Doctor Doom and Lex Luthor both want to be the power behind the throne, the power on the throne, and the throne itself. They each itch to receive the unreserved devotion of all of humanity, a.k.a. the lackeys they deserve.
Put 'em both on one earth, though, and you have the makings of quite a power struggle.
We’re not talking toe-to-toe battle, of course, unless such a throwdown is necessary to their plans. No, I want to know which one could conquer an earth that was home to both of them.
Assume for purposes of discussion that whatever superheroes are around will be factored into their plans – “Superman won’t let either of them win” isn’t a valid resolution to my scenario.
Who wins? Who rules the earth?
My money’s on Doom. I suspect his sorcery skills give him a necessary edge against Luthor – and for that matter, Doom may just be smarter. You?
Seriously, luther would not pose much of a threat to him. While they are both masters of science (complete with their own battle suits) Doom is also quite a magican. Wasn’t there a story were he was a canidate for Dr. Strange’s job (if He applied himself)? Add to that their resources, no matter what happens Doom still runs an entire nation, and the entire industrial complex is his to comand with impunity. Luther has acess to a simialr vein of resources, but simply putting them into motion requires alot of subifuge just so he doesn’t get his ass slung in jail. damn those pesky federal investigators!
Take a look at the batman No Man’s Land story. He was posied to own all of gotham but got shut down when bats was able to prove he’d garnered the deed illegally. Do you really think the law is going to stand in Doom’s way? Seriously man. He’d have marched in with an army of doombots, and declared Gotham as a protectorate of Laveria and that would have been that.
Lex Luther is not fit to grovel at the Feet of Victor Von Doom. Period.
Both are men of unsurpassed genius who are only checked by their obessive hatred for their nemeses. Now, Doom has magic which would put him up one against Lex, but hell, Lex throws down against Superman. Superman. And almost wins. Dude once took down Swamp Thing with about one minute’s work.
This after Swamp Thing had kicked Batman’s ass up and down Gotham City.
It’d be an interesting fight, but I suspect both parties would get distracted about halfway through and take off after Superman and that accursed Richards.
A big theme of Doom’s backstory is his “hideously scarred face.” An issue of FF, somewhere around 200, showed that his “deformity” was a single large scar. Yes, a scar that would affect his rating on any standard scale of “perception of beauty” but not something that, in the absence of megalomania, would justify Doom’s decades-long campaign against Reed Richards.
In Byrne’s retcon, Doom’s entire face is scarred because he was so impatient to wear the iron mask that he ordered the monks who made it to put it on him NOW, while it is still piping hot.
After much struggle, I will say that my vote goes for the Doctor. A MD/Phd (or whatever advanced graduate degree Doom has) is much more difficult to attain than at best an MBA (I don’t see Luthor fooling around school for anything more, particularly when there is a world to conquer and a certain schoolboy kryptonian’s ass to kick). Also, as others have said, Doom has magic. The wild card always seems to play.
At a time that Abby was being imprisoned for her “unnatural relations” with Swamp Thing, ST announced that if she wasn’t released, he’d rescue her from the courthouse at a specific time. Seeing an opportunity to know where he’d be, some folks from the Sunderland Corporation, old enemies of his arranged for an audience with Lex Luthor - then the smartest man on the planet, but hard to get hold of, since he was a criminal (post-Crisis continuity, but in that limbo time before Byrne’s redefinition of Superman made him a legitimate businessman) - ten minutes for a million dollars. In those ten minutes (with some time to spare), Luthor designed a device that would sever ST’s connection with the Earth and thereby trap his consciousness in the plant body he’d be visibly using, which the Sunderland guys then destroyed with napalm.
(It worked, but ST escaped by blindly projecting his consciousness into space, whereupon he went planet-hopping until the Green Lantern Medphyll tought him to change his “aura” so that he could get reconnected to Earth, and then he returned home.)
OK, this just further convinces me that not only do I have nothing to contribute to these questions with my 1960s comic book experience, I am totally lost just reading them.
Mr. Von Doom isn’t actually a doctor of anything. He left college after the accident that scarred him. Since then, I’m sure he’s made Latveria University hand over a PhD in everything to him, but that hardly counts.
To be fair, you’re right about Luthor. Luthor left high school after his disfiguring accident. So we’re comparing two home-schooled geniuses here.
That’s not a Byrne retcon – it was shown the very first time Doom was depicted putting the mask on that it ewas still hot, back in FF Annual #2 in 1964 or whatever.
“But master, the mask is still hot” says the monk manipulating it. “Doom is not like other men” says the other monk. It’s not clear if the hot mask scarred him further, but Doom’s face was already a mess from his failed experiment to contact Mom that gor him thrown out of college.
