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Blog Archive: July 2021
By The Soul's Darkest LightLast week I read a twitter thread by The Claremont Run discussing the way Chris Claremont writes his X-Men characters from "a perspective of perpetual adolescence", with their emotioins raw and judgement hasty. Having since read this comic I can confirm that this analysis is absolutely 100% accurate. The X-Men and other characters act like teenagers throughout, which definitely does make the story more dramatic but, for someone who is very much not any teenager anymore, it also makes them all incredibly, perpetually, annoying.
Before we go any further, the cover image of the X-Men wearing Doom masks to murder the Fantastic Four is a) brilliant but b) entirely unrepresentative of what goes on inside. You might possibly argue that they take Doom's side against the FF, but then again they don't really at all. It's a shame, because it looks great!
What we do get inside is a bit of classic Doom Looming, although for once he's actually there in person, healing Storm, rather than appearing menacingly in the sky.
The X-Men have gone to Latveria, where Doom has promised to cure Kitty Pryde of her Turning Into A Ghost complaint. Before that though he's using "bio-enhancer" to heal Storm's burns from last issue.
As Psylocke remarks, this could help burn victims everywhere. Um... burn victims like Doom himself, maybe? If, as canon now says (and explicitly clarified in the preceding issue of this series) Doom's injuries were caused by him putting on a burning hot mask, couldn't he use this device on himself?
The other X-Men are hanging around being annoying. Rogue has nipped into town to do some shopping without letting anybody know, so when she comes back (wearing "absolutely aces threads") it trips the alarms, sending a group of exciting armour-based Doombots to catch her.
We've never seen these sort of Doombots before, but they look brilliant - Jon Bogdanov's art throughout this issue is "absolutely aces". The X-Men leap into action and destroy the Doombots, competing with each other to see who can cause most mayhem, which gets them all into trouble when Storm finds out.
They are extremely teenage here - Rogue even says "They started it!" I bet she was asking if they were nearly there yet all the way to Latveria too.
Doom is very smooth indeed throughout this issue, and indeed the rest of the series, where he's a much bigger presence than in the first half. "Perhaps an error was made. On both sides," he says.
There's more high drama as we cut to Kitty, who's decided that enough is enough and she's going to just let herself die. Drama! She phases out of her life-support system so her atoms can be scattered to the wind, only to be stopped by Franklin Richards in his Astral Form, using his Ill-Defined Powers to talk her down. The X-Men arrive to see him comforting her, and don't seen at all surprised to see him there, leaving asking about it pretty low down on their list of questions.
We then get a lengthy cutaway to the Fantastic Four, all dealing with the idea that Reed might have sent them into space deliberately un-shielded, knowing the cosmic rays would give them special powers. Reed reads Franklin a story, Ben tries to get drunk and saves a child from a handily burning car crash, and Johnny has a moan to Alicia. It all ends with Sue deciding that the journal which "revealed" Reed's secret motivation must have been a forgery because "the author of that diary couldn't have related to Franklin the way you did." The others also come back, having decided that having superpowers is quite cool so they're fine with it. It's a lengthy section full of talking and talking and talking, and it doesn't half go on!
The issue leaves us there, with the FF happy to be reunited and Doctor Doom about to switch on his De-Ghostifying Machine to cure Kitty. There doesn't appear to be an awful lot left to tidy up in the final issue at the moment - the FF are fine, Kitty's about to be cured - but I'm sure Chris Claremont will manage something. Find out if he does, next time!
posted 30/7/2021 by MJ Hibbett
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Truths and Consequences
Before we get started on the contents of this issue, I think it's vitally important to recognise how brilliant the cover is. Doctor Doom is lurking menacingly in the background, the Fantastic Four are lying dead, Franklin is bawling his eyes out, and Wolverine is trying really hard to be comforting by saying "You're mother's been avenged, okay kid?" He is the best at what he does, and what he does is not counselling.
Once again, Doom is on the cover but he's hardly in the comic itself at all, though at least it is actually him this time rather than just a dream. His appearance is begun when it turns out that the fisherman Dazzler and Longshot plucked out of the sea last time isn't a fisherman at all but some kind of robot.
I like the way this is described as something only mildly perturbing, like bringing home a new jar of jam and finding that the popping lid isn't popping. I suppose that's the way it is on Muir Island (with robots, I mean, not jars with pre-opened lids). The robot is actually a Projection Device, which then stomps out onto the tarmac where the FF and the X-Men have been having a fight as a result of Mr Fantastic not being prepared to cure Kitty Pryde from her Phasing Into Nothingness disease. The robot has of course been sent by none other than... Doctor Doom!
There's a REALLY lengthy explanation here about why he used the robot, rather than, say, sending a fax. The real explanation, of course, is that this is a lot cooler than even faxing would have been in 1987. Doom appears in hologram form to offer to help, recreating the Molecular Reintegrator that Reed Richards refuses to use, and curing Kitty. As ever, Reed doesn't like the idea that Doom would actually do something better than him (why yes, I HAVE read a lot of comics starring Doctor Doom and started to see things from his point of view) so stomps off onto his plane and leaves the island. Doom himself disappears for the rest of the comic, telling the X-Men to call him when they're ready.
After that most of the rest of the comic is a whole lot of talking. The X-Men spend pages and pages discussing whether to take Doom up on his offer, and eventually decide that they will. It's massively padded, as there's never any question about whether they will or not, but I guess this is Chris Claremont in his Pomp so that's what you'd expect. The FF, meanwhile, have another lengthy chat during which they discuss the journal that Sue found last time, which appears to suggest that Reed knew all along that their trip into space would transform them into superheroes. This involves some nice image quotation, with a bunch of iconic images from Fantastic Four #1 recreated by John Bogdanov.
It's still Chris Claremont writing it though, so there's still an awful lot of dialogue! The issue ends with both teams in their living rooms looking glum, the FF because they're on the brink of splitting up (again), the X-Men because they're about to make a deal with Doctor Doom. It's sort of an anti-cliffhanger - "come back next time and hopefully things will be a bit more exciting than this!" But will they? Come back next time and find out!
posted 23/7/2021 by MJ Hibbett
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Are You Sure?
Doctor Doom appears on the cover of every issue of the four-issue "Fantastic Four versus The X-Men" mini-series, but he doesn't actually appear in it that much, unfortunately. He doesn't really appear in this one at all, apart from that cover image and a Dream Sequence that takes up the first few pages.
For years, Franklin Richards' super-powers had been extremely vaguely defined as "very powerful" without really saying what they are. In this issue they include seeing the future, astral projection, and convoluted metaphors. Many of these are expressed in the aforesaid dream sequence, where Franklin watches his Dad, Mr Fantastic, carrying his Mum, The Invisible Woman, around an Eery Dreamscape, having apparently killed her. Wolverine turns up and attacks Mr Fantastic for killing the X-Men too but misses, falls over, and ... er... dies.
Reed then takes out a Spooky Book labelled (in large, Batman TV show letters) "REED RICHARDS JOURNAL STATE UNIVERSITY" which causes him to transform into ... Doctor Doom!
There's a lot of Child Psychology going on here, but there's also some great character work as the cold, unemotional version of Reed Richards transfroms into Doom and his speech patterns do too. Reed/Doom takes up the Mask Of Doom and puts it on his face, completing the transformation and interestingly echoing the very recent canonisation of the idea that Doom was mostly scarred by putting on a very hot mask, as seen in Fantastic Four #278.
It also echoes an idea we've seen a few times before, of Reed and Doom being the same person, such as in Marvel Team-Up #133.
That's all the Doom we get for this issue, though it's not all the Child Psychology, as Franklin is brushed off when he goes to tell his Dad about his dream. Luckily Sue Richards is nearby, and she displays her excellent parenting skills by using that tried and tested method of getting frightened children to go back to sleep again - she gets him to help up open some old packing cases.
Was that tea set packed like that? Does Reed Richards have special Science Packing Foam?
Also in the crate is REED RICHARDS JOURNAL STATE UNIVERSITY, but before we can find more out about that we cut away to Muir Island where the X-Men are busily catching us up with what's been going on lately. They're now living in Scotland with a bunch of new members who don't all get on (as is the way with X-Men), including Dazzler and Longshot, who stop off on their way back from collecting groceries by speedboat to rescue a drowned fisherman. More importantly for the series as a whole though, we find out that Kitty Pryde has got stuck in Phase Form and only has days to live!
Back in New York, Franklin's dream is coming true as Sue confronts Reed with the journal, which she has read.
You don't read people's journals Sue, nothing ever good comes of it, especially when your future-seeing son explicitly advises you not to!
Over in Greenwich village we see She-Hulk, who just so happens to be reviewing The Trial Of Magneto for a charity event. I say "just so happens" because she and The Thing then get caught up with stopping a burning building from collapsing, and who should turn up but ... Magneto!
Magneto's there to ask Reed Richards for his help, as one of his experimental devices might be able to save Kitty. He agrees to go to Muir Island along with Thing, She-Hulk and The Human Torch, with The Invisible Woman choosing to stay home and be furious about what was in the journal. When they arrive on Muir Island Reed's in a bit of a state, worrying about what will happen about the Journal. This leads to him being over-cautious and not wanting to risk using the device, something which causes more of Franklin's dream to come true, as a furious Wolverine attacks Mr Fantastic, just like at the start of the story.
What can it all mean? What was in the journal? Why won't Mr Fantastic help the X-Men? And will we get a little bit more Doctor Doom as the series progresses? Find out... next time!
posted 16/7/2021 by MJ Hibbett
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Who'll Stop The Rain?
After Doom's final panel cameo in the last issue of 'Cloak And Dagger', this time he's got a much bigger part to play. It starts with the cover, where we see a very familiar portrayal of Doom looming enormously over other characters, something which he's done repeatedly throughout his career so far.
There's more Doom Tropes on the splash page, where we find Doom standing on a castle balcony, planning to save the world, with Boris The Faithful Retainer in the background. This is great stuff from the writer, Bill Mantlo, who clearly knows his Doom!
I also love the fact that Boris is carrying his lamp again, as he did in many of his earliest appearances, even when they get inside. As they stroll through the castle he and Doom briefly discuss the former's part in the latter's origin before entering a room full of technology which Doom is using to... predict the weather?
Doom is very good at this, apparently, and I for one would sign up to watch The Weather Forecast if he was doing it! They pass through a room full of art and another room where a fancy meal is laid out - artist Brett Blevins has also been doing some Doom Tropes Research by the looks of it - as they head out onto more battlements and then into another tower where Doom has built a Particle Projector which is going to rid the planet of all nuclear weapons.
This isn't the first time that Doom has tried to enforce nuclear disarmament - he's also attempted it in the the Spider-man newspaper strip (using a method eerily similar to the one from 'Watchmen') and as part of his takeover of the world in last week's blog. I really like his motivation here though - he's not doing this for the good of the world, not primarily anyway, he's doing it because if the world gets blown up he does too!
Cloak, Dagger, and her Annoying Boyfriend teleport into Latveria just as Doom has activated the device, and meet a bunch of Latverian peasants having a heated debate about whether Doom is a good guy or not. Most of them think he very much is, although I'm not sure how much you can trust the judgement of people who think it's a good idea to stand around in the pouring rain while wearing shorts.
You'd think they'd have adjusted their outfits according to Doom's Weather Forecast really. The police turn up and take Cloak, Dagger, and Annoying Boyfriend to meet Doom. He tears himself away from a KirbyTech Control Panel (more Doom Themes from Blevins) to turn on the charm when he meets Dagger.
Cloak is suspicious, but Doom then explains that everything they know about him is Fake News, and that he's simply the victim on malicious falsehoods from The Fantastic Four. To back this up he explains his Cunning Plan to them, which involves "neutralising the energy emitted by radioactive materials." This sounds totally plausible to me!
Boris takes them away to a Plush Suite, where Annoying Boyfriend points out that getting rid of radioactive materials means "no energy for cities, no radiation therapy for cancer patients, no nuclear powered science research." The second point is fair enough, even if a Marvel Universe with Doom and Mr Fantastic in it should be able to sort that out some other way, but the first and third points aren't very convincing. Also: no nuclear war!
Annoying Boyfriend sends Cloak And Dagger off to find Doom, who is relaxing at his console, watching a viewing screen, drinking some wine. Really, Blevins and Mantlo, with all of these Doom signifiers you are really spoiling us!
They also answer the question of how Doom drinks through his mask - inelegantly - and give us yet another foretaste of Watchmen. Doom is not a Republic serial villain - he did it thirty-five minutes ago (roughly)!
"We intend to stop you, madman!" says Cloak, which is going a bit far if you ask me, especially as he's already done it. Is it really that mad to get rid of all nuclear weapons? Or have five years of Doctor Doom made me more sympathetic to him than maybe it should?
Dagger zaps Doom with her light and then Cloak swallows him up into his cloak, where Doom has a Mystical Vision of his mum.
This is definitely NOT a way to get onto Doom's good side and he blasts his way out of the Cloak, which is apparently either rare or impossible. Annoying Boyfriend shows up, and the three heroes teleport away to the Particle Projector. Annoying Boyfriend (who is REALLY annoying by this point) bosses the others around, getting them to try and destroy the device which, just to be clear, is about to remove the threat of nuclear war.
Doom turns up and Cloak comes up with a Cunning Plan all of his own. He traps Doom inside his cloak again, which makes him so absolutely furious that he lashes out with his gauntlets, just as the cloak opens up again so that he accidently blasts his own projector to bits.
They teleport away and... that's it! We never get to find out how furious Doom must be, we just get The Three Idiots standing on a nearby rock, as Cloak ponders "Will we in time come to regret our gift, as we live with the gnawing guilt that we have given humanity back the means of its own destruction?" This is quite similar to the Moral Issues we looked at last time, where Doom basically saved the world but the Avengers had to stop him because of Reasons, which merrily restored Apartheid and The Cold War. Again, perhaps I've read too much Doctor Doom here, but it does feel as if maybe they could have had a sensible discussion about how it worked, rather than just blasting the whole thing to bits?
Despite all that, this has been a great example of Doom Being Doom, which I wasn't expecting to find at this late stage of the corpus. More please!
posted 9/7/2021 by MJ Hibbett
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Emperor Doom
Ever since "Secret Wars" finished we've had a long string of Doom in cameos, flashbacks, recaps, and occasional Massive Continuity Fixes, but we've not had much of him as the star of the show.
Until today!
Today we're looking at an actual graphic novel all about Doctor Doom! All right, technically it's called "Avengers: Emperor Doom" and is meant to be about how The Avengers, and specifically Wonder Man, stop him, but really it's all about what would happen if Doom took over the world. It turns out what would happen is that things would be great!
The story gets off to a baddy-based start, first with The Purple Man being kidnapped while being awful, then with Namor wandering the streets of New York before he arrives at a restaurant to meet Doctor Doom.
I really like the art in this story, which is by Bob Hall (who's drawn some excellent Doom stories before) and inked by Keith Williams, making it all look very Bronze Age-y, even as we skirt uncomfortably close to The 90s. There's no reason on earth that this couldn't have been an Avengers Annual rather than a Graphic Novel, but seeing the art so big looks nice, and it gives the whole thing a big grandiose feel that the story is altogether too much fun to live up to.
Doom needs Namor's helps with a Cunning Plan. He's going to take over the entire world by strapping The Purple Man into a Psycho Prism and brainwashing everybody... or nearly everybody anyway. The prism only affects people who can breath, so he needs Namor to stick some Robot Controllers onto a few Robot Superheroes, and in exchange he promises him he can rule the sea while Doom rules the land. This sounds like a good deal, so Doom gives Namor a mini-Psycho Prism and the control discs, then the Submariner pops off to put them onto The Vision, Machine Man and Ultron. This he does with ease.
While that's going on we take a trip to the HQ of the West Coast Avengers, most of whom are variously lolling about eating pizza and reading books. Wonder Man however is visiting Tony Stark, who is going to "perform a little science experiment" on him. They're going to find out how his pure energy body works, and so he needs to lie in a flotation tank for thirty days.
This seems deeply weird - he's going to lie there for thirty whole days? And none of the other Avengers seem bothered enough to wish him good luck or anything? Anyway, I'm sure it's not important and will have no impact on the rest of the story, which goes on to feature some great Doom Action. We see him landing on Doom Island, which I don't think is a place we've seen in the comics before. This is a top secret facility, manned entirely by soldiers who are cos-playing as Doombots.
I'm not sure what's going on here - those are definitely Doombots, and later on they are explicitly stated to be robots, so why they're soldiers here I don't know. They're guarding the Psycho Prism, which has a very annoyed Purple Man trapped inside it. He tells Doom that he doesn't deserve to rule, challenging him to face him man to man. Brilliantly, Doom does exactly that!
I love this bit, and it's part of a theme throughout the story of Doom Being Excellent.
Meanwhile, Namor has made a bit of a botch job of putting the control discs on robots. They're all attached, but like certain former Health Secretaries we might know, he forgot about surveillance cameras, and now The Avengers have got wind that something's going on. They fly off to Doom Island, watched by Doom on his viewing screens as usual, and fight their way through the Doombots, here described as "Latverian citizens" and so humans still. They make their way inside, just as Doom activates the Psycho Prism and taking over everybody's minds, leading to the first of several great lines, as penned by David Micheline.
The Avengers shuffle off, while Doom moves onto the next stage of his takeover. I said earlier that this all feels very Bronze Age-y, and this feeling is hugely reinforced by the fact that this next bit takes place at the United Nations building!
Long-term readers of this blog will know that there was a period during the 1970s when Doom was hardly ever out of the UN, using it for takeovers in the Amazing Spider-man newspaper strip, the Spider-man cartoon, and in Spidey Super Stories. Spider-man isn't here to see him get voted in as world leader this time (as I've commented many, many times before, the UN works very differently on Earth 616), but Namor is, and he wants his dues. When Doom says no he gets most irate, until he discovers that he's been tricked. The mini-Psycho Prism is not a fun free gift, it's Doom's way of controlling Namor too!
What a fiend! This is necessary because some people (including Namor) have extremely strong willpower, and so can fight against the Purple Man's power if they know what's going on, but I'm sure that won't come up again either.
Usually at this point something would go horribly wrong (usually involving Spider-man) and Doom would lose control, but not this time. Instead Doom immediately sets about changing things, and within days the Russians have withdrawn from Afghanistan, land is redistributed in Ethopia and farming is restored, apartheid is ended in South Africa, world economies all improve and nuclear disarmament begins.
Everything, in fact, is going great, until Wonder Man gets out of his tank a few weeks later (nobody comes to help him out either, which seems a bit rude) and sees a news report saying that Doctor Doom is having a ticker tape parade to celebrate giving independence to Puerto Rico. Wonder Man isn't affected by the prism because he doesn't breath, but when he suggests stopping Doom his team-mates immediately turn him in. They force him to flee the mansion, only to fall foul of a crowd of angry shoppers who also love Doom.
We're used to seeing ordinary people thinking Doom's great, but usually only in Latveria. Here it looks like the whole world is on his side, although only because of Mind Control. I wonder if this would change if everybody was released from this control and found themselves in a world free of hunger, war and poverty?
Wonder Man goes off on the run, leaving Doom to get on with the business of running the world. This, it turns out, involves an awful lot more admin than he was expecting.
This is a brilliant double twist by David Micheline (or possibly Mark Gruenwald or Jim Shooter who are credited as coming up with the original concept with him) - the whole world is happy and at peace, which makes Doctor Doom bored! We've seen this before, of course, back in The Champions #16, where Doom took over the world and was beseiged in the White House by annoying politicians.
That time he managed to take over by using a neuro-gas to mind control everyone in the world except for Ghost Rider, who was immune because he couldn't breath... hang on, isn't that exactly the same plot as this time? And if Ghost Rider was immune then why isn't he now? That story was also drawn by Bob Hall, funnily enough, although the script was by Bill Mantlo - perhaps Micheline, Gruenwald and Shooter should have shared the credits for their "concept"!
Wonder Man is wandering around (he does this a lot, maybe his name has just been spelt wrong all this time?) trying to find a way to put the world back to normal again. After a slightly boring chat with A Wise Blind Woman he goes back to Wet Coast Avengers HQ, fights Captain America, and forces him to watch video footage of Doom Being A Baddy.
This is enough to restore Cap to normal, and then he chooses the most strong-willed Avengers he can think of (Hawkeye, Iron Man and The Wasp) to do the same to them. Hawkeye wants to restore his wife Mockingbird next, but Cap says it'll only work on super strong-willed people like them which, again, seems a bit rude. Hawkeye goes and gives it a go anyway but it doesn't work. She tells on them to Doom and so they have to go on the run again. Doom, however, is quietly pleased to have a bit of a challenge again.
The Avengers fly off to fight him on Doom island, but their Quinjet is easily blown out of the sky by Doom's defences, leading to another brilliant quip which has since gone on to be one of those Internet Memes that the young people are so keen on.
Again, this is a lovely bit of characterisation, and Doom is of course correct. The whole thing was a decoy, and the actual Avengers are now on the ground fighting the Doombot army, who are now definitely robots, honest.
How Hawkeye knew they were robots is beyond me, but it's a flipping good job he was right! The Avengers fight their way inside, struggling against the power of The Purple Man as they get closer but, as Marvel superheroes always do, manging to prevail by Trying Really Hard. Still, even though they free Namor from the mind control by dousing him in water from a very handy nearby fish tank, Doom still has everything under control. All he has to do is press a big red button...
I think we're all with Doom on this one - who among us hasn't wished we could get out of boring meetings and/or social engagements at some point? He decides to "let fate decide" which in this case means "do nothing" while Namor smashes up the Psycho Prism, and the whole world goes back to normal. Afghanistan goes back to war, racism is re-instated in South Africa, vandals take to the streets of Los Angeles and the armies of the world re-arm their nuclear warheads. Er... hooray for the Avengers?
There's just time for one last Doom Trope, as he heads to an escape port and blasts off in a shuttle, and then all that remains is for The Avengers to fly home with more news of the world returning to normal on the radio. Hawkeye wonders whether they've done the right thing, and Captain America gives a speech which I guess is meant to be convinving and heroic... er... but isn't particularly.
The final panel has Hawkeye wondering whether they've done humanity the greatest favour in history or the greatest damage. "Either way that's something we're going to have to live with for the rest of our lives," he says, but I wonder if this ever gets mentioned ever again? If I was the Avengers I'd probably keep it under my hat for a few years!
It's a daft end, but I suppose they couldn't do it any other way. Otherwise this has been a thoroughly enjoyable story to read through, packed with some great Doom insights and lovely art. Sadly, I think this might be the last properly great Doom story we get for a while, but there's still a few left issues left so let's see if I'm wrong next time, when we return to the pages of Cloak & Dagger!
posted 2/7/2021 by MJ Hibbett
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