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The Marvel Collector's Far-Out Bonus!
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Here's a very brief detour from Doom's adventures over in "Super-Villain Team-Up" - a cameo appearance in Jack Kirby's massive "Captain America's Bicentennial Battles".
This was one of Marvel's "Treasury Editions", a series of much bigger than usual comics, both in terms of page-count and page-size, that, for the most part, really were quite special. This one definitely is as it features an epic story in several chapters, written and drawn by Jack Kirby, inked by some of the leading artists of the time.
As well as the story there are pin-up pages throughout, including this black and white image on the inside back cover:
And there, right at the bottom, is Doctor Doom. This is a throwback to his appearances in Not Brand Ecch (also often drawn by Jack Kirby) where he'd regularly show up with a whole gang of super-villains, signifying that this was meant to be funny because it WAS a bunch of proper super-villains doing something daft.
The use of Doom as a signifier of super-villiany would very quickly leak out into the main Marvel Universe, and would happen so often that researchers (hem hem) would even deliver academic papers about it at conferences!
Another interesting aspect of his use here is that Doctor Doom, at this point, was NOT a Captain America villain. So far, in fact, they have only actually met once, a whole decade ago in Avengers #25 - Doom does show up in Captain America #132 in 1970, but that was just a cameo in which he doesn't interact with Captain America at all. The fact that they've only met once seems strange in itself - Captain America is one of Marvel's biggest heroes, and Doom one of their biggest villains - and it makes it even more odd that he should appear in this celebratory piece alongside Cap's regular antagonists like The Red Skull and Batroc.
The only explanation,in fact, is that Doom really is being used as an avatar of supervillainy, and that these academics - whoever they are - were right!
link to information about this issue
posted 9/8/2019 by Mark Hibbett
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