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The Twilight Of Some Gods!
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An VERY Minor Appearance for Doom today, in the middle of a massive Thor storyline that sees Roy Thomas doing some EXTREME retconning of the history of Asgard, and by extension the history of the Marvel Universe itself, years before "Crisis On Infinite Earth" came along and made massive continuity rewrites an ongoing event.
In this issue Thor is talking to the giant floating Eye Of Odin, who keeps on saying things like "EYE will tell you what only EYE know".
The eye is doing a lengthy re-telling of Asgardian history which, for some reason, is being told in reverse order. This goes all the way back to the very start of Asgard which, according to this comic, happened "nearly two thousand years ago", a date symbolised by the birth of a specific baby.
Now that's what I call a guest star! It's all very complicated (not least because it's back to front) but as far as I can work out Roy Thomas is trying to find an in-universe explanation for the fact that the superhero Asgardians are not quite the same as the original Norse Gods of history. He does this by introducing a whole OTHER version of Asgard which existed BEFORE the current bunch, several millenia ago. This version of the Norse Gods went through their own Ragnarok, and then the survivors were merged together to form the current iteration version of Odin, who then went on to create all of the other gods, but this time less hairy and more like superheroes. It's all pretty far-out and complicated, and it's noticeable that Roy Thomas acknowledges the help of two other writers who were also keen on this sort of retrospective rewiring of continuity.
Doom appears in a single panel, as part of an abbreviated re-telling of Thor's years as a superhero.
The idea, as so often happens, is that Doom stands in for the many other super-villains that Thor has fought. He hasn't actually battled Thor very often, but as ever if you need an avatar of super-villainy, it's Doom that you call for!
After this there are at least three more issues of this sort of thing, which goes into how the Asgardians are linked to the Eternals and Celestials, how Odin lost his eye and then, somehow, murdered Thor and wiped his memory. There's no more Doctor Doom in any of it though, sadly, so next week we'll returning to the world of "What If?" for another single page appearance as an avatar of supervillains. It's what he does!
link to information about this issue
posted 29/11/2019 by Mark Hibbett
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