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This Time You Can't Blame Stan
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When I first sat down to read this issue I was a little puzzled, as there was absolutely no mention of Doctor Doom in it whatsoever. There's plenty of other stuff, not least the highly enjoyable introduction of Hercules, but no Doom.
It's not the first time this has happened - The Corpus Of Doom (which is what I should have called my big list of comics from the start) is collated from several different databases, all of which have had lots of different people adding information to them at different times in different ways, which means that sometimes the data entry criteria gets a bit muddled. For instance, in Incredible Hulk #2 there was an advert for Fantastic Four #5 (discussed here) featuring Doctor Doom, so somebody somewhere thought that that should be included as part of the comic, whereas normally only the actually story contents "count" towards appearances.
I thought that something similar might be going on here, and after a bit of googling I discovered that it was. In several Marvel comics published this month there appeared an advert for an Incredible Hulk Sweat Shirt, starring Doctor Doom:
This image, and a lot more information about it, can be found in an excellent blog by Nick Caputo at Marvel Mysteries and Comics Minutiae. According to him this advert was written and drawn by Marie Severin, which makes her the first person to ever write Doctor Doom apart from Stan Lee!
There's something rather fitting about Doom's first appearance without Stan Lee's stewardship being for an advert, or at least there is if you happen to be writing a thesis about him as an early transmedia character! It would be several more years before other people began to write Doom in the main Marvel Universe continuity, but from this point onwards he will start to appear regularly in all sorts of other media, out of Lee's control. Indeed, around this time 'The Marvel Super Heroes' cartoon would have been in development, at which point Doom (and much of the rest of Marvel comics) would truly begin to become transmedia characters. And it all began with a sweatshirt!
link to information about this issue
posted 2/4/2018 by Mark Hibbett
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