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Heel, Superdogs!!
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Get ready for a thrilling story today, featuring Primary Research, American sweets, and librarians alarmed!
Most of my reading for this blog is done via Marvel Unlimited a fantastic resource containing over 25,000 comics in digital format. It's an incredibly useful thing (even if the actual App is a bit frustrating) which contains the vast majority of the stories I'm covering here. Comics, however, are not just the stories - there's editorial pages, letters pages, and advert, and though Marvel Unlimited very occasionally includes letters, it never includes anything else.
This occasionally becomes a problem for my research, when Doom is listed as appearing in the comic but isn't in the story. Usually I can work out what's going on via scanned copies online, but sometimes I have to go and look at the actual comic. When I started on this project I hoped that I'd be able to solve this using the UAL Comics Collection (specifically the Nicholas Pollard Collection of US mainstream comics), but it turns out that Mr Pollard wasn't a particularly big Fantastic Four fan, let alone a Doctor Doom one, so none of the issues I was looking for were available.
However! A couple of weeks ago I realised that I didn't need to find the specific issues - Marvel comics of the time had the same paratextual content in EVERY comic published in a given month, so all I had to do was check what comics the collection DID have for the month I was interested in. Thus, although Defenders #65 wasn't in UAL's collection, Conan #92, published the same month, very much WAS!
There were a few other comics in my corpus where the same problem existed, so I ordered copies of Conan for those months too, as well as "Captain America" so I could make sure that I was right about them having the same paratext. Thus, I arrived at the LCC archive one morning to find two boxes FULL of lovely smelling old copies waiting for me, many with the original price stickers on from British Newsagents - these were very much reading copies!
I had a clue as to what I was looking to thanks to the Grand Comics Database, which said that the issue I was looking for had a "Bullpen Bulletins" that featured Mr Fantastic and Dr Doom. I checked, and this was entirely correct - there's an advertisement for Fantastic Four #200.
HOWEVER! When I looked through the rest of the comic (because I was obviously going to) I saw something that was NOT listed on any database, which forced me to emit an AUDIBLE GASP OF SURPRISE (and go into ALL CAPS!), causing raised eyebrows and consternation to nearby archive staff. I had reached the centre pages of the comic, where I suddenly saw THIS:
It's a whole double-page spread with not only a picture of Doctor Doom but an entire text narrative demanding that fans of super-villainy enter a competition to ensure that they, rather than fans of superheroes, win. The text is very slightly off, with Doom talking in a generally less formal way than he normally would and being a little more pally than you'd expect, although he does refer to superheroes as "Dolts!" at one point, which is very much in character! The illustrations are very on-brand throughout though, as he explains his scheme.
It was all very exciting to find, although it does raise questions, not least "Are there any more like this?" I checked through the boxes I had access to, and this advert appears in the previous month's issues of "Conan" and "Captain America" too, so presumably that means there were two whole months of Marvel comics containing the advert, which none of the indexers for the Grand Comics Database saw fit to include in their data entry. Arguably, they were right to do so - it's not part of the actual story, after all - but, as we'll see soon, other advertisements definitely did get entered. Are there therefore even more advertisements featuring Doctor Doom that I'm unaware of?
One way to find out would, of course, be to read every single Marvel comic published, or at least one each per month, but that wouldn't be possible with either the resources I have (the collection doesn't go back far enough) or the time I have to spend on all this. What I could do, however, is look at a sample of comics. I actually own a complete set of John Byrne's run on 'Fantastic Four', which means I have access to a Marvel comic for every publishing month from July 1981 to October 1986. Goodness knows I've read through the whole set enough times in the past, but maybe it's time to do so again?
link to information about this issue
posted 18/11/2019 by Mark Hibbett
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