Doctor Doom #3

[nomadicwriter]

Doom has another vision, of his future self telling a world assembly how he turned over his new leaf when his anger faded and he turned himself over to be the sole prisoner of Iron Gate Fortress, Siberia. Then he awakens in hell amid a pile of skulls, wearing what seems to be some kind of mystical version of his armour. Mephisto offers him a devil's bargain: if he can convince the soul of his first love Valeria that he deserves his life, he can return to it.

Doom chases her soul through hell, trying to convince her that he means no harm. She advises him to forget about destiny and visions, and instead be together with her in hell and redeem himself through love. He refuses, and Mephisto insists his visions of the future are impossible: he belongs to Mephisto eternally. Then, unexpectedly, Mistress Death herself turns up to intervene. (Thanos is gonna be sooo jealous.) Doom thinks she's sending him back because he's destined to save all things, but no: she says it's because he'll become her greatest servant of all.

Doom wakes up in Morgan's apartment, where Blue Marvel and the Herbie have already turned up and are talking about contacting Reed. Doom promptly blasts them through the wall with a spell, at which point Kang shows up again. Doom asks if he remembers any timelines where Taskmaster's assassination succeeded. He does: Taskmaster was sent after Doom by AIM, and if he'd succeeded, civilisation would have collapsed within 13 years.

To be continued...

Another intriguing issue, though we're still getting more questions than answers. I enjoyed all the dialogue between Doom and Mephisto in the hell sequences. Some initially mixed feelings about original Valeria showing up - glad to see her appear, but I would have been happier to have her just retconned back to life in this new post-Secret Wars universe. Still, she was used well here, and I can reconcile to it if we just run with this sort of simple acknowledgement of the fact Doom sacrificed her without touching on too many details of the frustrating execution of that storyline.

I liked the ornate design of Doom's mystical hell armour, and thought it was interesting that it gave way to his outfit from the waking world after he rejected staying with Valeria; lots of different ways you could interpret the symbolism there. I also appreciate the fact Cantwell has him using very Doctor Strange style sorcery: it's a nice touch that makes it feel a like bit more of a cohesive shared magical system.

The end scene with Blue Marvel and Herbie already at Morgan's felt like a bit of an abrupt cut - I double-checked to see if I'd accidentally skipped pages. I still can't get a read on the interpretation of Morgan here. She'd already let them in and was arguing Doom's corner? Does Blue Marvel actually know who she is? It's hard to figure out her game at this point, though I'll be disappointed if she's truly just helping without ulterior motives. I'm half wondering if the whole hell sequence was actually a vision of her doing.

Anyway, still enjoying the writing of this and appreciate that it's moving along at a fair pace, though I'd like to start seeing a first few answers soon, even if they only lead to further puzzles. Looking forward to issue four!

Comments

[ladyvictorious]

I was really surprised to see Cantwell go there and bring Valeria back into the Doom mythos. I've been thinking for quite a while now that she was treated terribly by Mark Waid. His only reason for using her was to do a "fridging", a term created back when Gail Simone was a columnist and wrote her "Women in Refrigerators" website. It doesn't strictly apply to Doom since it usually involves a villain killing the hero's gf But I think it fits in this instance since her character had not appeared anywhere and her prior appearance was in the Hulk back in 1971! So he only brought her back to have her brutally killed all in one issue. I notice she looks about the right age down in Hell. I never could figure out why she was drawn by Mike Wiering to look more like being old enough to be Victor's mother instead of a childhood sweetheart.

If Cantwell is going to do something with this character, I hope he saves it for sometime further on. I'd be surprised if TPTB at Marvel allow her to come back but you never know.

But holy smokes, now he's got Mistress Death to deal with. I don't know what's going on with Thanos. Someone said on another MB that he ended up brain dead recently. I doubt that will last. But will he be mad!

I hope this new Doom armor shows up again. It must be a pain in the ass to draw but props to Larocca for doing it. It does look a little bit like Samurai armor...and magnificently badass! I wonder to why he could summon it up in Hell but not when he came back from the dead. I also noticed that he changed his Victor look a bit and most notably the Spock like eyebrows are gone. I like that he dropped that but watch them show up again and contradict things!

still a bit up in the air what role Adam Brashear aka Blue Marvel will be playing in this. I guess Morgan was filling him in a bit about Victor but it wasn't apparent to me that he's changed his mind like some of the advance promos say. We'll have to wait to see how that develops. Since he's going to run into M.O.D.O.K next I assume my guess about the Intelligencia being behind the frame up is wrong. Very few clues have been dropped in about that, unless there is something I missed

[nomadicwriter]

Yeah, I'd have preferred to see Valeria resurrected because she has an interesting and unique relationship to Doom, and it was cheap to bring her back solely to have her death make Doom look more evil. (And agreed, the age thing was weird. Made me half wonder if Doom was somehow cheating by sacrificing an AU or future version of her instead of 'his' one.) But it's nice to see her remembered and acknowledged, at least, even if I'd prefer the whole storyline was undone somehow rather than seeing it confirmed that she's definitely still dead.

I assumed the hell armour was some sort of magical construct created to defend Doom's soul when he's not in his physical body, so basically his mental defences given form. Which is why I thought it was interesting that it morphed back to his waking clothes after he rejected staying with Valeria, because you could interpret that a lot of different ways: him losing focus and his defences weakening, or the opposite where determination to get back to the real world makes him focus more on his body, or just him beginning to wake up and return to reality (suggesting this is maybe more of a vision he's breaking out of than a true trip to hell).

And yeah, I thought the Blue Marvel subplot was a bit shortchanged this issue. I expected to see more of him investigating while he tracks Doom down and beginning to develop doubts about the evidence, rather than just being already there when Doom wakes up, with too little info to know if Brashear fully understands who Morgan is and what his point of view is on all this. I felt like there was probably room to have trimmed some of the fight scenes and squeezed in one more page showing him finding Morgan's place and his first reaction to her. (And like I say, even flipped back to make sure I hadn't accidentally missed it!) But maybe we'll get more of a window into that next issue.