Was that always the purpose the experiment or is it a retcon?
There certainly was an element of hubris attached to Doom’s scarring but I don’t recall anyone ever making a supernatural claim. I just flipped through Super Villain Team-Up which would have been the natural place for this to occur looking for other examples of Doom’s origin and didn’t see anything like that. Could you point out to me where this one was dropped in?
Among other places, the ‘He was trying to get mom out of hell’ explanation is given in Triumph And Torment. Therein, Mephisto claims that the experiment worked fine until he interfered and purposefully caused an explosion.
Right, I’m aware of that but not the “supernatural curse” part. All of the tellings that I know of (and as a Doom-buff I’ve read most of them) have the scarring as a result of the explosion. Mephisto may have made the machine go haywire but that’s different from his face being cursed.
And FWIW, from FF #5 Doom is explicitly trying to contact the netherworld when his machine blows up. His assistant harasses him trying to find out why Doom is obsessed with it but that’s as far as it goes until a brief run in Astonishing Tales (I think it’s #5) where it is revealed that Mephisto has the soul of Doom’s mother.
Doom was trying to contact his mother (who was a witch) in the afterlife in FF Annual #2 when the accident occurred. Reed Richards pointed out that there were potentially serious flaws in Doom’s calculations, but Doom brushed them off. After the explosion, Doom is shown in bed with his head completely covered in bandages. (So I think that any drawings of an un-scarred Doom – that one linked to above is the first I’ve seen or heard of this, and I’m a big Kirby fan, with lots of his stuff – must be a late idea of his).
Certainly Mephisto wasn;t part of the story at first – Mephisto was introduced in the first run of Silver Surfer, issue #6 or so, circa 1968.
I’m going to add my vote for both Phil Foglio’s Angel and the Ape, and his Stanley and His Monster. I agree with Arizona Teach - it’s worth finding a copy out there to read for yourself. You’ll have to find someone else’ copy, though. I’m keeping mine. (The scene where Morpheus sentences Stanley to a month of dreaming about the ocean is absolutely hilarious, btw.)
I believe that the Tom and Mary Bierbaum run on Legion of Super-Heroes contained numerous excellent revisions to the established canon. Not just the Proty/Lightning Lad, or Valor/Superboy stories. (Alas, AIUI that’s now gone the way of Pre-Crisis storylines.)
I really can’t think of a single Marvel retcon that I was aware of that did anything, IMNSHO, to improve the stories or characters. Usually it was done to explain the “pod people” effect when a writer takes over an established character or book, and didn’t want to follow the established character.
I’m inclined to believe that the worst retcon for Marvel, though, was the whole ass-raping they did to the character of Illyana Rasputin, beginning with when Louise Simonson took over The New Mutants. (Sure, I know it’s been 20 years - I’m still bitter.) She went from being a wonderfully complex and layered character to a caricature, then to a girl in a refrigerator.
If I may repeat this question, rather louder and in a Scottish accent.
The worst meta-retcon, in my opinion, was “Superboy punching the walls of the extradimensional bubble caused all of the continuity gaps that occurred in the time between Crisis on Infinite Earths and Infinite Crisis, not lazy writing.”
I meant the demon one.
I liked the Sentry’s original mini a lot. They probably should have left it at that. Still, I think Bendis writes him very well and he’s a nice addition to the Mighty Avengers book.
Good catch on the pulitzer though.
Kyle Baker’s Plastic Man series should have become mainstream retcon.