Issue(s): Fantastic Four #84, Fantastic Four #85, Fantastic Four #86, Fantastic Four #87
Cover Date: Mar-Jun 69
Title: "The name is Doom!" / "Within this tortured land" / "The victims!" / "The power and the pride!"
Credits:
Stan Lee - Writer
Jack Kirby - Penciler
Joe Sinnott - Inker

Review/plot:
The short of it is: the Fantastic Four are returning home from their battle with Maximus last issue (presumably Crystal got the OK she needed from Black Bolt to remain with the team) when they are contacted by Nick Fury. SHIELD has discovered that Dr. Doom is amassing a robot army, and he sends the FF in to destroy it.

Sue is still out of the picture, presumably still home suffering from postpartum depression. After a battle with the robots...

...the rest of the FF get captured and Doom removed their powers via hypnosis. The FF are then released in scenes very similar to the Prisoner TV show (and a later letters page confirms that's where the idea came from).

By the way, do not compare Dr. Doom to other arch-villains. Kristoff will learn this same lesson when he compared Doom to Magneto during John Byrne's run.

In these issues, Doom's subjects are terrified of Doom and act normal only on his orders (this is mainly shown from the FF's perspective so there may be some wiggle room for later revisions where Doom's citizens really are happy but all direct evidence here shows that Doom is simply a tyrant, maybe not to the average peasant but certainly to those who work in his castle.)

Doom is currently dealing with a rebellion, and he's got a new type of robot to deal with it.

Doom releases his new killer robots on his own subjects...

...and then later seems to regret it.

Eventually the FF get their powers back, but the robots are too powerful for them.

So Dr. Doom decides to destroy the entire village.

The FF and the villagers survive only because the Invisible Girl shows up to protect them all with a forcefield.

The Fantastic Four then go after Dr. Doom in his castle.

When they get to Doom himself, instead of fighting them he offers them a meal. This scene sure looks like something that may have influenced the Darth Vader scene at Bespin in Empire Strikes Back.

This is all a ruse so that they'll relax while Dr. Doom plays them a song on the piano that secretly will kill them with "hypersound".

But before he begins playing, the scientist Dr. Hauptmann runs in to shoot the FF, but Dr. Doom kills him for endangering Doom's art collection.

Dr. Hauptmann' brother (also Dr. Hauptmann) will be plotting vengeance over the course of a number of future stories.

Doom then calls off the fight and lets the FF leave, in what the cover of #87 calls "possibly the most off-beat ending of the year!".

It is nice to see both Crystal and the Invisible Girl using their powers and generally contributing, but they're still treated as minor supporting characters.

Interesting story with some nice Kirby art but it has that Silver Age quality of the end having nothing to do with the beginning.

Here's some nice pictures of Doom from Kirby in his prime:

Quality Rating: C+

Historical Significance Rating: 4

Chronological Placement Considerations: The Fantastic Four are just leaving the Inhumans so no FF appearances should take place between this FF entry and last.

References: N/A

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: The Villainy of Dr. Doom TPB

Jack Kirby was indeed a Prisoner fan, and tried to adapt it for Marvel in the 1970s, but it never got published. Steve Englehart, Gil Kane, and Joe Staton also tried but that went nowhere as well.

An unused Kirby page from #87 was printed in Comics Interview #90.

I really do not like the notion of Doom being billed as The Worst Guy Ever but then he just lets them go at the end? And the way he treats everyone around him is also terrible, there is no nobility, just maniacal and delusional behavior. One of Stan and Jack's weaker Doom stories.

So anyone want to touch with a ten foot pole the last picture? Did Doom have secret plastic surgery between appearances? Create a fake synthetic mask just like the one worn by Baron Zemo during the Free Spirit segment of Fighting Chance in Captain America? Or at the very least, see a decent enough shrink to pierce his giant size ego to make him realize he wasn't disfigured as badly as he claimed he was?

I know that Kirby wanted Doom to just have a small scar that he over-exaggerated as being a full-facial disfigurement, so was this a partial build-up to an potential issue that would reveal Doom's face at long last?

Also, to PeterA, it's a problem that exists at the core of Doom's entire character and especially stories set in Doom's home turf of Latveria. Either the heroes have to knuckle under and bring Doom to justice/free the people when they fight Doom in Latveria, or there has to be a legit (and non-Stockholm Syndrome reason) they leave town with Doom on the ropes but undefeated.

I think the idea is they're afraid a civil war would result if Doom is suddenly removed- that's happened several times in real life when a dictator is suddenly removed and in the MU, it happened when Rick Jones murdered a Middle Eastern dictator.

I liked the storyline they did a few years ago where Doom got killed again, and Reed actually took over Latveria to help prepare it for a gradual transition to democracy without a civil war. I wish they could have let the ramifications of that stay, instead of having Doom just come back and take back over a few months later.

There were a few stories where Doom is protected by "diplomatic immunity", so clearly the US has relations with Latveria. And the FF are private US citizens & have no mandate to go to other countries & overthrow their governments & decide who should be leader. (On the other hand, if the US did ever decide to do so, they would probably need the FF's help, as the US army would stand no chance against Doom's technology.)

I prefer the idea in the Byrne run where Doom has some genuine liking for the general population of his country and where the FF see that when Prince Zorba of the former Latverian royal family came to power, the country became a mess (which makes sense, the country often doesn't even look industrialised, apart from the Doomtech). That way the FF can feel the Latverians are safe enough under Doom, and preferable to some alternatives.

As Thanos points out, Waid did a story where Reed took over Latveria, though he was pushed to do so by a particularly evil Doom who had sent Franklin to a hell dimension, and in that case the FF did get in trouble with both SHIELD & the UN for doing so. (Arguably the ramifications of that story should have also seen the FF tried for their actions here.)

After that, Bendis' Secret War had Nick Fury overthrowing the following Latverian prime minister (who the US helped elect) for funding US supervillains, so it seemed Fury felt that this non-Doom ruler of Latveria was worse than Doom, or that Doom is too difficult to overthrow.

I know that Kirby wanted Doom to just have a small scar that he over-exaggerated as being a full-facial disfigurement, so was this a partial build-up to an potential issue that would reveal Doom's face at long last?

Brian Cronin ably covers this one.

To summarize, in stories like Fantastic Four #10, other characters react to Doom's face as if it is, indeed, horribly disfigured. The "small scar" drawing, however, is a much later piece; as shown in the link above, Greg Theakston apparently videotaped Kirby drawing it! As Cronin notes, Kirby's ideas about Doom changed significantly over the years.

It's also worth noting that even Kirby's "Doom is an egomaniac who can't stand a small scar" idea doesn't entirely fit with the idea here that Doom is perfectly happy to show his face, have it painted, and even stare at it in a mirror. Interestingly, the "unmasked Doom portrait" from this story will much later serve as a McGuffin in the Superior Foes of Spider-Man series.

John Byrne's combines the two idea, showing a relatively small scar that Doom turns into a disfigurement by putting on a red-hot metal mask, in issue #278. And Walt Simonson later fully retcons various "Doom unmasks" scenes by having Doom say only he and Kristoff have ever seen Doom's unmasked face in #350. So over the years, other creators noticed the contradictions and were moved to address them.

To Jese’s question about the splash where an unmasked Doom has his portrait painted: I would speculate that Kirby and Lee are referencing Shakespeare’s “Richard III.” There, the title character starts the play complaining that his repulsive physical deformity forces him to be evil. But after scoring a few brilliant Machiavellian victories (like seducing the widow of a man he killed), Richard starts to see his ugliness in a different light. He boasts that he’ll hire tailors to dress him in extravagant fashions, and even resolves to buy a looking glass so he can admire himself.

In the FF panel, Kirby visually “quotes” both the fancy regal dress and the looking glass. And Lee’s script seems to support the comparison with Richard, by having Doom predict that his face will establish a *new* standard of masculine beauty—that is, it doesn’t conform to the current standard (which would be the case if he had plastic surgery), but rather his very disfigurement will be considered beautiful.

This is exactly parallel to Richard’s reassessment of his ugliness, in light of his brilliant successes. Likewise, in this FF episode, we see Doom at his apex, on his home turf, with everything going right for him. His ego is so swollen that even the face he once hated is looking good to him. It’s a character thread Kirby and Lee never followed up on; but they were both literate creators and it’s plausible that they would mine Shakespeare greatest tyrant for their in-depth depiction of Doom.

To the question of the extent of Doom's disfigurement: I agree entirely with Omar that the "little scar" theory represents a late reconsideration on Kirby's part, which arose after his departure from FF and Marvel. Throughout his FF run, Kirby almost certainly considered Doom to be a physically repulsive figure, whose face was a source a personal shame. That feeling of shame seems momentarily relieved in the present issues (in the portrait-painting scene), but its root was still an objectively ruined face.

The evolution in Kirby's conception would have had a real consequence for Doom's motivation, in my view--and would have marked a departure from Lee's (and the general Marvel) conception. It's too much to get into here; but it's interesting to me that long after Kirby had ceased to have an active hand in the character, he still felt a responsibility for the way Dr. Doom's moral orientation should be portrayed.

Just a nitpick, but I don't think Kirby was feeling any particular responsibility for Doom's portrayal. He had a famously-bad memory, he was finally receiving due respect as an honored statesmen of comics, and if five different fans asked him the same question about Doom's face, he'd probably have given five different answers. I'm exaggerating, but not by much. He obviously put more thought into Doom than the Juggernaut or the Impossible Man. Ask him a question about those two, he'd probably need to see source material before he'd even recognize them as his creations. At least he remembered Doom, and obviously departed from the source material in his later recollections.

Hire Jack Kirby to do a comic, you get a Jack Kirby comic. Ask Jack a question about characters he did ages ago, you get a Jack Kirby answer.