Or Magneto in the first X-Men film. Or Lex Luthor in the first Superman.
Usually you start a franchise with the most iconic villain, and usually it’s the right move.
IIRC, originally, the gang, being juveniles, didn’t know the Thing was from Yancey St.–like these were the kids of Ben’s neighborhood contemporaries. They didn’t know who he was–he got targeted because was this celebrity/monster who was coming around.
Yeah.
Everything about the Thing’s transformation is fanwankable except for how he goes from having 5 fingers to 4.
Well, there’s the time the Yancy Streeters challenged Ben to a game of FFF (five finger fillet)
Hey, don’t leave us hanging. Did he answer them?
And what the hell is going on with his mouth in the second panel?
He mailed them back a folded up sheet of 6 inch thick titanium.
Heh. You know, your post prompted me to go back and look at his first eight appearances, and it’s underselling it to say he easily covers enough ground for eight villains:
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In his debut, he’s Time Machine Guy.
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In his debut, he’s also Has A Robot Double guy; he keeps making use of robot doubles of himself in later stories — as well as robot fish that swim around spying on people — but also has a robot who can pass for a regular guy, as well as a robot who can pass for a superhero; he also disguises himself as the janitor at the Baxter Building in the story where his own base of operations floats undetected over the city disguised as an innocuous cloud: he also makes use of hallucinogens and holograms, and deploys traps in general and a triggered conflagration timed so witnesses will say “There’s Spider-Man! It must have been him that blew up the building!” Which is to say: he’s doing Mysterio’s entire schtick, but before Quentin Beck actually shows up as Mysterio.
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In his debut, he’s also Jetpack Armor guy; we soon learn he’s got blaster weaponry built into the armor, and that it’s loaded with other goodies — Reed at one point tries for some stretchy personal combat, and promptly gets frozen by some built-in gadgetry Doom then deploys at Johnny, sure as Sue’s invisibility draws a dismissive “keep you in check by means of a simple radar device built into my armor” — but the point is the armor, which means he’s basically doing the Beetle’s villain schtick before Abner Jenkins shows up as an evil Iron Man knockoff.
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Speaking of an evil Iron Man, picture him as an evil Ant-Man: he does some shrunken-down surveillance, but he also launches some shrink-ray attacks on people: dwindling them down when they’re driving a car, or when they’re working out in the weight room, and so on; one of Pym’s early villains got by with just the size-changing schtick after this, but note that Pym also has the whole ‘tune in to the bug wavelength’ thing, so note too that Doom devises a ‘spider-wave transmitter’ to send a mental message to Spider-Man, and that he later devises a way to find Spider-Man by tuning in to those mental impulses; he later devises a way to cut in on “all TV transmissions” to deliver a supervillain monologue; another time: “Almost overnight, the mighty industrial complex of America seems to grind to a halt” as he sends out a signal to disrupt everything from factories to guided missiles.
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Speaking of an evil superhero variant, he’s also Mindswap Guy: at one point, he thereby gets Mister Fantastic’s body and powers, and promptly starts crimin’. But the point is, he’s brainy enough to pass himself off as Reed; after all, Reed is a rocket scientist who tools around in the Fantasticar and tries to cure Ben Grimm’s condition, and Doom built a rocket that can tow the entire Baxter Building into outer space, and built a car that “makes the Fantasticar look like a dog sled” and “musta been designed by a genius” in the story where he also built a raygun that turns The Thing back into Ben Grimm. Which brings me to how:
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In that last story I mentioned, he hires three crooks and uses his “XZ-12 device” to give one superstrength for to punch out that depowered Ben Grimm, and to give another one superhearing for to capture Sue Storm despite her invisibility. Now, that Power Broker schtick already seems pretty solid, but add in that the third crook apparently has a minor superpower already, and Doom enhances that. So we’re in a setting where there are criminals who have minor powers, and the fill-in-the-blanks story hook is that he can turn them into bigger threats.
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Likewise, in Doom’s first appearance he knows which gems “were originally the property of Merlin, the ancient magician” and how to make use of their “mystic power”. Because, well, “I, von Doom, have mastered the mystic rites!” And, as we later learn, young Doom grew up in a setting where other such items exist: “Magic potions!! Strange scientific secrets! Why did I never suspect?? My mother was a witch! And now I can learn her secrets!!” And, well, guy who knows where to find and how to use magical items is also a fill-in-the-blanks story hook all by itself, isn’t it? Like, when DC scrambled to explain why their various superheroes didn’t just win WWII right quick, they invented a villain with enough know-how to use mystical artifacts in a ritual, period, much like how the villain in Raiders Of The Lost Ark is basically just a guy who can put in the work to find a holy relic and then perform a ceremony over it. Tell me we’re in a setting with a magic-lamp genie and the ‘villain’ part writes itself.
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At that, Doom experiments with “dimension warps” until he can spirit the FF “into another dimension”; we see later see him give an underling a “dimensional-transport machine…capable of taking you to another dimension” “until your master has need for you again!” That’s arguably the big fine story hook for a villain, if we add that there’s interesting stuff to be found in other dimensions: but, even putting that aside, we see him zap himself and Reed from Point A to Point B by way “of my mental-teleporter! I only have to think of a place, and I can be there!” And that, plus his sleep-mist gun, plus “the deadly rays of this ultra-heat beam” gun, is pretty much the Vanisher’s schtick before the Vanisher showed up to stymie the X-Men; it’s pretty much Sidewinder’s schtick, from when he was getting crooks to do his bidding by pointing out that he could zap them out of jail if they got caught, before he made his debut, too.
Even leaving aside the whole ‘ruler of Latveria who smirks at you from behind a forcefield’ aspect, that’s at least eight, right? I mean, that first appearance, just add an incapacitating raygun and you’ve got Rama-Tut; so, well, cue Doom laying out The Thing, because “this miniature paralysis gun of my own design, so easily concealed in the palm of my hand, is but one of the many reasons why Doctor Doom can never be vanquished!”
And tell me again, how did anyone, let alone the FF, ever defeat him? get him to say his name backwards?
They usually exploited his cumbersome ego and arrogance in some way.
Overpowered villains are usually defeated in a stupid fashion.
There’s also been a trend in recent years to cast Doom as more of an antihero. According to more recent writers, despite appearances Doom is not a despotic dictator. He genuinely loves the people of Latveria, and they genuinely love him. If he has to occasionally threaten or even attack an American superhero team, that’s only because he loves his kingdom so damn much.
Every once in a while, in fact, Reed’s daughter has to come and ask Uncle Doom to save the world because one of her dad’s experiments has gotten out of control again.
There was a animated show where Superman was fighting Darkseid. Supes told him, it was nice to finally be able to let go, whereupon he pounded Darkseid like a tentpole.
Bah, foolish Richards! You will never trick Doom into saying “Mood!” Ooops!
Outside the magic thing, he just sounds like a guy whose hook is “mad scientist inventor.” Which would, necessarily, require him to invent a lot of stuff that could function as another villain’s whole hook. He can’t just keep “inventing” the same tech for every appearance, after all.
I suspect a lot of Doom’s appeal comes down to mostly character design. George Lucas was obviously impressed.
I guess my read on it was, you could get variety with a mad-scientist inventor who just tinkers with that XZ-12 device — or, as he puts it in this issue, “There! It is over! I’ve adapted each XZ-12 device to affect you differently!” — such that, sure, this time he took a brawny crook who’d beaten up “six husky longshoremen who wouldn’t join his protection racket” and turned him into a guy who could lift tons more than before; but, next time, he could unleash a blackmailed speedster villain on the world, or whatever.
But, like I’d said, he also seems to take a crook who has a bona fide superpower — albeit a minor one that he maybe had no use for beyond playing circus performer — and boosted the heck out of it. And that suggests other powered small-timers who aren’t yet doing much only because a scientist hasn’t yet offered them a shot at being so much more. And, after you get as much mileage from that every-appearance-is-something-different premise as you like, maybe have the scientist boost one of his own abilities through the roof…
I wonder if the Fantastic Four are simply unadaptable as they are. I understand the novelty of the original concept for a superhero series, and I know they have had plenty of good stories over the years. But it does feel like Pixar did it better, and Venture Brothers did the perfect deconstruction, and the whole thing kinda feels too late after the various problems Disney has had with Marvel properties after Endgame.
Did I dream a story in which Doom flies around in a hollowed out Sphynx?
What’s funny is Stan Lee created the Fantastic Four as a response to the popularity of the Justice League. He made them a family to give them a reason to be a team. Not sure why they are more or less adaptible than any other superhero team. Their main difference is they have a more science fiction bent than the others. If anything that’s a refreshing difference.