 20th Century Fox, and the folks there hold them jealously. It’s time for that to change, even if such a change may seem impossible right now. And yet, the traps and tripwires of legality have made his meta-textual story something of a tragic one, because a heated legal situation has prevented him from entering the spotlight of Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe. But Doom looms above them all as the closest thing to the Platonic ideal of a supervillain that the genre has ever seen. (Magneto is a close second.) The corpus of superhero fiction has a surfeit of nasties, dozens upon dozens of antagonists for each of the already multitudinous protagonists. When one makes a list of the best Marvel Comics bad guys, only a classless fool would rank him below first place. Then he offers one of the better lines he’s ever uttered: “You should have known better - Doom is no man’s second choice.” “You should have thought of that, Namor, and more carefully considered your position,” Doom says, as he stands to leave the banquet. “Everything will stand or fall on what we face.” And you dragged the stinking carcass of your failure to my door.” “I can forgive your dalliances with Richards and the others - their nature is not conducive to such practicality - but after that, you chose to throw in with your subhuman lot. Doom casually raises his left palm and eases into one of the grandiose explanatory monologues for which he is so beloved, and without which you can’t understand his magic. Helping Namor would arguably be in Doom’s best interest: After all, the end of Earth would also mean the end of the country that Doom rules, the small European nation of Latveria.īut when the request for aid is made, the green-cloaked, mechanically masked Doom replies, “I think not.” Namor is astonished. This being a superhero comic, the specifics of the plot are a bit hard to summarize, but I’ll try: The morally ambiguous superhuman Namor has come to Doctor Doom to ask for help in saving the planet from a massive threat after Namor has exhausted the options of working with heroes like Doom’s eternal rival Reed Richards and bloodthirsty baddies like Thanos.

In a story called “ The Cabal,” written by Jonathan Hickman with art from Valerio Schiti, Frank Martin, and David Curiel, the reader finds themselves attending a dinner with the greatest supervillain of all time: none other than Doctor Victor von Doom. It came on the printed page, of course - no one on screens large or small has been able to capture that diabolical egomaniac’s essence and make him sing. In late 2014, while Hollywood was busy hammering out yet another failed attempt to make audiences care about Marvel Comics icons the Fantastic Four, the team’s finest foe experienced one of his finest moments.

Doctor doom