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A Land Enslaved!
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The splash page for this story picks up minutes after the end of the last issue, with Doom leaving the French Riveriera by jetpack, talking to himself about how boring it all was and how happy he'll be to get home. His internal dialogue reveals the contradictions that have developed over recent year, between his earlier depiction as a 'hard man' ruler governing his people with an iron rod for their own good, which Roy Thomas has favoured, and the more corrupt, deluded dictator he's been depicted as more recently, especially when written by Stan Lee. Here Larry Leiber hedges his bets, with Doom saying "As a shepherd belongs with his flock, so must a monarch remain with his beloved subjects!" and then immediately adding "... lest the misbegotten dogs grow restive and rebellious in their master's absence!"
There's more of this when he finally arrives home, "How quiet and serene the realm is!" he says to himself. "In the future I must arrange for spontaneous outpourings of joy among the peasantry to greet my homecoming!"
Little does he realise that Latveria has actually been taken over in his absence by the Red Skull, and the populace converted to Nazism. Perhaps this isn't such a leap as it may at first have seemed - after all, during Rudolpho's rebellion the people did seem very keen indeed on hailing him.
The Red Skull attacks Doom, using the tried and tested method of deploying his own weapons against him. This has happened several times now, and one might have thought that a self-proclaimed genius like Doom would have made sure he had safeguards against all of his own inventions, but once again he falls victim to his own devices, this time "the one weapon I've no defense againts - chemi-sleep gas!" Get some defence against it then!
Doom is imprisoned in an 'adamantine mummy case' and put on public display to demonstrate the futility of rebellion against the new leadership. The case is designed to heat up, to torture the incumbent, but this time Doom has a plan. All he needs to do is use a 'thermo-energizer', yet another previously unheard of device, which converts heat into power which he then uses to break free. As in previous issues, Larry Lieber seems quite happy to invent new superpowers as he goes along, robbing his stories of tension as the reader just assumes that Doom will remember another gadget that he's never mentioned before which will get him out of bother.
Still, it's a good job he escapes, as at the very moment that new regime is busying itself by shipping people off to concentration camps.
I must admit that this made me feel a little uncomfortable. We know that the Red Skull and his Exiles are Nazis - they tell us all the time and drape swastikas everywhere - but they're presented almost as comedy caricatures, so this sudden reveal of Actual Proper Nazism is a bit of a gut punch. As previously discussed, Lieber is making the baddies as bad as possible to ensure that we can root for Doom as the hero, but this seems to be in rather bad taste.
Doom charges up to the castle and, never one to make the same mistake twice (well, not all the time) he goes underground, heading for the power station where he finds the fusebox for the weapons systems and switches them all off.
This allows him to get into the main castle, by which point the Skull has ordered his men to "reverse the input lines and attach an auxiliary power box", which means the weapons are back online. The Skull orders the use of a flame-gun, ignoring objections that his own men will be killed, and his men obey.
I think this is meant to show how ruthless the Skull is, but it doesn't exactly paint Doom in a great light either. Presumably the men he is fighting are all Latverians who have been forced into service for the Nazis, but Doom is only concerned with his own safety, and does nothing to protect them. This is not the behaviour of a conventional superhero - Doom remains a villain, even if one we're meant to cheer for.
He then plunges the temperature of his armour to "sub-freezing depths" (yet another previously unmentioned power which, surely, would have come in handy when the sarcophagus was boiling him alive) and proceeds to duff up all of the Exiles one by one, chucking them all into an underground room which then fills with gas. The Nazis are convinced it's going to kill them, but then wake up later to discover that it's been used to shrink them instead!
Doom pops them into a miniature rocket and blasts them back to Exiles Island, chortling to himself about the great gag he's played on them - it wasn't shrinko-gas he used, but hypno-gas, which they will wake up from soon and realise they were conned! How this works with regards to his revenge, or why he doesn't kill them, or how he puts them in an actual rocket, are not discussed, and the issue ends with a rather marvellous series of silhouettes from George Tuska, depicting Doom relishing his own brilliance.
Like most of this series, this has been an odd story which has struggled to find ways to make Doom a lead character whilst still enjoying the villainy that made him a fan-favourite. The method used here, of simply making him fight someone even worse, doesn't work as well as that used by writers like Stan Lee or Roy Thomas, where they try to find reasons for his villainy, and the issue as a whole is at times in rather poor taste. Maybe that's why Larry Lieber tries something a little different in the next story, sending Doom off to fight The Black Panther!
link to information about this issue
posted 25/10/2018 by Mark Hibbett
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