Since Marvel Studios has confirmed that they’re working on a Fantastic Four film, I have to admit that for the first time in a while I’m a bit on edge about whether they can pull off something properly that I really care about. Whatever they do with Moon Knight or She-Hulk? That’s all fine, it’ll be good, I’m sure.
But the Fantastic Four are really my favorite comic-book characters and they’re hard to get right even in the comics themselves—and so far even more difficult to get right in cinematic adaptations. Still, the basics shouldn’t be as hard as they have been.
What they really have to get right is Victor Von Doom. There’s less margin for error: he’s one of the most layered and complicated villains in comics. When a comics writer gets him wrong, it’s instantly obvious and deeply annoying. (Say, when Brian Michael Bendis had Doom making crude misogynist remarks to the Avengers: the entire Internet howled about how off that was.)
The easiest analogy I can think of is Doom is like Elon Musk in the sense of thinking of himself as brilliant, as above all the constraints placed on ordinary people, as entitled to do anything he pleases and to having unconstrained rights to command other people, but with dignity and a sense of grand drama that Musk doesn’t have.
Doom started as a standard Stan Lee-pulp villain—all the early Marvel villains were cut more or less from the same cloth in terms of their demeanor, with the major distinction between them being “commie or not commie?” But the development of his origin—the shared past and rivalry with Reed Richards, growing up as a Romany in a small Central European country, finding out he was the secret heir to the monarchy and becoming absolute ruler of the small Central European nation of Latveria, hiding a scarred face behind armor—gave him his depth of motivation and character.
And then beyond that, Marvel’s writers, primarily Jonathan Hickman in the most recent version of Secret Wars, finally recognized that Doom had a kind of emergent leitmotif that no one had really planned, which was that he regularly launched schemes involving mind control of various kinds—sometimes just of his specific enemies, sometimes at a global scale—and succeeded, only to voluntarily undo or subvert his own triumph by allowing his enemies the chance to escape or defeat the control. Or, somewhat similarly, he achieved godlike powers of dominion over people and then made one obvious mistake—almost on purpose—that lost them. What became clear is that Doom wants the entire world to proclaim him the best human being and to hand power to him out of love and respect. He wants dominion because it is given to him, and when he achieves it any other way, it is hollow and he cannot bear it.
The best Doom story where this all comes together, I think, is Fantastic Four #247, by John Byrne.
Byrne’s run on the title is justifiably famous. There’s a few really bad issues in it and a few questionable ideas, but his Doom was tonally perfect, and never more so than in this issue.
The story proceeds from a Doom storyline written about four years previously by Marv Wolfman that was not so tonally perfect—Wolfman’s Doom is petty and a bit pouty. He ends up in a coma after fighting Reed Richards one-on-one and the heroic Latverian resistance movement puts its leader, Zorba, on the throne of an ostensibly liberated Latveria.
Considering that Byrne’s follow-up to that story appeared in 1982, there’s a certain prescience about it in terms of the end of the Cold War in Eastern Europe. Zorba is actually the brother of the former monarch, Rudolfo, who among other things persecuted the Romany living in Latveria when Doom was young, while also behaving pretty much like any monarch of the ancien regime in Europe, mistreating the ordinary people of his kingdom. In the time between Doom’s loss of power and #247, Zorba has become an insane autocrat. Latveria’s economy is a shambles and crime has become a scourge to its people.
Doom, in the meantime, has recovered from his coma and has decided to retake power. He’s used a mind-control ray on the Fantastic Four to prevent them from attacking him and brought them involuntarily to Latveria. As the issue proceeds, it becomes fairly clear that Doom could have retaken power on his own, without their help, but that he’s brought them here to see the consequences of his removal from power and make them complicit in retaking his authority. He wants to prove to them, Reed Richards most of all, that he is actually the right person to rule Latveria (and perhaps the world?)
You can read the issue as allowing the possibility that Doom is manipulating events somewhat, but basically Byrne plays it straight (in a way that was controversial at the time): the Latverian people want Doom back for the sake of order and prosperity, and many of them are now voluntarily devoted to him (in contrast to many earlier stories where the Latverians were portrayed as compelled to pretend loyalty and love for Doom). For the most part, Byrne’s portrayal has been influential since, though Doom has continued to be a more or less Machiavellian ruler who prefers to be feared rather than loved. (Up to his most recent turn to being a good guy, which I’m not going to get into now.)
Beyond that, the issue just generally gets Doom right: genuine love for his most loyal servants who are tied to his youth, his seemingly genuine love of his country, his formality of speech, his operatic affect, his charisma (here acknowledged by the Invisible Woman),
his decisive ruthlessness (when he gets to Zorba, he wastes little time in killing him unceremoniously), and his sense of honor.
You have to love the way he punctures Reed Richards’ posturing here—and the fact that he doesn’t gloat about the fact that he’s achieved his purpose, not just in reassuming power but in more or less proving to his enemies that he deserves to be in charge.
This is one of those issues that you could use as a kind of metronome in a long-running shared storytelling framework like Marvel’s, to remind later writers of what a particular character should sound like and act like. The problem with this kind of sprawling serial storytelling (not just comic-books but also soap operas, for example) is that characters who appear frequently tend to acquire lots of narrative crud on them, like barnacles. Doom, for example, got more and more fouled up over time by the overuse of the idea that he sends life-like robots of himself to represent him in some situations (which let later writers explain why Doom wasn’t acting properly in some of his worst-written stories), that he is replaced for a while by a young boy who has been brainwashed to act like Doom, that he has been off on some cosmic jaunt for much of his history and has only just actually returned, and so on. But every once in a while, you could see a newer writer scraping the barnacles off and getting back to the core character, who is perfectly on display in this issue.
Getting that sort of nuance in a movie is really difficult.
I remember watching the first X-Men move. I was in college, but home on vacation, I saw it with an old friend who was a big comics fan and a particular fan of the X-men. We had a great time and both agreed it was the first movie to capture the _feel_ of comics on the big screen.
And yet . . .
It gets the character of Scott Summers badly wrong -- and he's a tough character for some of the same reasons that make Doom complicated. He's the senior X-man, and can be a bit of a prig, and sometimes overly invested in his authority. But he's invested because he has no life outside the X-men. Both because the group is his surrogate family and because he constantly fears that he's not _capable_ of life outside the X-men. That his powers will be accidentally destructive.
The movie captures none of that and doesn't even try -- there isn't space for that sort of emotion within the 2 hours of a movie.
I appreciate your description of Doom, and I would love to see a movie attempt to do him justice, but I've become convinced that many of the strengths of comic books don't translate well to movies -- and that weight of character history is one of them.