Blog: A Day Of Doom

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I awoke on Sunday to discover that suddenly, out of nowhere, Marvel had changed the habits of at least a decade and FINALLY decided to put Doctor Doom in the MCU. Amazingly, they had not only gone and announced that he's the new main baddie for the next Avengers movies, but also that he's going to be played by Robert Flipping Downey Jr!

Crikey, who saw THAT coming? Very much NOT ME, and so I spent a large chunk of the rest of the day trying to ALERT the World's Media that I EXIST and am very much a Doctor of Doctor Doom. I even went and wrote a PRESS RELEASE about it, what you can read for yourself here:

Doctor of Doctor Doom makes his predictions for Doomsday

Robert Downey Junior is returning to the MCU to play Doctor Doom in Avengers: Doomsday, and the world's leading (and only) academic expert on Doctor Doom has a few theories about which story it might be based on.

"Doomsday is a great story title for a character called Doctor Doom and so it gets used a lot", says Doctor Mark Hibbett, author of Data and Doctor Doom (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) and the only person in the world to hold a PhD in Doctor Doom.

"The best known story called 'Doomsday' is probably the one from 1967's Fantastic Four #59, when Doctor Doom stole The Power Cosmic from The Silver Surfer". Doom used this mighty power to beat up his enemies and zoom around the planet causing mayhem, before crashing into a space barrier and falling to his apparent death. Spoilers: he did not really die.

"Julia Garner has already been cast as the MCU's Silver Surfer", says the Doctor of Doctor Doom, "so this one does seem likely, but there are plenty of other options."

One example is Doom's Day At The UN from 1976's Spidey Super Stories #9, in which Doom built an army of robot spider-men to trick the United Nations into making him King Of The World. Another is the Simon & Schuster novel Doomsday, in which he tried to use the power of Stonehenge to travel to the after-life and defeat a people's revolution in his native Latveria before apparently dying himself. Spoilers: he did not really die.

"These are all well and good, but my favourite is the very first time this title was used, in a 1966 episode of the Marvel Superheroes cartoon series," says Hibbett. In this story Doom shot the headquarters of The X-Men into the sun, fought Namor The Submariner in space, and was then hit by a meteor and apparently killed. Spoilers: he did not die.

Whichever of these stories gets adapted, Hibbett is excited to see Doctor Doom finally enter the MCU. "He's always been the greatest villain in Marvel Comics", he says, "so I'm thrilled to see how they bring him into the continuity of the movies. Whatever happens, I hope it ends with him apparently being killed and then - spoilers - not dying after all!"

I also did a shorter version of this as a BLOG over on The Marvel Age Doom blog with LINKS to yet more blogs about each of the stories mentioned above. The general idea I think is to get my name linked with terms like "Doctor Doom", "expert", "academic" and so on in case MEDIA TYPES do a google search for such terms. If that is the case, and any such people are reading this now - I am VERY much up for talking about Doctor Doom!

I've spent the past eight years or so TRYING to talk about Doctor Doom but nobody has been hugely interested because he wasn't in any of the films, so I hope that this situation is about to change! If nothing else, it will save me time going "No, he's a baddie in The Fantastic Four. No, not the Famous Five, no, that's Doctor Strange." It would have made my stand-up set a couple of weeks ago a bit quicker for a start!

posted 29/7/2024 by MJ Hibbett

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Comments:

should have been "the only person in the world to hold a DOCTORATE in Doctor Doom." Doom's doctorate is fake, granted to himself by himself, but is not on himself or indeed on anything at all -- show me the paperwork -- so we're on safe ground.
posted 29/7/2024 by Robert Downey Sr, lamenting what my son has become

The Famous Five? Okay, Iron Man has a trilogy of movies with numbers in them, Captain America and Thor and The Hulk each have an origin story movie and a couple more, and that leaves Black Widow (just an origin story movie) and Hawkeye (doesn't even get his own tv show, and has to share it and his nom de plume with some kid., so I guess he doesn't count? Still, I think "Famous Five" is being very unfair to Hawkeye, and much prefer "Superhero Six".
posted 29/7/2024 by Reece

Surely you could compose A SONG ABOUT DOCTOR DOOM, in honor of this epic occasion?
posted 30/7/2024 by the ukulele is the right choice

Correcting a cultural misunderstanding: sorry Reece, I was referring to Enid Blyton's Famous Five of Julian, Dick, Anne, George and Timmy the dog. Hadn't thought about how that would work for an exciting International Audience!
posted 30/7/2024 by MJ Hibbett

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