The Worst Things That Doctor Doom Has Ever Done To The Fantastic Four

Doctor Victor von Doom is the greatest super-villain in Marvel Comics (yes, Doom is greater than Thanos). He's such a great character that it's hard for writers to not use Doom. Hence, he has fought pretty much every major Marvel hero: Doom's fellow armored genius Iron Man, Doctor Strange, Spider-Man, the X-Men (during which times Storm has caught Doom's eye), Black Panther, Captain America, etc.

But von Doom's ire is reserved for the Fantastic Four above all else, especially that accursed Reed Richards. During their days at Empire State University, Doom was building a machine to breach the afterlife and contact his mother Cynthia. Reed warned him his calculations were slightly off but Victor refused to hear him. Then the machine blew up in Doom's face. How badly Doom was scarred by this explosion varies, but he's hidden his face behind an iron mask since. He's also convinced himself that a jealous Reed sabotaged the machine and is out to destroy Reed to repay his old classmate for "ruining" him.

Of course, in his heart of hearts, Doom knows Reed did no such thing. Victor just can't stand that Reed Richards makes Doctor Doom only the second smartest man in the world. Instead of using his genius to help mankind, Doom pours most of his energy in destroying the Fantastic Four.

If Doom wakes up and his first thoughts aren't of ways to screw with Richards, then it's not a day ending in "Y." Everything else Doom values, from the people he loves to his subjects in his domain of Latveria to his own purported sense of honor, stand second to his grudge. In the words of comics writer Mark Waid:

"[Doom] 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."

Doom hasn't actually done anything quite as vile in his vendetta against the Fantastic Four, but he's come close.

Doctor Doom is a genius and super-villain extraordinaire, yes, but more than anything, he is a petty hater. In Ryan North and Iban Coello's "Fantastic Four" #7 (legacy issue numbering #700), he uses his magic skills to cast a spell that makes the Four gradually forget every letter of the English alphabet except for D, O, and M. When Doom makes his presence known, all the FF can literally say is...

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This pettiness goes all the way back to Doom's second appearance ever in Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's "Fantastic Four" #6, where he teamed up with Namor the Sub-Mariner. The devious duo enact a scheme just as personal as Doom's later letter spell but much more destructive.

In the Marvel Universe, the Fantastic Four are the most public facing superheroes and maintain a headquarters in the heart of New York City: the Baxter Building. The Four live on the top few floors but the Baxter Building is often depicted as an actual apartment building. (These days the Four own it, but back during the Lee/Kirby days, they were renters.)

In "Fantastic Four" #6, Doom affixes a magnetic ray to a rocket ship and lifts the Baxter Building off the ground, intending to drag it into space. He gets it past the upper atmosphere, but is defeated by the Four with help from the betrayed Namor. This leads to Doom's first faux-demise when he's spent spiraling out of his ship (he's rescued by the alien Ovoids in "Fantastic Four" #10), and Namor uses the ship to put the Baxter building back in place.

The "Fantastic Four: World's Greatest Heroes" cartoon adapted this premise into the episode "Doomsday Plus One." In that one, Doom has some custom-built robots attach themselves to the side of the Baxter Building and blast off, turning the building itself into a rocket ship with a one-way destination.

From the very beginning of his feud with the Fantastic Four, Doctor Doom was thinking big and striking close to home.

I could summarize the Fantastic Four's origin here, but I'll just quote the succinct theme song from the 1994 "Fantastic Four" cartoon:

"On an outer space adventure, they got hit by cosmic rays, and the Four were changed forever in some most fantastic ways!"

That was the best and worst thing that ever happened to the Fantastic Four. It brought them together as a family and they became celebrities heroes, but it also left them all not-quite human (especially Ben Grimm/the Thing). In "Fantastic Four" #60 by Mark Waid and Mike Wieringo, Reed tries to tell his and Sue's daughter Valeria the Four's origin as a bedtime story, but eventually he sighs and his guilt for uprooting his friends' lives comes out: "Once upon a time, there was a very arrogant man who did something very stupid."

In 1987's "Fantastic Four vs. the X-Men" (by longtime "X-Men" writer Chris Claremont), the real conflict is actually a division within the Four. Sue unearths Reed's old journal, which states that he deliberately lowered the shields on the Four's ship to expose them to cosmic rays and give them powers. This infuriates Sue, Ben, and Johnny, and eventually Reed begins to doubt his own denials.

Which is exactly what Doom wanted. The journal was a forgery, planted by Doom inside the Baxter Building years ago. Someone would eventually find it, Doom concluded, and the "revelations" within would tear Richards' family away from him. As brief as it was, Doom made the people who should love Reed the most hate him.

Like Doom's Baxter Building rocket, this story got an adaptation in the "World's Greatest Heroes" episode "Doomsday" (though without the X-Men crossover).

Mister Fantastic and the Invisible Woman are proud parents of two children; their son Franklin and daughter Valeria are just as fantastic as their parents. Franklin is named for Sue and Johnny's father, Franklin Storm. Valeria is named after Doom's childhood sweetheart. Wait, what?! Why would Reed and Sue name their daughter after their foe's beloved? Because they didn't name her — Doom did.

In "Fantastic Four" #54 (plotted by Carlos Pacheco & Rafael Marin, with dialogue by Karl Kesel and pencils by Mark Bagley), Sue is in labor giving birth to her daughter. Nebulous complications threaten both her and the baby. Doom, of all people, comes to her rescue, using a combination of science and sorcery to save Sue and deliver the girl. But his help comes with a price: he gets to choose the baby's name. He names the girl after his Valeria and swears she is under his protection. (To this day, Valeria maintains a friendly relationship with her "Uncle Doom.") 

It seems like a minor request, but think about it. Every time Reed and Sue look at their child or say her name, they'll think of their worst enemy, and how she only lives because of the brilliance of Doom. Doom himself spells this out when he leaves in issue #54: 

"Enjoy your family, Richards. And remember every time you look at your wife and daughter that Doom saved them both... when, once before, you could not."

Of course, it speaks to Doom's character that he thinks that Reed would believe this is humiliation equal to his joy of having Sue and Valeria alive. That's because for Doom, it would be. But Reed would, say, proclaim Doom is smarter than him ad infinitum if it saved his family. All in all, this one is still moreso a victory for Reed.

Despite what the "Fantastic Four" movies will have you believe, Doom and Sue do not share romantic interest. Sue loathes Victor much more than Reed does; despite everything Victor has done, Reed still believes there is a good, even great man, buried somewhere in Victor. That's what the conflict of 2015's "Secret Wars" by Jonathan Hickman and Esad Ribic boils down to.

During Hickman's "Avengers" and "New Avengers" runs, the Marvel multiverse is gradually breaking down in "Incursion" events (where two worlds collide and destroy each other). Reed builds a "lifeboat" to preserve key individuals while Doom challenges the alien Beyonders that are causing the Incursions. This story climaxes in "Secret Wars."

After Marvel's primary world, Earth-616, is destroyed, Reed launches his lifeboat but the section holding the rest of the Fantastic Four is lost in oblivion. Doom, who has taken godlike power from the slain Beyonders, builds a new realm out of fragments from the multiverse: Battleworld. Versions of Sue, Johnny, Ben, Franklin and Valeria have a place in this new world, but not Reed, who they have no memory of. (They instead remember Sue and Johnny's father Franklin as the Fantastic Four's leader.) Doom wins Sue's heart; Valeria and Franklin are their children this time. Why, though, if he's never been interested in Sue before? Because it's not about her, it's about Reed.

Doom does not accept Ben and Johnny into his new "family" — they are used as seeds for the Shield and sun of Battleworld, respectively. Sue's fate looks more pleasant, but remember that Victor remembers his past with Sue. He knows their marriage is nothing more than his latest pissing contest with Reed but lets Sue, Franklin, and Valeria love and worship Doom, the man who in another life caused them more pain than any other.

When Reed arrives on Battleworld, he's naturally confused that his family doesn't recognize him. He's aghast, both in horror and eye-rolling disbelief, that Doom has essentially stolen his life. Even without Reed present, Doom's obsession is with proving himself the better man than Richards, and part of that is by usurping Reed's patriarchal role. Like when he delivered Valeria, Doom saved Reed's family when Reed himself failed to do so.

Reed, summing up how small Doom behaves even when he's almighty, tells Victor that: "You made yourself God and the first thing you did was replace me."

Waid and Wieringo's "Unthinkable" is an aptly named story because it's all about Doom abandoning any pretense of moral high ground in his fight with the Fantastic Four. (The story runs in "Fantastic Four" #67-70, and then the anniversary #500 issue, which continued on with the series' original numbering even though the comic inside stayed the same.)

Doom realizes that if he focuses solely on magic, Reed — who is a scientific genius and needs to logically understand how a phenomena works to master it — will be completely outmatched. So Doom strikes a deal with some demons to gain enhanced magic powers. One of Doom's opening moves is to literally cast Franklin Richards into Hell as prey for his demon benefactors, forcing Reed and Johnny to watch it happen. He also makes Valeria into his familiar, using her presence to spy on and influence the world around the Four.

Holding Valeria and showing the Four a vision of Franklin being tortured by demons, Doom promises Reed he will free "[his] child" if he surrenders to his mercy. Reed agrees — so Doom places Valeria softly on the ground. His end of the agreement fulfilled, Doom then closes the portal to Hell with Franklin still trapped behind it.

From there, Doom captures the entire Four and places them all in horrible torture devices (Valeria excepted). Ben is hung upside down and beaten repeatedly by Mindless Ones, Johnny is given Reed's elastic powers and stretched out, and Sue is set alight as a new Human Torch.

Reed is left in Doom's library; the only way he can save his family is by learning magic, and every second he doesn't, they suffer. Doom gives Reed all the time in the world to study the mystic arts but warns him: "Were it my child burning in the fires of Hell... I'd hurry."

By the end of the story, Franklin is rescued from Hell and Doom is trapped in it (he scars Reed with hellfire on his way down). Still, Franklin takes a while to recover and is angry at his parents for not saving him sooner. Throwing an innocent child into damnation because you hate his father sure tests the saying that "all's fair in love and war," huh?

"Unthinkable" ended with Doom being sealed in Hell. Victor certainly did everything he could during that story to earn his place in the abyss, but it didn't last. Doom's shadow is long even in the very next "Fantastic Four" arc, "Authoritative Action" ("Fantastic Four" #503-508).

Doom got just what he wanted to by scarring Reed (since the burn is magical, it can't be healed). Everytime Reed looks in the mirror, he's reminded of Doom terrorizing his family and his failure in preventing it, exactly the way that Doom's own scars reminded him of his failures and of Richards. Normally, Doom is the one trying to surpass Reed, but in "Authoritative Action," it's the other way around. Reed moves the Four to Latveria and not just to offer aid; no, they're going to set up base there, permanently, and dismantle the remnants of Doom's regime.

("Authoritative Action" was published throughout the latter half of 2003; Reed's folly at playing benevolent tyrant, which only causes more problems for his family and Latveria, seems to be commenting on the contemporary U.S. invasion of Iraq.)

Eventually, Reed conjures Doom's spirit and tries to trap them both in a pocket dimension. That only leads to setting Doom free, leaving him to possess the rest of the Fantastic Four one-by-one. Equipped with Sue, Johnny, and then Ben's powers but none of their moral compasses, Doom lays waste to Nick Fury's S.H.I.E.L.D. forces until, to stop Doom, Reed is forced to kill Ben's possessed body.

Ben's death ultimately doesn't last long (the remaining Fantastic Three literally go to Heaven to bring him back), but the fact remains that Ben did die. Doom wasn't possessing Reed's body but he still forced his hand against his friend. As this marks the rare occasion that Doom actually succeeded in killing one of the FF's family, it has to rank as his worst crime against them.