Why Marvel is Betting Their Future on Doctor Doom
Episode 263
All Hail Doom! The supreme ruler of Latveria has successfully defeated The Fantastic Four and The Avengers. Marvel Studios is bowing towards his will, casting Robert Downey Jr. as the iconic villain and betting their fortunes on Doctor Doom! But Victor von Doom is more than a classic bad guy. He is one of the most complex characters in Marvel history. I talk with comic book writers Mark Waid, Brian Michael Bendis and Ryan North about the ways they’ve depicted Doctor Doom, from noble intensions gone away to horrific acts of selfishness. And cultural critic Mark Hibbett discusses why he believes the history of Doctor Doom reflects America's ambivalence towards dictators and the role they play on the world stage. MUSIC LISTOminous AmbianceLightless Dawn by Kevin MacLeodHidden Room by Anthony EarlsDarkest Child by Kevin MacLeodSuperior by Silver Maple
Why Marvel is Betting Their Future on Doctor Doom transcriptYou’re listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I’m Eric Molinsky.
This summer at San Diego Comic-Con, Marvel made a huge announcement. Robert Downey Jr was returning – not as Iron Man, but as Doctor Doom.
CROWD CHEERS
DOWNEY: What can I tell you? I like playing complicated characters.
They’re also paying him $100 million dollars -- reportedly.
This announcement brought up a number of questions. If you don’t read Marvel Comics, your first question might be, who is Doctor Doom? We’re going to go deep into that later. But first, why is Marvel doing this?
Enthusiasm from the fans was waning. So were the box office numbers. Marvel had another storyline going with a different villain that was not working for various reasons. So they’re doing a hard pivot. Doctor Doom will be their next big villain in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Next question: How is this possible in the MCU storyline? Spoiler alert from the last Avengers movie in 2019, Iron Man died saving the universe. Now the same actor is going to play Doctor Doom?
Well, Marvel is setting up a new version of The Fantastic Four, along with their arch nemesis, Doctor Doom. And it looks like the characters will be introduced in a parallel universe before they cross over to the main one.
Third question: Is Downey really playing Victor von Doom? Marvel has already set up the idea that there are multiple versions of the characters in parallel universes, so he could easily be a variant of Tony Stark who went to the dark side, and everyone calls him Doctor Doom. But Downey says he is playing Victor von Doom, and the pitch to him was that Marvel wanted to do the character right and not make him the generic bad guy that he was in the previous Fantastic Four movies made by a different studio.
I had not read a lot of The Fantastic Four comics since I was a kid. I remember The Fantastic Four very well: Reed Richards, Sue Storm, her brother Johnny, and Ben Grimm, also called The Thing because he looks like he’s made out of rocks.
But I didn’t have a clear memory of Doctor Doom. I remember that he wears a green cloak. Underneath he has a metal suit. And he wears a metal mask, where you can only see his eyes peering through. And I remember that he’s the ruler of a fictional country called Latveria, which is supposed to be somewhere in Eastern Europe. What else is there?
It turns out a lot. In fact, Doctor Doom is often described as the best villain in Marvel Comics. And as I kept exploring the deep history of this character, I discovered there are eerie parallels between Doctor Doom and people in power throughout history, right up to the present moment.
Like a lot of villains, Victor von Doom has a sympathetic backstory. He comes from a disenfranchised minority. His official Marvel biography says he was quote, “born to poor gypsies,” although many fans prefer to use the term Romani. When he was a child, both of his parents died. He vowed revenge against the government. He trained himself to be indestructible and undefeatable.
Mark Hibbett wrote a book about Doctor Doom:
MARK: Doctor Doom is like Batman except instead of going around using his means to beat people up, Doctor Doom uses his intelligence to take over the state, and then by taking over the state, he then rules the state so nobody else has to go through that.
Since this character has been around for over 60 years. If you read his Wikipedia biography, it's a big inconsistent mess. But Mark put the character in a new context for me. He has read and watched almost every version of Doctor Doom across different media and noticed a pattern. He says, throughout the Cold War, Doctor Doom echoed America's attitudes towards Eastern Europe. When he first appears in 1962:
MARK: I mean, he looks like the Cold War. That's what he's, he is cold, he is steel. He's riveted in, he's science, and he's sort of mysterious Eastern European ideas of magic and fairy tale. He combines both of these aspects of Eastern Europe.
One of the selling points of Marvel early on was that there's no Gotham. There's no Metropolis. These comics take place in our world with just a few fictional countries like Latveria or Wakanda. And contemporary politics often found their way into the storylines. Like in 1976:
MARK: There's an issue of Supervillain Team-Up, which is advertisers having the strangest guest star of all. And the strangest guest star of all is Henry Kissinger, who teams up with Doctor Doom, uh, much to the annoyance or The Fantastic Four themselves. And this is when we're seeing the idea of American foreign policy being a dark thing, that shouldn't be trusted. America is allowing itself with actual super villains. Um, what happens then is that The Fantastic Four then worked to overthrow Doctor Doom, Reed Richards has a one-man invasion of Latveria. He comes in and, uh, he basically takes over the revolution. The revolution is led by the hereditary monarchy, Prince Zorba, but Prince Zorba is weak. Um, and the inferences as all, uh, non-Americans are weak and need help with their revolution. And when they finally overthrow Doctor Doom as leader, Reed Richards shakes the hand of the leader of the resistance said over to you. Now, off you go. And this is seen as a really good thing.
Those comics were written when the Vietnam War had just ended, and faith in the Machiavellian art of Cold War realpolitik is at an all-time low. Then in the Reagan era, a more conservative writer named John Byrne took over The Fantastic Four.
MARK H: When John Byrne has Doctor Doom calling The Fantastic Four to Latveria. And he says, some look what you've done. Latveria is in ruins because the people could not govern themselves. Zorba, who was the former revolutionary leader, becomes a tyrant himself. The implication, it's not an implication, it's stated very clearly. Uh, Zorba is a tyrant as bad as Doctor Doom, but he's not as efficient as Doctor Doom. He can't run the country. Uh, the people rise up because, uh, Doctor Doom never, um, took taxes from them. Zorba takes taxes. Doom didn't do that because he could just go and steal things and blow things up without need for money. And so The Fantastic Four are forced to agree that Doctor Doom was a better ruler for Latveria than the Latverian themselves. And they meet a mother who cries with joy to see Doctor Doom because he's returned to save them. They overthrow the country, and then Doctor Doom murders the revolutionary leaders, and The Fantastic Four can't do anything about it. They have to go home realizing that, well, this seems to be the best thing. And that's kind of how it goes through the rest of the Cold War.
And is Communism ever mentioned during any of this time in terms of his relationship to Communism?
MARK: There is indeed. I've got a quote for you, in fact, Doctor Doom takes back control of Latveria, he says to The Fantastic Four, when I seize his control of my native land, she was a pitiful joke of a country with a feudal monarchy that was slowly destroying her. Within months, Latveria would've been swallowed by the Communist lands which surround our hills.
America has had an ambivalent attitude towards dictators. Officially we don’t like them! We love democracy!
In reality, the U.S. has a long history of supporting dictators or putting them in power. If they’re loyal to us, they can be a stopgap against our enemies from Communism to Islamic Fundamentalism.
After 9/11, Doctor Doom easily made that transition in the comics. In one storyline, Doom had been sent into exile. And without him, the Latverian government was selling arms to terrorists.
MARK: It’s quite a straightforward cut and paste of going, here is the baddie we face. Now what do they do? They're terrorists and they have weapons of mass destruction. And obviously Doctor Doom’s weapons are of a very mass, very destructive. Nick Fury has to put together a team of superheroes to again, have an unauthorized invasion. I mean, the metaphor is, is quite heavy here, but there's, there's an unauthorized secret invasion of Latveria in which a team of superheroes go in and it goes horribly wrong. And because of the damage that the American superheroes do to the people of Latveria during the course of this, some months later, uh, the Latverian government take revenge and send a supervillain suicide bomber to America and the suicide, they're not, they're not wearing a bomb. They are a living bomb. They explode and kill thousands of people. And it's, it's barely even a metaphor. The story is saying because of American actions abroad, which were not legal, these are the repercussions. This is what's happened to us.
Doctor Doom’s power doesn’t just come from America’s implicit support. He is a master of both science and sorcery. Typically a character picks a lane, like Iron Man and technology or Doctor Strange and magic. But Doctor Doom can take on both of them.
And his desire to rule the world is not just based on a thirst for power. He truly believes that he could do everything better than everybody else. And sometimes he’s right. There’s a graphic novel in the 1980s called Emperor Doom.
MARK H: Where Doctor Doom takes over the world and is entirely successful. Everything he does, it goes really, really well. Uh, this is in the late ‘80s. So Doctor Doom comes in, he immediately gets rid of Apartheid. He immediately ends world hunger. He immediately, uh, gets rid of all nuclear weapons and it works great. Everything's brilliant, everybody's happy. And then The Avengers get together and decide to overthrow him. And within half an hour of The Avengers overthrowing him, Apartheid is reinstated, the farms that Doctor Doom set up are destroyed. And nuclear war is on the card. Again, Hawkeye says to Captain America on the way back, Cap, did we do the right thing here? And obviously as a reader, you're thinking, I don't think you did, Hawkeye. This is pretty bad. And Captain America says, we did for freedom. We must be free to make our own mistakes. And you sort of think, well, yeah, if you're in a Quinjet flying away from it all, Cap, that's probably fine. It's probably not fine for the people who are now starving because of your actions.
I asked Mark, where are these stories coming from? Are the writers actually pro-dictatorship? Or are they creating thought experiments? He thinks it's the latter and the writers are responding to each other, and he thinks this conversation reflects the liberal conservative divide in America.
MARK H: I think it's, it's really interesting to see this in something as American as superhero comics, where it's this clash of these two different flavors of is it freedom to do whatever you like or freedom from harm? And I think that's what's going on with these Doctor Doom stories happening. It's like, well, what do we want? Do we want to be free? Do you want to be saved? Do we want to be fed? Do we want to never go hungry? Which is what often the Latverian go for. The appeal of power, the appeal of strong government is always laid out very strongly in all these. And often I think the people who are writing these stories, especially, kind of tend to fall mildly in love with this idea, despite themselves. They're trying to tell a story that says, this is a really bad thing. But then, in creating a story where, um, the heroes have to fight against the bad thing, they kind of make it a good thing.
I decided to pose that question to some of the writers who have been depicting Doctor Doom in this century. And they also have competing ideas about how Doctor Doom should be portrayed.
AD BREAK
With many characters in comics, there’s often a debate among the fans of which version they prefer. Do you want your Spider-Man to be a wise-ass high school student with teenage problems, or do you want him to be a neurotic adult trying to hold down a job and a relationship?
Do you want your Batman to be a dark loner with no one to talk to except Alfred? Or do you want him to have a Bat Family with several different Robins, Batgirls, and other sidekicks and allies? There’s no right answer. And the spectrum reveals interesting aspects of the characters. It makes them more dynamic and durable. They can be reinvented for different audiences, and still feel authentic.
The big question around Doctor Doom is do you want him to be a truly evil villain, or do you want him to be the noble Doom with good intentions gone awry?
There are even disagreements about what’s behind his mask. We know he’s scarred, but how scarred is he? Mark Waid wrote the character in the early 2000s.
MARK W: I do subscribe to the theory that Doom’s scar is a little tiny scar under his eye. Every time we actually do something in the comics to show people reacting in horror to his face, a little part of me dies inside. Because I really think that Doom's ego is such that the scar that he hides is probably the size of your fingernail. It's oblivious to most people unless they’re looking closely. But that's all he sees when he looks in the mirror.
Along the spectrum of Noble Doom to Evil Doom, Brian Michael Bendis wanted to test how noble Doom could be. Brian is famous for creating another Spider-Man character named Miles Morales, and for writing the comics that the Jessica Jones Netflix series was based on. When Brian wrote the character of Doctor Doom, he depicted him as being comfortable taking off his mask.
BRIAN: That is my favorite Doom. He is genuinely charismatic, like my favorite part is that people meeting him and being thrown off about how much they don't want to murder him. Like, like if you say, Doctor Doom is coming, oh, I better, I better, I'm going to murder, murder him, right? And then he walks in the room and immediately you're thrown by his energy. The charismatic, arrogant beyond measure, but arrogant because he's that good. Like, like that's the, when you meet someone's arrogant and like, oh yeah, you're, you should be arrogant. You're, you're literally the best. That is my favorite because it's, it's harder to write. It's more off putting to write, it's more of a challenge. And I, and I, you see them in the real world.
In one of the storylines he wrote, Doctor Doom tried to be a hero. In fact, he tried to be Iron Man.
At this point in the chronology of Marvel Comics – which was 2016 -- Tony Stark is in a coma.
Now, Brian had always suspected that Victor von Doom was secretly envious of Tony Stark. Their masks and armor don't look that different, and he imagines that deep down Victor looks at Tony and thinks:
BRIAN: Oh, you have all the fucked up shit I have. But you, you, you figure out a way to like be in society, like, like, and to be, uh, revered and be an Avenger. Whereas I am, you know, part-time dictator <laugh> that that him coming to terms of the fact of who he admires like in his adult life, like who he, who actually aspires to be, and then realizing once he was gone, it was, Tony was a, like a character arc I was dying to dive into.
In this scene, Doom goes to the Iron Man arsenal, because he wants to combine his armor with Iron Man’s armor. It’s being guarded by a hologram of Tony Stark.
BRIAN: So it was almost like, um, like a live experiment in storytelling. Like to see, like, is would the audience buy into this? And that's when I brought up like Walter White as an example of you could feel that watching Breaking Bad or, uh, Vic Mackey on The Shield, that there was a level which the audience like, like, we're, we're, we're with you until we're not and it’s up to you to figure out where that balance is without selling out the idea.
So when he does heroic things, but he is Doom. He is not Iron Man, but he is doing heroic things. What do you, where does that put us as an audience? Where do you enjoy playing with like the moral alliance or complicitness or just sort of that, again, like you're talking about as an audience member, you're, you're kind of rooting for Walter White, or rooting for Tony Soprano, and yet you're not, you know, like, like how did you play with that?
BRIAN: There's a quote about from those, from that era of television about like, why are these, uh, broken men are so appealing to watch week after week, sometimes for a decade. I think it was the creator of Breaking Bad that said that, that some people like watching the money and also some people, uh, or they call a competency porn where like, these people are really like, I'm never going to make meth and I don't want to know anybody who makes meth. But it's really interesting to watch how good he is at figuring out how to make the meth right? Like that, or, or Tony Soprano is really going to die today. And it's really interesting to find out how he's not that, that competency porn became a, like, like, all right, so everything's working against him. He has new tools. Nobody trusts him. No one's ever going to, like, no one in the Marvel universe is going to go, all right, good. All right. I, I like, and then, and he knows it. So there was a, a moment in writing where someone, he does something really big. Someone says, you know, this doesn't make up for all the nightmare, like this is, and he goes, I know, like, like, like, yeah, I'm, and that I know, not that, oh, I thought this all fixed, everything. Him going, no, I'm fully aware of who I am and what I've done. Like when, when he admits I'm never going to be able to when you back, but I'm still going to do it. That's almost a heroic gesture other than the fact that he did all the villainy, you know.
Ryan North is currently writing The Fantastic Four for Marvel Comics. His version of Doom is very much a villain, but not just any villain.
RYAN: And when I'm writing a Fantastic Four story, if Doom's in it, you can't just sub in any other villain in a Doctor Doom story. because to me, Doctor Doom always gets a win. Even when The Fantastic Four defeat him, he gets something out of it.
He also agrees with the theory that I've heard, which is that Doom's biggest flaw is his jealousy of Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four. That rivalry brings out the worst in Doom.
RYAN: Doom's tragic flaw is his ego where he wants to help the world and he wants to make sure that everyone knows that Doom did it. And Doom's the one who's, who's given you this gift. And that leads to a lot of problems, a lot of situations in which if he was simply able to step aside and let someone else take the glory, things would be better. But if you have this guy who can do amazing things, but always wants to make sure that his name is on it and he's the guy who's getting all the credit for it, and even more so that Reed Richards gets none of the credit for it, <laugh> that pettiness, that rivalry that defines, uh, to some extent both these men, but to a large extent, uh, Victor von Doom himself is something that always to me gets in the way of, of what he's doing.
So this was one of Ryan’s storylines.
RYAN: The premise, the background of the story is that Reed Richards has sent a building a year ahead in time and in that building was his own children. And the only way to get them back safely was to wait a year. One of these children is named Valeria and she is actually Doctor Doom's goddaughter. And she is one of the few people that Doctor Doom respects, I would say even loves. He really cares about her.
There is a complicated backstory behind this. When Valeria was born, she was in peril. Doom was the only person who could save her life. In doing so, he created a magical bond with her, which gave him leeway over The Fantastic Four. But he also ended up forming an emotional bond with her, and he became her Uncle Doom.
RYAN: He shows up and he's like, no, Reed, I will do it better. I will do this thing that you couldn't do. I'm going to go back in time and fix this. And he goes back in time. Everything he does, even if he saves Valeria from this problem, he makes it worse for himself. His, his private nation of Latveria embraces democracy, for example. And it starts to drive him a little bit crazy because he's like, how could it be that every intervention I make, I go further and further back in time no matter what I do, the universe is not as good as it was when Reed did it? This is tearing him apart. And the conclusion he reached, which is the conclusion I reached, was that the timeline is already the best it could be under Reed and Doom cannot improve on it. And that idea is so antithetical to Doom's ego and Doom's belief that at the end of the story – spoilers -- he goes back in time and prevents himself from ever undergoing it. So that version of Doom ceases to exist because he cannot live with this humility that he's given himself. <laugh>.
AD BREAK
Mark Waid wanted to make a different statement with Doctor Doom. First of all, he questions the assumption that Doom believes his own hype. Mark had this epiphany in the early 2000s when he was working at a company called Cross Gen Comics.
MARK: The guy who ran the place was an arrogant guy, uh, very full of himself, very, a lot of used car energy salesman, you know, energy to him. And he would, every once in a while, when he got agitated or especially irritated or just kind of lost his train of thought, would, would suddenly talk like this, just for a second and he would snap back. And I asked him once we were friendly enough where I was able to ask him, I said, what's, what's going on? He said, he said, I have a cleft, I had a cleft palate when I was a kid and we did a lot of work on it. And I went through years and years of speech therapy to lose that, you know, that effect. And that reminded me that here was a guy who was, who appeared confident and appeared completely together. But that was a little overblown because deep down inside him somewhere, there was still the little kid who had the speech difficulty that it would surface every once in a while. As a reminder, all this to say that it changed my perspective on Victor von Doom, it changed my perspective in the sense that to me, Victor von Doom is not someone who believes to the very atomic level of his being, that he deserves to be the ruler of the world. If these idiots would just get out of his way and listen to him, I think deep down on a molecular level at a place that Doom would never, ever acknowledge is somebody who believes that the only way to prove his worth and to prove he is above all is for him to be able to rule the world.
A few years later, Mark was writing The Fantastic Four for Marvel. His editor suggested that he needed to remind the audience how evil Doom is. The character had been around for a long time. Younger readers might take for granted the fact that he's supposed to be one of their biggest villains. Mark’s thought, challenge accepted.
MARK W: So the challenge was, okay, let's see, if as if Doctor Doom were a brand new character you've never heard of before, what would you need to say about the character? What would you need to do with a character to really illustrate and underscore to a new reader these, the levels of, of evil that a man like this will stoop to?
Remember, Doom is a master of both science and sorcery. But a lot of writers tended to lean towards technology. I mean he’s got the metal suit like Iron Man. So, Mark decided maybe Doom thought that was a mistake. He can’t out-science Reed Richards. But The Fantastic Four would be defenseless against magic.
So Doom makes a deal with demons to gain new powers of sorcery. But it comes with a price. He has to track down his childhood sweetheart and use magic to strip the skin off her body until it covers his armor. What’s left of her collapses into a pile on the ground
MARK W: It just in the moment seemed like the absolute grizzliest thing you could possibly do in that, in that story that I had never seen before.
There was a backlash and to this day, fans are still debating whether that was too dark and nasty for Doom’s character. But Mark disagrees. When he starts a new series, he likes to go back to the original comics to see how the characters were portrayed.
MARK W: If you go back and look at the first, the really first quintessential Doctor Doom story, it's that Fantastic Four 57 through 60, it's Doctor Doom steals the Silver Surfer’s powers. Yes. He pontificates he tells us all the time he is noble, he is great, he is, you know, his, his word can be honored. He's an honorable man and there's nothing in that story that he does that is remotely honorable. That is remotely noble. It isn't just straight up trickery and evil. I think Doom says this about himself a lot, but he is the very definition of an unreliable narrator.
You know, it reminds me a little bit too of, um, it was sort of midway through the run on Sopranos. David Chase was on Fresh Air, and he was talking about a shift he made with Tony Soprano where he said, not enough viewers understood that Tony's evil, that too many of them were finding him everyone's adorable mobster next door.
MARK W: Yes.
And he started making Tony much more morally compromised in his choices and much more sort of beyond redemption on purpose because he's like, I want to send a message to my viewers. I don’t know if you feel the same way about when Doom is portrayed too, too noble, too regal.
MARK W: Yes, totally. Because again, that familiarity breeds, not breeds contempt, that just breeds, you know, acceptance that you just Doom is such a part of the Marvel universe. And Doom is such a character who's been not overexposed, but certainly has as much screen time as most any other Marvel character that the people who hate him love to hate him. The people who, the readers, the Fantastic Four readers, the Doctor Doom fans, they're not worshiping as evil. They just, they're so, they just so like the characterization of that character that they've fallen in love with that character. So it's the same thing. Every once in a while, you really have to remind these people who have sort of grown so accustomed to Doom that they look at him as a benign evil that he is nothing remotely resembling benign.
Another interesting aspect of Doom is that he creates these Doombots, which are android duplicates of himself. I think the Doombots are right out of a dictator’s playbook. Joself Stalin, Vladamir Putin, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jung Il and other dictators have all allegedly used body doubles and lookalikes.
The Doombots have also been convenient for writers who don't like the way a previous writer depicted the character. There have been several instances where a new writer takes over who didn't like what the previous writer had done, and they have Doctor Doom declare that version of him was a Doombot. He's the real Doctor Doom -- until the next writer comes along and decides that version of Doom sucked. That was a Doombot. This is the real Doctor Doom.
I think on a meta level, that manufactured confusion is also right out of a dictator's playbook to blur people's understanding of reality with propaganda. It allows an authoritarian to be unaccountable for their actions.
MARK: Yes, he was very ahead of the fake news curve, wasn't he? It is that third person self-glorification that is, as you say, right out of the dictator's playbook
But what about the people of Latveria? Do they have any agency? Sometimes they're portrayed as living in fear, and sometimes they’re portrayed as Doctor Doom’s loyal subjects.
Ryan North is more interested in that version of Latveria.
RYAN: For me, it comes down to complexity again, where I feel like if Doom is lording over a country of people who are suffering and hate him, that feels like the place where you'd start. That's the obvious version. If Doom has a country where at least a large percentage think he's great, that's interesting. Why do they think that? What has he done for them? Is it sincere? Is it, has it been manipulated in some way? What does doing propaganda look like? Is it reasonable or is it almost a parody? What propaganda should be? All these questions to me are very interesting. So I like a Latveria that has a large proportion of it that, that celebrates Doom. In fact, I would, I think the, my favorite idea of Latveria is that it's a country that's so enraptured by Doom and so enthralled by Doom. It doesn't exist without him. If Doctor Doom disappears, I don't think Latveria continues as a going concern. It is Doom and Doom is Latveria.
MARK: Look, I think if you're Latverian, there's peace. You never have to worry about going to war. You never have to worry about the price of eggs. You don't have to worry about putting your kid in school. You don't have to worry about gun violence. You have to worry about any much of anything because Doom is very, very protective of his people. Is it because he loves them? He will say that. I would argue that it is more along the lines of, if I can keep them safe, it is evidence that I, uh, have the power that I say I do.
It reminds me of the old saying that at least Mussolini made the trains run on time. But the truth is, Mussolini didn’t make the trains on time. It was a lie, repeated over and over again, until people believed it.
This is the second to episode I've done this year where I've been grappling with the question of why some people want to be ruled by authoritarians. I'm so baffled as to how they can be drawn towards these leaders and at the same time convince themselves that they're not embracing authoritarianism. Mark wonders that as well. He's not writing any storylines with Doctor Doom now, but:
MARK W: I would be writing that a lot differently in 2024 than I would have in 2004.
I asked Brian Michael Bendis if writing about Doom gave him any insights.
BRIAN: If I had a really strong answer to your question, I would, I probably wouldn't need to write as much
<laugh>. So does this bother you too? Or is this sort of the kind of idea that?
BRIAN: I just don't really understand it and it fascinates me, and there's such a long history of the same story being told over and over and over again. And the, and, and the same kind of person selling the same kind of fear to hold onto the same kind of power over and over and over again. And those of us who don't fall for it watch and go be why really, again?! It, it's just been going on for centuries and, and it's, and, and so it is, you can't deny part of the human condition on some level. I do not fully understand it, or I would be free to write other things.
I know that I'm not going to find answers in comics, fantasy shows or sci-fi movies. I just find more people asking the same questions. But if Doctor Doom is a means to play out these thought experiments, then I suspect he will continue his reign for years to come. Or to quote Doctor Doom, “All hail, Doom!”
That’s it for this week. Special thanks to Mark Hibbett, Ryan North, Brian Michael Bendis, Mark Waid and Luke Daniels, who did the readings. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman.
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