FF #16

[nomadicwriter]

Well... that was pretty painful to read.

It starts out okay, with Doom posturing and trying to bargain with Scott by offering to resurrect Cassie, which Scott rejects because it would be spitting on the way she originally sacrificed herself to stop Doom getting ultimate power. Then, thanks to Scott's handwavy new understanding of Pym particles that makes him suddenly super powerful, we get about 15 pages of him completely beating the crap out of Doom, crushing his armour and ripping it off him, throwing him around and stuffing leaves down his throat, while Doom says things like "It's- it's not possible! You're just an Ant-Man!", "How are you this powerful? How?" and "No! Not the mask!", looks intimidated, and doesn't attempt to fight back physically in any way.

It's retconned that Scott's ants were around when Reed was doing the brain-transfer between Kristoff and Doom back in Hickman's run, and they copied Doom's brain patterns to share them all over the internet. Doom's mask is ripped off and his face revealed to be completely unscarred, until the Living Tribunal appears with the Watcher, judges Doom for seeking omnipotence, and declares that from now on every act of malice he makes will cause a new scar, and nothing else will be able to harm or heal his face. After they're done, Scott continues beating on Doom even more until he finally lapses into his own language and apparently surrenders, bowing his head in Scott in front of a group of his subjects.

As Scott goes to leave, Doom grabs his gauntlet and attempts to shoot Scott, only to apparently hit and kill Valeria as she and Franklin teleport in, setting up a parallel to the way that he killed Cassie. As Doom mourns her seeming death, it's explained in a rather rushed and confused couple of panels that it's some kind of mental illusion of Ravonna's that only Doom sees, and the real Valeria is fine.

Ravonna disappears, and the issue of whether she really is a grown-up version of Valeria is vaguely waved away by Franklin saying that she claimed it but he doesn't believe it because she "had the stink of Doom on her". The main story ends with Val trying to get through to "Uncle Victor" to tell him she's all right, while Scott says he doesn't believe there's a man named Victor inside the armour and there never was. (The backup story is mostly a repeat of the backup from F4 #16, with some pages told from a different perspective and others just a direct reprint from the F4 story.)

So, er. Well, it's kind of hard to think of much to say about that... Um... the art was good? The beginning and ending weren't bad? It was just the whole section in between that was... not.

I'm curious how much of this was Fraction and how much was Lee Allred, because as a basic outline, "Doom offers to resurrect Cassie, Scott rejects that as an insult to her sacrifice, and spends the rest of the story thoroughly beating the crap out of Doom until Doom's attempt at a kill shot apparently kills Valeria," sounds fine. It's just the completely OTT nature of the beating and the warping of Doom's character required to achieve it that's so dire.

Regardless, really not a great end to a series where I wasn't all that thrilled with the depiction of Doom to begin with. I loved the FF kids and the parts of the issues that focused on them, but this was really not a good outing for Doctor Doom on any level.

Comments

[jarodrussell.livejournal.com]

"Painful" is a good word for it.

[dhampyresa.livejournal.com]

Is the Living Tribunal established Marvel continuity? Not that it would be any less of a deus ex machina if it was, but I'm curious.

I did like Scott commenting that the first thing Doom does with absolute power is fix his face, because, eyah, it kind of is. I didn't like that he called Doom a sociopath/psychopath, when Valeria's fake death scene shows that he does care.

I can't shake the feeling that whatever it was Doom said in Latverian, it wasn't what Scott thought he was saying.

Valeria's feelings from the back-up last issue and her scenes here make me think she's less and less happy by the way her family is treating her Uncle Victor.

I was kind of disappointed Bentley didn't follow through with his plan to dig up Cassie. We'd have gotten Cassie back, with new powers!

[ladymercury-10.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the Living Tribunal kind of came out of nowhere, although it is an established Marvel thing. The only reason I recognized it at all is because I've been reading back issues of She-Hulk.

[dhampyresa.livejournal.com]

Thanks! How's She-Hulk, by the way?

[ladymercury-10.livejournal.com]

Mmm, I don't think I'm as into it as a lot of other people are? I like Dan Slott's first run better than his second, and there are some really abrupt changes when Peter David starts writing it. I think I'm up to like #23 in She-Hulk vol. 2 right now.

I'm really excited for the new She-Hulk ongoing though. The Kevin Wada covers are amazing.

[dhampyresa.livejournal.com]

The new She-Hulk looks great!

[nomadicwriter]

I've only come across the Living Tribunal once or twice, but from what I gather, it's a vastly powerful being that predates the multiverse and deals with events that threaten the balance of all universes. So a failed power-grab by Doctor Doom seems way too small-scale to get its attention. (It makes even less sense when you consider the Living Tribunal is a single entity that exists across all multiverses, and yet it apparently ignored all the Dooms who became the Annihilating Conqueror in other universes and only came to deal with one who didn't even succeed.) Plus the Tribunal choosing to punish Doom for his acts of malice makes absolutely no sense, since part of its function is actually preserving the balance between good and evil, and it has intervened before to introduce more evil to the world when the 616 heroes had tipped the balance too far the other way.

Also, yeah, I did think there was a definite "have your cake and eat it" aspect to the sociopath/psychopath stuff. First we get the implication that Scott's thrashing of Doom is thoroughly righteous because Doom is pure evil and incapable of any other feeling, but then we get an "eye for an eye" style karmic punishment at the end that only works as a plot device if you accept that Doom is capable of grieving a dead loved one just as much as Scott is. I guess you could assume it's supposed to be Scott's personal opinion and his actions here are intended as somewhat dark, but the issue really doesn't come off that way. (The whole "I meet people who think you're nuanced" bit in particular feels like the writer lecturing the readers for thinking that.)

I did think it was an interesting choice to have Doom speak in Latverian (I assume) at his supposed surrender. He could have been saying anything, really, since I doubt Scott understands the language, and Doom does go for the gauntlet immediately after. In fact, that whole ending sequence from there to the fakeout killing of Valeria really could have been a great, fitting way to end the story arc, but it's crammed into so few panels that I had to reread it a couple of times to even figure out what happened. This would have been a much better issue if they'd cut out the Living Tribunal bit and spent more pages on that.

[dhampyresa.livejournal.com]

The issue says it's Doom hurting a Watcher that draws the Living Tribunal's intention, but even that sounds small-scale.

In many way, this issue felt like a revenge fantasy. It's okay to beat up the bad guy, because he's evil! But the worst pain is emotional, so have some emotional torment too!

Cutting out the Living Tribunal would have made the issue so much better. (Unrelated, but fyi, Doom's been in Iron Man: Fatal Frontier and there's a Doombot in Avengers AI.)