Get the latest tech news

Doctor Doom’s comics legacy is so much bigger than his Iron Man connections

The most interesting things about Doctor Doom has always been his relationships and the context they exist in.

Those aspects of Doom’s personality became easier to understand following Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four Annual#2, which fleshed out his origins in the fictional, Eastern European country of Latveria where his mother, a Romani woman named Cynthia, was murdered for practicing witchcraft. That sense of animosity could also be felt in moments like the complicated birth of Valeria Richards — Reed and Sue Storm’s daughter whose delivery required Doom’s assistance and his becoming her godfather — and it has continued to keep the Fantastic Four’s (extended) family dynamic interesting in more recent years. And while it wasn’t long before Doom was back to wearing his usual cape and mask ensemble, the time he spent as Iron Man helped hammer home how much more interesting the character is when he’s allowed to exist in a morally gray area surrounded by people with justifiably complicated feelings about him.

Get the Android app