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A World For The Winning!
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This is Doctor Doom's final appearance in Super-Villain Team-Up, and thus the last time he'll headline (or, rather, co-headline) a series of his own until we get to Secret Wars (which I will definitely be arguing he's the lead character for!).
There are a lot of cameos and guest spots to get through before then though, and also this issue which kicks off with Magneto pushing his way through a crowd of Latverians, who Bob Hall has chosen to show as a strange mix of medieval peasants and hipsters.
I love the fact that even the pub has a picture of Doctor Doom on its sign! The people are refusing to get out of Magneto's way because they have been ordered by Doom to "rejoice or face his wrath". Magneto gets really annoyed with them, especially when they don't recognise who he is, and he reacts by bringing a statue of Doom toppling to the ground in a weird pre-echo of the revolutions to come to Eastern Europe in 1989.
Magneto eventually finds Doom pondering his chess set, last seen very briefly in Giant-Size Defenders #3. It appears to have characters colour coded red and blue, presumably for teams, in which case Spider-man is on Doom's side?
Magneto bursts in, and is pleased to find that Doom recognises him - they haven't met before, except of course in the pages of Not Brand Ecch, so it's a nice ego soother after the locals blanked him. Doom has actually been doing his research on Magneto, and so is able to quiz him on his recent continuity for a while, before he gets distracted by one chess piece in particular.
We haven't heard from Valeria in AGES, but sadly this isn't a hint of something to come, it's just Bill Mantlo enjoying some more background character shading. When Doom snaps back to attention Magneto asks for a team-up so they can rule the world together, but Doom states that he already DOES rule the world - he's released gases into the air which mean that the entire planet is under his control!
Doom demonstrates by forcing Magneto to kneel and then almost kill himself, and when the Master Of Magnetism asks why he was spared from completing his suicide Doom replies that he's bored!
This is a very unusual way to tell a story, with the villain already victorious, having undertaken his world domination plan without telling anybody to make sure nothing goes wrong - he is, after all, not a republic serial villain who would explain his masterstroke, though it seems that he did do it more than thirty-five minutes ago.
Doom, however, is not Rorschach either, so he offers Magneto the chance to fight him for world domination, just to keep things interesting. Magneto agrees and then makes the rookie error of sharing a toast with Doom and, inevitably, is knocked unconscious by the drugged drink. Never share a drink with Doctor Doom!
The scene then shifts to Avengers Mansion some hours later, where Magneto arrives seeking aid in his fight to overthrow Doom. Clearly he's not had much practice at this sort of thing. You or I might call ahead, or at least knock on the door and then explain your business, but Magneto just crashes in and rips up the floor, which, as usual, leads to a Big Fight.
Once that's all done with Magneto explains what's going on, but before anyone can leap into action a holographic image of Doom appears which commands the Avengers to kneel before him.
This is several recurrent Doom characteristics for the price of one - he's communicating from a distance, his face is looming huge over the action, and he's using mind control to get what he wants!
He also acts in a sportsmanlike way, or at least his version of it, telling Magneto that if he can free the mind of one of the Avengers than he will stay free to act as an ally. Magneto selects the Beast, magnetically floating him into a stolen Quinjet, and then using his mind control powers (duly backed up by a footnote to Avengers #111) to extract the hypno gas using magnetism.
Yep, that makes perfect sense! The pair of them then zoom around Manhattan looking for more allies, despite the fact that Doom has very clearly told them that every other person on the planet is under his control. The issue ends with them flying to Los Angeles to see if they can get The Champions to help them even though, again, Doom had clearly told them that he has mental control of every single human on the planet.
The introduction of The Champions comes pretty much from nowhere, and there's a sort of explanation for this in the "next time" panel at the bottom of the page.
Bill Mantlo was writing The Champions at the time, so that does seem like a sensible place to carry the story on. The only odd thing though is that this wasn't actually the final issue of Super-Villain Team-Up - the next issue would come out a year later, with reprints of Astonishing Tales #4 and #5 (where Doom fought The Red Skull), with another issue six months after that starring The Red Skull and Hate-Monger, and an actual final issue over a year after that again, starring the same two characters. Publishing a comic starring two actual proper Nazis as the lead characters seems like a very strange decision - maybe the final issues took so long to come out because that's how long it took for the editors to persuade someone to write them, especially when you consider who The Hatemonger really is under the mask...
Suddenly Doom's victory and Magneto's plan both seem very sensible - we'll see how it all works out next time!
link to information about this issue
posted 4/10/2019 by Mark Hibbett
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