Neverending Doom: Fantastic Four #9 Review

Editor’s Note: Stretch, I’m tellin’ ya… I messed with spoilers I didn’t understand, and it all blew up in that jerk’s face. Literally.

Considering he’s one of the premier villains of the Marvel Universe, Doctor Doom’s origin has always been kinda crap.

I mean, think about it: the dude is a brilliant scientist and a master magician who, upon having an experiment blow up in his face, uses that wealth of head-earned knowledge to alleviate his condition by covering it with an iron mask that looks like it was forged and riveted by a seventh grade industrial arts student. And on a basic level, we’ve spent years being told that, if it weren’t for the one, single incident of his horrible disfigurement, Doctor Doom would never have become a tyrannical despot with a lust for immortality and ultimate power despite being born the heir to the throne of a third world Eastern European toilet (an area historically known for its great record on human rights) and having the positive family name of “Von Doom.” Which is, of course, the Germanic term for fucking “of doom.”

So I have never completely bought into the simplistic background of Doctor Doom… and clearly neither has Fantastic Four writer Matt Fraction. Because in Fantastic Four #9, he gives us a firsthand view of Doom’s originating accident, but from a completely different angle then we’ve seen before. And while it doesn’t make Doom’s motivations any more complicated – it actually simplifies them by a pretty significant level – it does make Doom and his personality a lot more believable, if not any more relatable. He doesn’t make Doom, who has always felt a little like a guy who only wears an iron mask to stop himself from twirling his moustache and cackling, “Moo-hah-ha-ha!”, any more complex… but he does make him a two-and-a-half dimensional megalomaniac that I find more believable.

And it is very, very good.

Ben Grimm has admitted to Reed Richards that, back while they were all in college, he messed around with Von Doom’s experiment… and that he thinks that messing around caused the accident that spoiled Victor’s good Aryan looks (Hey, his name is “Von Doom” and he was created by Jack Kirby; if the Von Doom family weren’t Nazis, they were high on their fundraising list). So Reed steers the Fantastic Four’s space / timeship (FARDIS? Nah.) back to their college days and fits himself and Ben out with scramblers so they can move around without anyone seeing them. They see younger Ben accidentally bump into Victor, making him dump some paint and act like imperious Eurotrash, leading Ben to take some his buddies to fuck around with Victor’s equipment. But they also see Reed looking at Vic’s math for his experiment and finding it wanting… before moving to the experiment itself, where they find similarly scrambled versions of Doctor Doom from a variety of dimensions, all to witness the “Nativity of Doom” (which will be the name of my next Norwegian Death Metal band). When Victor enters what he thinks is an empty room, Ben, overcome by guilt, unscrambles and knocks Victor out of harm’s way… only to find that Doom’s origin and motivations aren’t really what we always through they were, and that responsibility can sometimes be a tricky thing to understand.

The most compelling thing Fraction does with this issue is to show that, where the rubber hits the road, the Doctor Doom origin story we all know doesn’t mean fuckall when it comes to the guy’s character. By taking a different point of view of the incident we all know, and by allowing a little bit of interference to mess with the incident, we learn that the accident that disfigured Doom’s face simply doesn’t matter. Fraction shows us that Doctor Doom wasn’t created, he was born… and he shows it to us in a bunch of different ways.

Fraction gives us not only the youthful Victor Von Doom, but at least a dozen other version of Doom from a variety of dimensions, and in the ways that matter, they are all the same: self-obsessed, narcissistic and obsessed with his own greatness. From youthful Doom’s imperious attitude toward Ben to his reaction to seeing The Thing for the first time, it is all about himself – hell, Doom sees a rocky monster who appears from thin air, recognizes Ben’s eyes… and accuses Ben of being obsessed with him. That’s self-absorption. I think I dated his sister. But I digress.

Every version of Doom is the same, and every version is the same: willing to pay any price to become the greatest person who ever lived. So what Fraction accomplishes here is pretty remarkable: he makes Doctor Doom not more human as a character, but actually less so… but in doing so, he makes the character more believable to me. Fraction is telling us basically that Doom has always been Doom, accident or not… and if he didn’t have the accident? He would have done what he did to become what he did anyway. And he hammers it home by showing us the extent of his “facial disfigurement,” which it turns out is just enough to not only qualify as “disfigurement” to a lawyer, but also just enough to get him quickly laid in any biker bar in America. And the net effect to me was to make more believable: Doom isn’t a self-absorbed monster because of any accident, he is a self-absorbed asshole because he is a self-absorbed asshole. I can buy that. It works for me.

Fraction also blows up the general idea of Doom being motivated by revenge for Ben and Reed allowing the accident to happen, not only in showing Doom not, in fact, being motivated by that incident, but also by calling into question whether or not Ben or Reed really bear any responsibility for the incident at all. Sure, Ben fucked with his equipment and Reed let Victor’s shitty math slide, but Fraction makes a point of having Reed point out to Ben that Doom should have checked his own equipment and questionable math before dumping a million volts into it and applying it to his face. Basically, Fraction uses this story to show that Doom wanting revenge for the accident isn’t a motivation, it’s a distraction. And again, that works for me; Doctor Doom’s origin has always been quintessentially Silver Age and simplistic. A guy who takes control of a nation and delves into dark magic all while cackling, “You spoiled my face so I am going devote my life to fucking all your holes” is a little childish (fucking your holes reference aside)… but a born megalomaniac who, if self-mutilation is needed to make him more powerful, would do it to himself if he can’t find some dupe to do it for him? That’s something I can believe, and it is really somewhat terrifying.

Mark Bagley’s art is about as straight-ahead superhero comics are as you can get, and that is a good thing for this issue. His figures and facial expressions are clear, his panel layout is simple and easy to follow, and he even manages to give us about fifteen different versions of Doctor Doom that are distinct enough to keep you from getting confused. It might not sound like I’m saying a lot about Bagley’s style, and I’m not, because it is simple, attractive comics art. It is not necessarily exciting, and it is not heavily stylized, but it is good, simple storytelling, which is something that comics could use a hell of a lot more of. I have always been a fan of Bagley’s art, and this issue doesn’t give me any reason to change that opinion.

It takes a lot of balls to fuck around with the origin of a classic comic book villain… even an origin as blatantly simplistic and pulpy / B-movieish as Doctor Doom’s. But Matt Fraction tackles the character in as smart a manner as possible, leaving the guts of the classic defining incident in place, while blowing the “defining” part of that event out of the water. And when it’s all said and done, it basically leaves that incident intact, while modifying Doom’s motivations to make him seem even scarier and more dangerous. It’s damn good work, and worth checking out.