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Death To The Beyonder!
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Look! On the cover! It's Doctor Doom! HOORAY!
For years I thought this cover was drawn by John Byrne, but a very cursory look at the cover itself shows that it's signed by Mike Zeck. The inks, however, are by Terry Austin, which I guess explains my mistake. If this is what they look like together I wish this team had been used on the insides too!
The story carries on from last time, with the heroes explaining to each other that they've cocked it all up and basically given Galactus the power to destroy everything. While they watch, however, the power that Galactus is absorbing by eating his own spaceship suddenly veers off towards to Doombase. Captain Marvel zooms after it and finds Doctor Doom (in a machine that looks very different to the one at the end of the last issue) absorbing the power for himself.
Doom wakes up and struggles to cope with the influx of cosmic power, as his senses go into overload. Showing this calls for a level of Cosmic Action that Mike Zeck isn't really able to live up to, with him drawing Doom inside his own head and then turning invisible in a way that I can't help thinking would have been a lot more exciting to look at in the hands of a groovier artist.
Doom's new super-senses tell him that there's a spy in the building, and Captain Marvel's telepathic tie to the heroes is suddenly cut off. They are, as usually, talking and talking and talking, and while they make preparations to investigate what's happened to their friend a Philosophical Debate breaks out between Wolverine and Captain America.
This is actually a Quite Interesting bit, with Wolverine criticising Cap for his moral simplicity before, telling him that his use of the term "terrorist" is "just what the "big army calls the little army." Sadly, the whole thing gets tied up in a massively banal way later on in the issue - Cap stops a building falling on some mutant which persuades Wolverine that The American Dream is entirely unproblematic for minorities after all.
Before we get to that though, the heroes finally head off to Doombase. Here we see Doom going about the very important task of giving himself a new costume in order to fulfill the wishes of Mattel... I mean, to prepare himself for the battles to come.
Apparently Mattel thought that Doom's existing costume was "too medieval", hence this new version, which features various harbingers of 90s Superhero Costumes in the form of a single garter and lots of lines all over the place. Suitably dressed he's ready to fight The Beyonder, but it very quickly becomes clear that he's way out of his league - he may have the powers of Galactus, but The Beyonder can, after all, alter reality itself - so he is forced to ask the heroes for help.
I love the fact that Doom here is telling a MASSIVE fib - the battle is going really badly and he's about to be obliterated, but it's very much in character for him to characterise it this way instead. He offers them the chance to "share" his victory and Magneto is about to take him up on the offer, before the Avengers very sensibly stop him from doing so. This leads to Doctor Doom being killed, and The Beyonder picking up his body and rooting around inside his brain for a super-condensed version of his origin story.
According to this Doom's mother was a "healer, maker of potions - cruelly put to death when Doom was but an infant, slain at the command of a petty official for practicing her arts after failing to cure an ailing horse." Eh? What? As usual when something like this pops up my first thought was "Oh, I haven't read that story" before realising that I have actually read ALL THE STORIES about Doom so far, and the reason I don't remember this part is because it has never ever been referred to before. "Failing to cure an ailing horse"?!? Where on earth does that come from? His mother has always been referred to as a witch, not a half-arsed vet! I do, however, like the fact that Mike Zeck has been back to the original origin story for the design of Doom's mum's box.
What's frustrating here is that on the very next page Jim Shooter does make a passable attempt to define Doom's character, boiling his basic needs down to power, freedom for his mother, and restoration of his face. This isn't always true, but there is something to it, even if I'd quibble with the overtly fascistic way in which Mike Zeck illustrates "power".
Also, a page after saying that Doom's mum was just a rubbish vet, here she is described as being "held by Mephisto in his fiery dimension as payment for arcane knowledge granted to her" i.e. because she was a WITCH. Unless Mephisto has been retconned as Dread Lord Of Vetinary Colleges?
While we're struggling with these amendments to Doom's origin he's being dissected by the Beyonder, or at least half of him is, and it's at this point, with 50% of his body pulled apart, that Doom wakes up!
Doom is HARDCORE! We leave him in this predicament to catch up with the heroes, who have decided to rescue the supervillains that Doom left to die, but then suddenly they see a light coming towards them with "something forming inside of it." This light turns out to be - Doctor Doom!
Zoinks! How on earth did that happen? There's no time to explain as there's only one page left in the comic, and that's taken up with the heroes girding themselves for battle, only for Doom to shrink down to their size, and explain that it's all over - he has won!
I have complained bitterly about the limp endings to these issues throughout the series, but this is a LOT more like it. Personally I would have ended on the previous massive splash page of Giant Doom , but even carrying on for one more page is all right if we get that big declaration from Doom. How has he managed this? What does it mean for the future of the series and the Marvel Universe? We strongly suggest you read the next edition of The Marvel Age Doom blog available in seven days!!
link to information about this issue
posted 12/3/2021 by Mark Hibbett
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