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Thunder In The East!
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I'm combining two comics together in this blog, as it's one story in which Doctor Doom appears incredibly briefly across the course of both. It's also a comic in which Doctor Doom is completely and utterly unnecessary, and seems to have been chucked in by Roy Thomas as one extra bit of continuity re-writing, just because he can!
The story itself has more than enough going on in it already, as The Invaders (the team of World War Two Marvel Superheroes who never actually existed as a team at the time) are tasked with stopping the Nazis from destroying some experimental Achilles Tanks (which turn out to be a real, if rather oddly named, thing) and then delivering them to the Russians. Along the way we get a cameo from Stalin and several appearances from Hitler, who has had the brilliant idea of using a Dimensional Gateway to access the world of the Teutonic Gods which only Wagner had previously been able to see into in order to write his operas.
I believe this is where we all say together "Because Comics!"
Hitler recruits a scientist called Doctor Olsen to analyse Wagner's operas, using science, in order to build this dimensional gateway, because that is how both opera and science work. Olsen has a mysterious assistant called Hans, whose face is bandaged due to an accident.
Olsen's machine works and calls Thor (actual Marvel Thor) into our dimension, and Hitler uses his astounding persuasive skills to convince him to fight for the Nazis.
Thor flies off and, in the second issue, has a Big Fight with The Invaders, who are forced to save Stalin even though they - with remarkable foresight - don't really like him very much.
Hitler starts ranting about how he's going to get all the old Norse gods to fight for him, while Olsen and Hans become worried that he might - just might - be bonkers. The strain of it all is too much for Olsen, who has a heart attack and dies, leaving the mysterious Hans to carry on the work.
I do find that text box odd - I'd guessed it was Doctor Doom because I knew he was meant to be in these comics, but other than that there's absolutely no indication whatsoever that it's him, and nothing like this has ever been mentioned before. However, as soon as the reveal is made he starts to act in a much more Doom-like way, notably by double-crossing his boss, changing the spying device that allows them to watch Thor in action so that Thor himself can hear Hitler ranting, and then by destroying the dimensional gateway altogether.
With Hitler trapped in the ruins Doom is able to give him a piece of his mind, pointing out that his mother was a gypsy, and so one of the people that Hitler would have destroyed.
It turns out that Doom has been working for Olsen as a way of finding out more about dimensional gateways, so that he can build his own to try and bring his mother back from hell - which is actually quite a neat bit of continuity-revision from Roy Thomas. What is slightly less neat is that this nails down Doom's origin story to at least the late 1930s, as he must have attended college with Reed Richards sometime before this, hopped over to Europe for a while, and only then gone off to see the Tibetan monks. It doesn't really make any sense whatsoever, so it'll be interesting to see if this ever gets mentioned again!
It definitely won't next time, however, as we're off for a look at The New Fantastic Four cartoon series, starring the one and only Herbie The Robot!
link to information about this issue
posted 8/11/2019 by Mark Hibbett
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