The first time we heard the story, it was put straightforward enough.
"Years ago, in my college days, there was a student named Victor von Doom, who was fascinated by sorcery and black magic. He was a brilliant science student, but he was only interested in forbidden experiments. One night, the evil genius went too far, as he brought forth powers which even he could not control! He managed to escape with his life, although his face was badly disfigured!"
That was the origin of Doctor Doom, as Reed Richards explained it to his teammates in "The Prisoners of Doctor Doom", from Fantastic Four # 5 (Jul., 1962). A simple account designed to provide all the information on the villain that the reader would need, in as brief space as possible to keep the story moving. That's how Stan Lee wrote them in the earliest days of Marvel Comics: knock out the background fast, usually in just four or five panels, then move on to the action.
But Doctor Doom would go on to become the Fantastic Four's arch-enemy and a particular favourite of the Smilin' One. Over time, the character of Doom was fleshed out. Lee preferred to write Doom as treacherous and cruel, hiding behind a veneer of nobility. Later writers turned that pose of honour into a genuine streak, albeit a thin one. In some hands, Doom's one virtue was that he did not lie; in others, falsehood was his very nature. There was one constant, though, no matter who was behind the typewriter: Doctor Doom's arrogance. The perspective of everything he viewed was down his nose.
Curiously, this inconsistency of writers' approaches extended to something which, early on, had been taken as a given. But, by the end of the Silver Age, Marvel fans would be wondering what lied behind . . .
The first complete account of Doctor Doom's beginnings appeared in Fantastic Four Annual # 2 (1964). Here we learn that Victor von Doom was the orphaned son of a Gypsy healer and a sorceress. He grew into a handsome youth, glib of tongue and brilliant of mind. In late adolescence, von Doom crossed central Europe, bilking wealthy noblemen, taking their money for worthless items disguised as miraculous gifts, thanks to his mechanical talents and knowledge of mystic arts.
Accounts of the young Gypsy rogue spread even to America, where the regents of State University cared more about the "scientific genius" part of his reputation than the "notorious swindler" part and offered him a full scholarship. Von Doom accepted, for the opportunity to make use of the college's modern laboratory. It was at State University where he made the acquaintance of science prodigy Reed Richards who, on one fateful day, discovered Victor's experiments in dimensional warps. The arrogant von Doom practically burst a blood vessel when Reed told him that his equations were off by a few decimal places. An hour later, von Doom inserted his head into a conduit designed to allow contact with the nether world and, unable to conceive of the possibility that he could make a mistake, programmed the device with his unchanged calculations. Then, he ordered his assistant to throw the switch.
Ka---boom!!
The story informs us that, disfigured by the explosion and expelled from the university, von Doom returned to the Continent, travelling to the remote mountains of Tibet, where he was taken in by a mysterious order of monks. And it was there, after learning their secrets, that he first donned the mantle---and the mask---of Doctor Doom!
Victor von Doom's ravaged face added pathos to the character. No matter how successful the villain might ever prove to be in his evil ambitions, he would always have that scarred horror staring back at him in the mirror. It was the one chink in Doom's psychological armour, and the readers were reminded of it often enough that one had to wonder if there were any unshattered mirrors left in Castle von Doom.
That's what Stan Lee was going for: a multi-dimensional villain, despicable, yet marred by tragedy. But the artist who created the visual depiction of Doom, Jack Kirby, had a different take. In Jack Kirby's Heroes and Villains (Pure Imagination Publishing, 1994), he stated:
[Doom's] a good-looking guy, and he only has a tiny scar on his cheek, but because he's such a perfectionist, he can't bear to see that imperfection. He isn't hiding his face from the public, he's hiding it from himself.
It's up in the air if that was Kirby's intention for the character from the start, or if he came to that conclusion sometime later. The earliest reference I can find to Kirby's "small-scar" contention is anecdotal. Kirby supposedly told a couple of boys who bicycled out to his Long Island home that he intended for the story contained in Fantastic Four # 85 (Apr., 1969) to reveal only a minor scar on Doctor Doom's face. Some versions of the tale include the King showing the youngsters a page from the story.
Given the lead-in time typical for a comic book to be produced, this encounter would have taken place around December, 1968. However, the four-part tale that was finally published in Fantastic Four # 84-7 makes no revelations about the face behind the mask of Doom. If Kirby did intend to do so, he got overruled by Stan Lee.
In 1983, Kirby did a sketch of Doom removing his mask, to show a handsome face beneath, for comics archivist and publisher Greg Theakson. Theakson video-recorded the session, during which Kirby repeated his claim that Doom had suffered only a minor injury to his features.
According to Kirby, Doom's mind was so warped by his belief in his own perfection that he viewed the tiny scar as "ruining" his well-formed looks.
That's quite a jump. For one thing, it significantly shifts the characterisation of Doctor Doom. A Reddit poster with the screen name of Dr. Hermes put it best: "It weakens Doom's motivations; it reduces him from a tragic Byronic figure to a vain fool." Under Lee's handling, Doom's anguish over his ruined face evokes sympathy from the reader, despite the villain's enormity. If we go with Kirby's approach, it forces a different reaction; every time Doom recoils from the mirror, the reader just rolls his eyes and thinks, "What a nut case!"
In any event, Kirby's version is belied by the reactions of various story characters to Doom's unmasked features. The first time we see this occurs in "The Return of Doctor Doom", from Fantastic Four # 10 (Jan., 1963), when Doom invades the offices of Marvel Comics, and Lee and Kirby respond in horror to his naked face.
One might write that sequence off as a metatextual in-joke, but there's no getting around the example that occurred in "The Prisoner, the Power, and Doctor Doom", from The Mighty Thor # 182 (Nov., 1970). In this tale, the Thunder God seeks to infiltrate Doom's castle in Latervia in order to rescue a kidnapped French scientist. He accomplishes this by planting a phoney news article claiming that his alter ego, Doctor Don Blake, has perfected a revolutionary method of plastic surgery that can restore any damaged face. Doom takes the bait and abducts Blake to Latervia.
Once Dr. Blake is in his presence, Doom removes his iron mask . . .
John Buscema's art and Blake's horrified reaction kill any idea that Doom suffers from just a "tiny scar".
I know . . . I know . . . for the past few paragraphs, a lot of you have been thinking, "John Byrne took care of that." I'll be getting to him in a minute. First, I need to take a brief detour into one of everybody's favourite topics . . . O.K., one of my favourite topics: terms and their definitions.
Retroactive continuity, or its contraction, "retcon", is a term first popularised by writer Roy Thomas' handling of the 1980's DC series All-Star Squadron. Thomas applied the term---which, in the letter column of All-Star Squadron # 18 (Feb., 1983), he stated he first heard from a fan at a science-fiction convention---to his efforts to "fill in the gaps" left in the original adventures of his All-Star cast. Things which had never been given an in-story explanation back in the Golden-Age, like why Doctor Fate started wearing a half-helmet, or why the Sandman switched to a skin-tight costume. Thomas simply inserted events to explain the changes, but otherwise, the characters' continuities remained intact. That was a retcon.
And that's the way comics fans employed the term until 1986, when the conclusion of the Crisis on Infinite Earths mini-series resulted in many of the historical details of the fictional DC universe being modified or completely changed. When the facts of a character's continuity are altered with a wave of the hand, like that, then it's a revision. But for the most part, the fans simply shifted the meaning of "retcon" from Roy Thomas' narrower definition to one that described any occasion when a character's background was changed outright. (In grammatical terms, this expansion of a word's meaning is called semantic broadening.)
Now I know, just as with the expressions déjà vu and beg the question, the ship has already sailed on any chance for "retcon" to be used within its actual meaning. But, for purposes of my remarks on John Byrne's contribution to what lies behind Doctor Doom's mask, knowing the distinction between "retcon" and "revision" will come in handy.
O.K., on to Mr. Byrne.
In 1981, John Byrne began a five-year run as writer and artist of the Fantastic Four title. He masterfully blended a retro take on the F.F. with modern story developments. It's considered by many, including myself, to exceed the gold standard set by Lee and Kirby on the series. But, at least on one occasion, he tried a bit too hard to bring past and present together.
The plot of "True Lies", from Fantastic Four # 278 (May, 1985) sets Byrne up to retell the origin of Doctor Doom. Outside of a few descriptive touches, he follows the events presented in F.F. Annual # 2 right up to the moment when the hospitalised Victor is expelled from the university following the explosion. Once alone, von Doom removes the bandages from his face and, departing from the original tale, we see the face that he anguishes over.
It's pretty much the face he had before. There is a scar, though, and not a small one. It runs from beneath his left eye, down his cheek, and to his jawline. It's bad enough that you'd want it fixed, but not so bad that a plastic surgeon couldn't make you look good as new. So, von Doom's "What have I done? My face is too horrible!" reaction comes a bit over the top. Particularly since Byrne had not depicted the young Victor as being vain or narcissistic.
As seen before, von Doom abandons society and makes his way to Tibet, where he is taken in by a lost order of monks. And once he is hailed as their master, his armour is forged. When he is ready to don his mask, Byrne tweaks the original story in that not only has the mask "not completely cooled yet", it is glowingly red hot. Doom commands it to be placed over his face, anyway. Pain, he insists, is for lesser men.
Well, maybe not.
In blinding agony, Doom hurls his burning face into the mountain snow. The mask cools, and the features beneath it are a scorched and blistered horror.
Thus, John Byrne attempted to reconcile both Stan's and Jack's versions of how badly Doom's face was damaged into one unified account. He covered the matter of folks such as Don Blake being repulsed by Doom's disfigurement just fine. But he missed a few other details.
First, there is the caption on page 10, panel three of the F.F. Annual # 2 origin which states that von Doom's face was "hopelessly disfigured". Unlike Reed Richards' account, from F.F. # 5, that statement comes from the omniscient narrator and, therefore, must be accurate. This is supported by the fact that von Doom's entire head is swathed in bandages---something which would not be necessary if he had suffered injury to just the lower left side of his face.
Next, the scene in the original story in which the mask is applied to Doom's face shows that the mask cannot possibly be red hot. The monk holds it his bare hands, as shown by his fingernails. Furthermore, as the mask is set in place, Doom continues with his grandiose statement without pause, let alone any pain-blinded dash into a snowbank.
Lastly, Byrne's Doom evidently feels that his facial scar from the explosion is beyond the help of plastic surgery to repair. He speaks of his "hideous countenance" and doesn't seem to be concerned about the additional damage that will be inflicted when the red-hot mask is put on. In truth, his attitude comes across as, "My face can't get any worse."
But in The Mighty Thor # 182, we see a Doom desperate at the chance to get his face restored. That means that, if he had received only a minor injury from the university explosion, he would have had it fixed when it was easy to do so. And he would not have had glowing hot metal applied to his face to make it worse.
No, the only logical conclusion is that Doom's face was, indeed, horribly mutilated by the explosion of his inter-dimensional device.
That makes John Byrne's story a revision---it alters facts in continuity---and not a retcon, which would have been simply adding non-contradicting details. Therefore, it cannot be applied to the Silver-Age Doctor Doom.
Undoubtedly, other writers have or will attempt to leave their stamp on the Fantastic Four by tinkering with the crucial events in Doctor Doom's origin. Perhaps subtly, by trying to shift some of the blame for the explosion which destroyed Victor von Doom's face onto others. Modern comics writers love to give the heroes feet of clay.
But in doing so, they dilute the purity of Stan Lee's conception of Doctor Doom: a tragic figure done in by his own arrogance, that Doctor Doom is, and always has been, his own worst enemy.
Replies
Not sure about Doom's royal bloodline but he did battle two legitimate crown princes of Latervia who tried to oust him from power, Rudolfo and his brother Zorba (Not a Greek) who actual took the throne of Latveria but ran it so tyrannically and poorly, the people were praying for Doom's return!
Fraser Sherman said:
While I loved Dwayne McDuffy's Damage Control, his conviction Doom would never have cheated Luke Cage of $200 always struck me as pulled out of McDuffy's butt. Silver/Bronze-Age Doom never had any trouble double-crossing people.
Then we never would have had the line:
“Where’s my money, Honey?”
Stan's treatment of Doom's face reflects his fondness for using Tormented Disabled Person as a character element (Blake's leg, Matt's blindness, Doom's scars).
But they were always self-tormented. Blake and Matt knew they couldn’t get the girl, even though they could have.
Rereading the FF Annual with Doom's origin a year or so ago, I was struck by how he followed up scamming the nobility with his magic by then tossing the money to the poor (he was above mere greed!). I'd love to see that as a What If? where Doom became a Robin Hood-ish anti-hero.
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