Mark Waid's Dr. Doom Manifesto (aka, the reasoning behind Unthinkable)

(Apologies in advance for the wall of text )

While generally well-regarded, Waid's interpretation of Doom did have a vocal minority of people who disliked his take (having been all over the internet, braving more well-known places like 4chan, Reddit, Quora, Tumblr, Dreamwidth, Twitter, Comicvine, CBR Forums, etc., all the way to dozens of obscure gaming forums and random one-off blogs (plus comment sections) that haven't been updated since 2006, I'd personally put the ratio at about 60:40 in Waid's favor).

With that in mind, and considering the broader debate among fans as to whether or not Victor von Doom should be written as genuinely noble or just posturing, I'd thought I'd post Waid's logic behind his take on the character to see what everyone has to say. For your consideration:

[[[[[The most insecure man in the history of the world. That fool Reed Richards! He couldn't STAND the idea that the great Victor von Doom was smarter and better than him, so in a fit of jealousy, that idiot tampered with Victor's machines and caused them to explode, scarring Victor's face and destroying his academic standing and blah, blah, blah. Doom can bitch until your ears bleed about how Reed MUST have sabotaged his calculations, but it's pretty obvious to everyone—including, at his very core, Doom himself—that Reed was right and he was wrong and that proves Reed is smarter and so Doom will hate him with the heat of a white dwarf star until the end of time.

It's funny, and golly, I just can't explain it, but for some reason, ever since I moved to Florida, I've gained a whole new insight into the kind of man Doom is. Regardless of whom he's evaluating, there are only two measurements on Victor von Doom's yardstick of success: Best and Worthless. He tells himself he's the lord of all he surveys, the rightful ruler of Earth, and the smartest being to ever walk the planet, but every single thing he does every waking moment of the day is about trying to convince himself that this is true when he knows it's not. (This, by the way, is magnificently reflected in Doom's speech pattern, thank you, Stan; you can tell you've got Doom's voice "right" when every single sentence contains at least one pompous adjective. Doom never has a plan, he has a BRILLIANT plan. He doesn't wear armor, he wears MIGHTY armor. And so forth and so on.) Guy can't even look in a mirror without being reminded of this. No wonder he's nuts. The only place he can be and not hate himself is in a world where there's proof that he's smarter than Reed Richards.

This is hardly A Great Insight, but the reason Doom became king of a nation and wants to expand his sovereignty is because the most expedient way to fool yourself into believing you have power is to control everything you see and pretend that nothing else is important. Despite his rep, Doom doesn't really, genuinely, at heart believe that he's the rightful ruler of humanity; it's the opposite. He believes that by becoming ruler, he will be instantly validated, that it will prove he is the best and smartest man alive, and all his doubts and insecurities will vanish. Some genius.

By the way, the truism that Victor von Doom is, despite his villainy, a noble man is absolute crap and I can point to about a thousand moments in Stan and Jack's run that bear this out. A man whose entire motivating force is jealousy is ridiculously petty, not grandly noble. Yes, Doom is REGAL, and yes, whenever possible, Doom likes to ACT as if he possesses great moral character, because to him that's what great men HAVE, and yes, we HAVE seen Doom exhibit a sense of honor from time to time—

—but when I hear Doom say "it does not SUIT him to" do this-and-such, what I hear is, "it has nothing to do with my hatred for Reed Richards, so it's not worth my time." Remember, most of the reportage we've heard about what Doom will or won't do COMES. FROM. DOOM. I think "Doom the Noble" would tear the head off a newborn baby and eat it like an apple while his mother watched if it would somehow prove he were smarter than Reed.

Why has even the pre-scarred Doom always been driven to be the smartest, the most clever, the best? Look at how he grew up! Gypsies are outcasts, derided and shunned; of course Doom grew up eager to prove himself.

Side note: that machine that Doom built to communicate with his dead mother, the one that blew up and scarred his face? I'm not convinced that in the half-second before it exploded Doom didn't see or hear something (literally) hellish that he's repressed since then but which is beginning to gnaw its way out of his subconscious.]]]]]

Aaaannd that's the whole thing. Some final notes on Waid's take on Doom:

- He mentioned in a Reddit AMA thread that his tactic for writing characters was to either a) go way back to their origins and write them as they were initially, or b) go a completely new direction with them. As you may have guessed, with the F4 and Doom he chooses the former because, as he states in his F4 manifesto, these guys were wildly popular back in the sixties, so clearly Stan and Jack were doing SOMETHING right. Basically, don't reinvent the wheel, don't repaint the Mona Lisa, etc. This is why he relies so heavily on the original Lee/Kirby Doom content from the sixties when interpreting Doom's character, as opposed to the more recent "Noble Demon" material.

- Considering the recent evidence coming to light that Jack Kirby may very well deserve more credit than Stan Lee when it comes to the conceptualization of the Fantastic Four, I do believe that Waid put more credence into what Kirby had to say about the character than Lee, and after wasting WAY too much time scouring the absolute dregs of the internet for Kirby quotes/interviews/art/diagrams, I found that Waid's perspective on Doom aligns remarkably well with what Kirby had to say about the character. If this becomes a point of significant curiosity/debate, I'll happily make a Kirby Doom thread (since there's really too much content there to post in a reply, and it honestly deserves its own discussion).

- Waid elaborates on his perspective of Doom in this podcast, which I found enlightening. Specific Doom content starts around the 56-minute mark. Link: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/war-rocket-ajax/vol-2-episode-6-you-cant-go-s4D8-m6qcoN/

- This isn't Waid's, but I thought this guy had an excellent review of Unthinkable that ultimately changed my mind from disliking it to liking it. Link: https://comfortfoodcomics.wordpress.com/2020/10/30/discomfort-food-comics-fantastic-four-unthinkable-by-kevin-m/

- The comments on this post also have some good Waid-Doom discourse, if this is a portrayal/debate that you're interested in. Link: https://mightygodking.com/2011/07/29/the-five-best-doctor-doom-writers/

- If you like Waid's Doom, then I would highly recommend the Marvel Wastelanders: Doom podcast, which Waid co-wrote. It stars an older Doom and an adult Valeria in a post-apocalyptic earth where the villains won, and has some truly hilarious, intense, and well-written stuff. You can listen to it for free on any podcast app (at least to my knowledge, as that's what I did).

- FINALLY, in order to preempt any unproductive comments saying "Well CLEARLY Waid didn't read Byrne's Doom/Triumph and Torment/Secret Wars 1985/Emperor Doom wherein Doom does [insert moral grayness here]", yes, he did in fact read all of these things, which he either confirms within his F4 run itself or in the rest of his F4 Manifesto. Waid made a conscious decision to write Doom this way, not an uninformed one lacking in background on the character, and I'd prefer if we stuck to discussing which version of Doom you prefer/you think is better, not which one is supported by THIS specific panel/interview here, because Doom has been written so wildly inconsistently over the decades that you can find panels supporting practically ANY take on the character at this point.

Edited by cabletable on Sep 13th 2023 at 8:45:57 AM