Fantastic Four Annual 2

Featuring: Dr. Doom
Release: July 2, 1964
Cover: 1964
25 cents
Earth-shaking script by: Stan Lee
Breath-taking illustration by: Jack Kirby
Epoch-making delineation by: Chic Stone
No-faking lettering by: S. Rosen
12 pages

We get another 25 cent annual for 72 pages. The Amazing Spider-Man Annual we recently covered was a better deal. That was 72 pages of all new material, which is really quite the bargain for 25 cents. This issue reaches the page count by reprinting Fantastic Four #5. Now, if you’d never read the first appearance of Dr. Doom, and were having trouble finding it, that would make this just as good a deal.

The first page

Confusing opening. It seems to show Dr. Doom in a castle. Yet, we saw Dr. Doom get lost in space in Fantastic Four #23. Of course, he also got lost in space in issue 6 only to be miraculously rescued by the Ovoids. But the odds of something like that happening twice are too improbable to consider. After all, space is big. Perhaps this story is meant to be set before Doom fell into outer space. Because I was sure we’d seen the last of him.

This is the best drawing of Dr. Doom we’ve yet seen. At least, that’s my take. I’d like to see if I can break down what’s leading my instincts to that conclusion.

I have to be a little careful assessing the image, as the coloring might have a lot to do with my impression. I don’t have easy access to the original, and the coloring is not fully consistent across the three versions of this story I do have access to (the digital shown above, the Epic Collection, and the Omnibus). I did find a scan of original art through googling. Let’s look at that.

And I definitely think this is the best rendition of Dr. Doom we’ve yet seen. I suspect the simple reasoning for that is this is the first time Chic Stone has supplied the inking. He fills the belt with a thick black while being otherwise sparing with the blacks. This allows the belt to be an accent that was missing in other renditions where it blended in with all the ink.

Of course, more simply, it also helps that it’s a full page picture that shows the character clearly, a page the artists clearly spent time on. Also, it helps that he is sitting on a throne, which is how I picture Dr. Doom.

Doom so far

I’ve mentioned repeatedly at this point that Dr. Doom is my favorite comic villain, but that I am thinking of more modern takes on Dr. Doom. He battled the Fantastic Four frequently in the early days, but that Doom wasn’t quite mine. Something was missing.

Most of the ingredients were there in the beginning. A man in armor with a green cloak, a villain who has mastered both science and sorcery, who seems driven largely by his own vanity. We even got the outlines of the origin in the first appearance. A brilliant science student and classmate of Reed’s who engaged in forbidden experiments to contact the Netherworld, which resulted in an explosion which scarred his face and got him expelled.

He was missing a cape in his first appearance, but he got it by his second. His look was basically the modern look by that second appearance in issue 6. Only subtle things were missing, the accents we talked about above.

His third appearance in issue 10 got these right, for example with a more evident belt buckle.

The character and the stories were still missing something. He kept setting clever traps for the Fantastic Four but wasn’t quite my Dr. Doom yet, so I’ve been eagerly watching for the gradual transition from that Doom into the one I know.

There is no gradual transition. It happened on the first page of this story. This is the modern Dr. Doom I know and love. As of this page, Dr. Doom is the greatest villain in the history of comics. The day before this comic came out, it was probably the Joker.

The origin

When we learned Doom’s origin in his first appearance, we learned it from Reed’s perspective, focused on their college days together. We get now the full picture.

Victor Von Doom was a Gypsy child. The comic refers to him as a “Gypsy”, so I will do the same. It is likely they are indicating he has Romani heritage, though they may be using the word more generally.

His father was a renowned healer, who found himself taken by soldiers to try to save the wife of a local Baron. The Baron’s wife was beyond saving, and Werner Von Doom knew he would be punished with death.

He flees with his son, but ends up sick from the elements. Boris rescues them, and returns them to camp after the soldiers have departed.

Werner Von Doom dies and Victor blames the Baron– and a cruel and indifferent world– for his father’s death.

We get a favorite scene of mine at his father’s death bed. His father’s last words to his faithful friend and servant Boris go unfinished. He merely says, “Heed my last words… You must protect…” His life ends with his last words incomplete.

Young Victor thinks he was asking Boris to protect his son, and responds that he needs no protection. But Boris understood the true meaning, that the world would need protection from young Victor.

Victor’s mother had been murdered when he was an infant. Now an orphan, he finally learns the truth his father had long hidden from him, that his mother was a sorceress, and that Victor has likely inherited some of her magical power.

As he grows older, he travels wide and uses his scientific prowess to scam the wealthy, selling them miracles which seem to work. Not so different from the schemes of Diablo.

He kept no riches for himself, sharing them with the poor. He earned the wrath of many local governments; soldiers constantly hunted him, and failed.

His achievements include a lifelike robotic duplicate of himself he used to fool local authorities. He used a similar robot in his first appearance to fool the Fantastic Four.

Professor Horton’s great achievement was unveiling a synthetic man in 1939. We saw here that Doom had his own robotic human likely before that, one he invented while still a youth. There is no reason to believe Doom’s robot was as sophisticated as Horton’s. Horton had created a fully self-aware man capable of reasoning. Doom has built a double that merely needed to fool the authorities that it was human for a short time. It’s not clear it even qualified as sentient. Still, it’s interesting to reflect on the state of robotics in the 1930s. Horton of course was many decades Doom’s senior, a professor before Doom even started university. So it makes sense that Doom might go on to overshadow Horton’s accomplishments with experience.

He is then tracked down by a recruiter who offers him a scholarship to State University. We see the origin just as presented originally, but with more details, including his first meetings with Reed Richards and Ben Grimm.

One key addition is that Reed was looking over his papers and tried to warn Doom of the flaw in his equations which led to the explosion, but Doom was too arrogant to listen.

Reed had known Doom left school for Tibet, but now we learn what happened next. Another brilliant moment from a brilliant comic. He was taken in by an order of Tibetan monks. He learned their secrets and came to be their master. The monks forged his armor. He gives his most Doomlike speech yet, that pain is for lesser men.

Finally, his mask is ready, but not yet cooled. He dons it while hot, which perhaps scarred his face even more.

We don’t see quite what happens next. He invents a flying device and leaves the monastery.

Now, 20 years later, he is the absolute monarch of Latveria. He has larger ambitions and one days plans to rule the whole world.

The people seem to respect him, though it may be because they know the consequences of disrespect. They do note that Latveria has been prosperous ever since Doom became the monarch.

He has brought prosperity to this land. But at what cost to human freedom?

This is an incredibly detailed origin to fit in 12 pages. It’s even more dense than the origins of Spider-Man and Dr. Strange. We get a lot of a plot, a long timespan, a lot of character growth, a lot of fleshing out of what we knew.

The original origin was only 5 panels. Let’s see how they line up with the new scenes.

Even the meeting of Reed and Ben lines up with what we saw in Fantastic Four #11, just with the added dimension that Reed had first asked Victor to be his roommate and been rebuffed.

In the earliest days of our reading, Stan showed little care for consistency within his stories. That has changed. The origin presented here aligns perfectly with the shorter version we saw before. Stan even gets the University right: State University. The University had not been named in Fantastic Four #5, but we did learn that was the university of Ben and Reed in Fantastic Four #11.

That the authorities were responsible for his father’s death adds a new dimension and a motivation for his villainy. His childhood tragedy connects him with Spider-Man. Their differences lie in how they chose to respond. Both characters learned lessons which shaped their perspectives and their decisions.

Boris attempted to emphasize to Victor that his father had used his talents to do good, to help people. Victor noted only how the world repaid his father’s good deeds.

The three best moments are his father’s attempted deathbed warning of what his son will become, Reed’s attempt to warn Doom of the flaw in his equations, and Doom donning the newly forged iron mask before it cools.

Of course, the most important addition to Doom’s character is the revelation that he is the absolute monarch of Latveria. Interestingly, the origin tells us much about him, but not how he came to be monarch. He had been a persecuted Gypsy child in the land, then a fugitive con artist across Europe, then a student in America, then a guest of a Tibetan monestary… and then the story skips ahead a couple decades. Now he’s a monarch.

Geography

Latveria is a fictional kingdom. We learn this about it: “…it nestles, virtually unnoticed in the heart of the Bavarian Alps.” It is further described as an “isolated kingdom”.

We deduce it is a very small country.

Note also that a Latverian officer refers to Doom as “Herr Doctor”, suggesting Latveria is in a German-speaking area.

Modern Bavaria is a state in Germany, but the historical kingdom of Bavaria stretched at times into much of what is modern day Austria. The Alps are a very long group of mountains, but the Bavarian Alps tends to refer to the section along the modern German/Austrian border.

Reed and Doom started college at the same time, so are presumably close to the same age, though Doom could have started late since the recruiter had difficulty tracking him down. Based on what we know about Reed’s World War II service, he was probably born in the early 1920s. That suggests the story of Doom’s childhood is set in the late 1920s or early 1930s.

The maps of the region were shaken by World War I and again in World War II. After the end of World War I, Bavaria became part of the Weimar Republic, and the Austrian-Hungarian Empire collapsed. The only mentions of Latveria are in the present, so the kingdom may well have been formed by Dr. Doom himself. We simply learn it sits in the area controlled by the Baron of Doom’s childhood. That Baron may have been a Baron within the Weimar Republic or within Austria, or perhaps within a small independent territory similar to Liechtenstein.

In fact, a good model for Latveria is Liechtenstein. Liechtenstein is a small German-speakng country in the Alps which borders Switzerland and Austria not far from the German-Austrian border. It’s also one of the last countries in the modern world where the hereditary monarchy retains considerable power. At the time this story was set, its population was around 20,000 people, though the population is double that today.

I don’t wish to go too far with my Latveria/Liechtenstein comparisons. I am comparing them in size and location. The royal family of Liechtenstein seem like lovely people. Very much not Dr. Doom.

I will note there is also a reference to a “Balkan kingdom” in the story of Doom’s young adulthood, but I think the clear implication is that he was traveling at the time, and got in trouble with local authorities in a place that wasn’t Latveria.

As the Nazis rose to power in the 1930s, it makes sense that Von Doom would travel beyond their reach, for example toward Balkan countries. The persecution of “Gypsies” depicted in this story would turn to genocide, as around a quarter million Roma, Sinti, and Lalleri were slaughtered under the Nazi regime. It is very fortunate for Von Doom that he was invited to school in America in the late 1930s. He may have gotten away before the German conquest of Austria in 1938.

Of course, I am also certain I have put more thought into this than Stan Lee ever did. I am sure he didn’t think too hard about words like “Balkan” and “Bavarian” when he wrote them down.

Later writers will offer contradictory evidence about the location of Latveria, to the point where many nowadays consider it to be noticeably East of where I am describing, perhaps bordering Hungary or even Romania. Such locations would very much not be in the Bavarian Alps.

What else is in this comic?

That’s the first 12 pages of this 72 page annual. Oddly, they chose to lead with a story which seems more like a backup, as it is short and doesn’t feature the Fantastic Four. They will close the issue with what seems like it should be the main story, a 25-page Fantastic Four adventure. We’ll cover that in the next post. Before that, there is a reprint of Fantastic Four #5.

As well as a gallery of the Fantastic Four villains. There had been a similar gallery in Fantastic Four Annual 1, so this one picks up where that left off, covering the villains introduced between Fantastic Four #18 and #30: Super-Skrull, Rama-Tut, Molecule Man, Hate-Monger, Infant Terrible, and Diablo. It leaves off the Terrible Trio, but they’re really just henchmen.

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Scattered throughout, we get a pin-up gallery with each member of the Fantastic Four, as well as Thing’s special lady, Alicia.

Rating: ★★★★★, 93/100
Significance: ★★★★★

For those keeping track, this is our third five-star rating. And yes, I am getting a little self conscious that 3 out of 3 are origin stories. Do I only appreciate origin stories? I obviously have some inclination toward them. We will eventually get to non-origin stories I give five stars, I am certain. I just need somebody to try to eat the Earth or perhaps some rubble to fall on Spider-Man, or something along those lines.

I read this story in Fantastic Four Epic Collection vol. 2: The Master Plan of Dr. Doom. You can also find this story in Marvel Masterworks: Fantastic Four vol. 3. Or on Kindle.

Characters:

• Dr. Doom/Victor Von Doom
• Boris
• Werner Von Doom
• The Baron
• Reed Richards
• Ben Grimm

Story notes:

• Dr. Doom’s castle is in Latveria, in the heart of the Bavarian Alps.
• Victor Von Doom had been a child in a Gypsy tribe.
• Werner Von Doom is a healer for his tribe; he is taken to the Baron’s castle and ordered to save the Baron’s wife, but unable to. Boris looks over Victor during this time.
• Werner and Victor flee from the Baron.
• Werner thinks his son has a destiny to fulfill.
• After the Baron’s soldiers depart, Boris takes a sick Werner and Victor back to camp. Victor recovers, but Werner does not.
• Von Doom’s mother, a mystic sorceress, was murdered when he was an infant. Now his father has been killed. He swears revenge on all mankind.
• Victor built scientific and magical oddities which he scammed people with.
• Doom was sentenced to face a firing squad in a Balkan country, but they killed a robot in his place.
• Dean of science at State University recruits Von Doom.
• Doom refuses Reed’s request to be roommates, so Reed and Ben room together.
• In school, Doom experiments with matter transmutation and dimension warps.
• Reed notes mistakes in some of Doom’s equations; Doom ignores him.
• Doom trying to contact Nether World, when the mistakes Reed had noted lead to an explosion. The explosion scars his face and gets him expelled.
• Doom taken in by Tibetan monks, a mysterious order that had dwelled in a lost mountain cave for centuries.
• Monk warns iron mask had not cooled yet; Doom dons it anyway.
• Only Dr. Doom’s ring can remove mask; ring camouflaged with special herbs.
• Doom has become absolute monarch of Latveria.
• People note the land has been prosperous under Doom’s rule.
• People refer to him as “Master”, and must be silent when he passes. Compliments to Doom seem to be allowed.

#239 story in reading order
Next: Fantastic Four Annual 2, Story C
Previous: Journey Into Mystery #108, Story B