Marvel Comics and Fascism

[Gav]

The "Storm" of your avatar once fell in love with Doctor Doom.

You think Storm would fall in love for a villain? And why would Marvel heroes such as Nadia Pym admire villains so much?



According to "Children's Crusade, Doom was the one that planned the genocide of mutantkind caused after "House of M".

Didn't Storm promise to kill Doom during Doomwar?

[chamber-music]

Sorta unrelated but hey- a huge swath of the MCU seems to be authoritarian, at the very least. SHIELD this spooky shadow agency that seemingly answers to no one, but don't worry they're good guys! We're lucky Nick Fury isn't a tyrant, but he could be.

SHIELD directors answered to a Supreme International Council in the early comics and later a twelve-member council. SHIELD originally was associated with the U.S Government and later on the U.N. It is a espionage organisation with oversight but some rather lax and limited oversight.

[Missing Username]

Didn't Storm promise to kill Doom during Doomwar?

Imagine how conflicted she felt. The dictator she loves vs her then husband.

[Iron Maiden]

Imagine how conflicted she felt. The dictator she loves vs her then husband.

Still waiting to see some proof that;

Storm is in love with Victor.
Other genius heroes worship Doom

You need to back up your statements with solid evidence or you're just farting in the wind.

[CaptCleghorn]

Still waiting to see some proof that;

Storm is in love with Victor.
Other genius heroes worship Doom

You need to back up your statements with solid evidence or you're just farting in the wind.

Pretty much. The Reed/Victor relationship has been discussed a lot in FF and Doom threads. There's more there than just hero/villain. And if my worst enemy managed to deliever my daughter and make sure she (and/or my wife? didn't die in childbirth, I'd have a much higher opinion of them.

Nadia Wasp fawned over Doom in an Avengers issue. The subject was Doom's considerable scientific resume, NOT his political leanings.

Many women have a thing for bad boys. I don't understand women.

And Doom saved the multiverse (except for Reed's little ship). Doom created Battleworld without which all would have been lost. So, he has a few checks in the "pro" column.

[Triniking1234]

The Valeria siding with Doom is just to back up her character development and for that to even work in the Hickman era, Doom had to be written pretty tame. During that time, Val was shown to have a crush on Bentley, a super-villain's kid.

Nadia admiring Doom was only done for his Iron Man push. She was the only Avenger who never encountered him.

The only hero that talks to Doom willing is probably Namor and that's only when he wants something from him; he doesn't admire him.

Nice try reaching, OP.

[Iron Maiden]

The Valeria siding with Doom is just to back up her character development and for that to even work in the Hickman era, Doom had to be written pretty tame. During that time, Val was shown to have a crush on Bentley, a super-villain's kid.

Nadia admiring Doom was only done for his Iron Man push. She was the only Avenger who never encountered him.

The only hero that talks to Doom willing is probably Namor and that's only when he wants something from him; he doesn't admire him.

Nice try reaching, OP.

I would add Doctor Strange to the group that doesn't have a beyond repair relationship with Doom. He took Doom at his word that he was trying to do the right thing when very few did. Ben sort of came around but then Slott ignored things in "Infamous" and Zdarskty's MTIO where Doom was tagging along with Ben and Johnny to make sure they didn't get themselves killed or something.

Pretty much. The Reed/Victor relationship has been discussed a lot in FF and Doom threads. There's more there than just hero/villain. And if my worst enemy managed to deliever my daughter and make sure she (and/or my wife? didn't die in childbirth, I'd have a much higher opinion of them.

Nadia Wasp fawned over Doom in an Avengers issue. The subject was Doom's considerable scientific resume, NOT his political leanings.

Many women have a thing for bad boys. I don't understand women.

And Doom saved the multiverse (except for Reed's little ship). Doom created Battleworld without which all would have been lost. So, he has a few checks in the "pro" column.

I think that is why Reed was cutting him some slack in Zdarsky's MTIO (even though he did tie Doom to a rock before he wiped his memory) Reed and BP's plan was only going to save an arc full of people and then even that failed to save all of the passengers. Doom was going for it all, or it least what they could do until the incursions accelerated towards the end.

As for the thing with women, just think of Doom as the MU version of the Phantom of the Opera. That play's been running for decades because of the appeal of the Phantom...nobody cares about Raoul And Eric does murder a couple of people in the play IIRC.

[Blind Wedjat]

Why bring up Wakanda as an example if you're gonna call T'Challa a liberal? Didn't you just defeat your own argument?

[Huntsman Spider]

Here are the opinions of some creators on Doom:

"I had a hand in creating Doctor Doom...Doom is a very tragic figure...I like Doom. Doom has got a lot of class, he's got a lot of cool. But Doom has one fallacy: he thinks he's ugly. He's afraid to take that mask off. Doom is an extremist; he's a paranoid. He thinks in extremes...if Doom had an enemy, he'd have to wipe him out. And if Doom thought that anybody was smarter than himself, he'd kill 'em, because Doom would have to be the smartest man in the world."
— Jack Kirby, Kirby & Lee: Stuf’ Said!: The complex genesis of the Marvel Universe, in its creators’ own words, by John Morrow.

"Everybody has Doctor Doom misunderstood. Everybody thinks he’s a criminal, but all he wants is to rule the world. Now, if you really think about it objectively, you could walk up to a policeman, and you could say, 'Excuse me, officer, I want to tell you something: I want to rule the world.' He can’t arrest you; it’s not a crime to want to rule the world."
— Stan Lee

"Doom, at heart, is a revolutionary, and there's no such thing as a revolutionary who's all bad. Even Robespierre had a couple of good ideas. He was a barking lunatic whose hobby was lopping people's heads off, but he had a few good ideas. Doom's very first detailed act in the Marvel Universe was when he took control of Latveria from a bunch of calcified aristocratic types...Doom may do monstrous things, but he is not a monster."
— Warren Ellis, 2099 Special: The World of Doom

"Doom was born a [Romani]...Put differently, he was one of us. His aspect was scarred from his attempts to transcend himself, and so he donned a mask...Comics are so often seen as the province of white geeky nerds. But, more broadly, comics are the literature of outcasts, of pariahs, of Jews, of gays, of blacks. It's really no mistake that we saw ourselves in Doom, Magneto or Rogue."
— Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Jack Kirby's quote at the end sums up perfectly why Doom is still a villain, barring his occasional heroic or anti-heroic turns. He sees competition not as something that makes him strive to improve himself, but a threat to be eliminated at all costs. Reed Richards is only slightly smarter than Doom, but even that slight edge is enough to set Doom off and make him see and treat Reed as an enemy regardless of the many times Reed has tried to reach out to him in friendship, brushing off those attempts as pity, condescension, mockery, or even underhanded. It's that fundamental insecurity in himself that he can't or won't overcome (at least not for very long) that drives his villainy and it is simultaneously saddening and horrifying, the latter when you consider the lengths he's sometimes gone to in order to avenge a perceived slight or counter a perceived threat against him.

As for Warren Ellis's quote, that makes sense for where Doom was at the time he was writing him. It was the year 2099 and the world was effectively ruled by deeply corrupt corporate oligarchs who'd made a bigger mess of his beloved Latveria than even the aristocrats that used to run it, so despite the lines Doom himself might've crossed, him taking over the United States to oust the corporate leaders and make reforms to improve general quality of life was better than letting the mega-corporations continue as they were. As for his overall place in the Marvel Universe, Ellis's take strikes me as more along the lines of someone who sees things not necessarily in terms of "black and white, good versus evil," but more like "there are people, and they all want stuff, and no two people want the same exact thing, so that causes conflicts, and who's 'right' or 'wrong' depends purely on whose side you're on and what you stand to gain." The part where he says "no such thing as a revolutionary who's all bad" could also apply to Magneto, for much the same reasoning, and even Magneto himself said at one point that just because he had aligned himself with the X-Men, that didn't make him a hero or change his overall goals: "There's just what I want, and what I'll do to get it." Rather bluntly cynical, but also rather honest, in a manner of speaking.

Then Coates's take, which makes a degree of sense because comics themselves were for so long a pariah medium and genre, disrespected by the masses and demonized by those with power and authority and "respectability," so of course a lot of members of disenfranchised groups and cultures gravitated toward them, especially after the X-Men got popular. In that sense, I can see how someone would gravitate toward Doom, who did rise above and ultimately conquer those who disrespected and demonized him for his roots, which is a very potent and enduring fantasy for so many in real life.

Concerning the overarching point of whether or not Marvel has a thing for fascists or not, I'd say the superhero genre as a whole could be argued to have issues with authoritarianism, elitism, and even privilege and entitlement, boiled down to, "These people are innately special and superior compared to everyone else, and because of that, they deserve to lead and take command of the masses, they know what's best for everyone, and anybody who dares dispute that is just an ingrate trying to take down their betters out of pure envy and spite."

I mean, if superhumans did exist in the real world, with inscrutable motives or even motives that were all too close to more recognizably human motivations, would people not be rational for being suspicious of them and their intentions for society? Not to mention how a number of them are at least social elites already by virtue of their wealth or positions in their civilian lives, and then they become costumed "heroes" (in part) due to said wealth and position and act (even more) like they're above the laws and rules that govern everyone else due to a combination of their acquired or innate abilities and wealth and resources. If you think about and look at it long and hard enough, the superhero concept is full of troubling crypto- or proto-fascist implications and messages, especially when you get into the thorny issue of super-intelligent heroes withholding revolutionary, even transformative inventions from the public because "the world isn't ready" or superheroes in general beating up disenfranchised and/or mentally ill individuals that are painted as unironic, unexamined bad guys to make that seem ok.

In retrospect, that's probably why Spider-Man remains my favorite superhero of all time, because he just doesn't buy into that sort of thing. No matter how often people in-universe tell him he's special, he doesn't really believe it. He remains at heart "a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man" who just wants to help people and does what he does out of both a sense of moral obligation and a sense of guilt from what happened when he did start thinking he was special and better than other people and thus deserved to have or get whatever he wanted. He let a common thief go, and that thief later killed his uncle Ben, one of the few people who loved him and who he loved in return. That's what's kept him humble all these years, and while it might mean that he hasn't seized as many opportunities as he "should" to better his station in life, he knows that there's a lot more to life and to being a hero than that, and so he perseveres.

[kjn]

Concerning the overarching point of whether or not Marvel has a thing for fascists or not, I'd say the superhero genre as a whole could be argued to have issues with authoritarianism, elitism, and even privilege and entitlement, boiled down to, "These people are innately special and superior compared to everyone else, and because of that, they deserve to lead and take command of the masses, they know what's best for everyone, and anybody who dares dispute that is just an ingrate trying to take down their betters out of pure envy and spite."

There is another angle to the origin of superheroes, and that is that they were a cultural response (especially in the US) to a change in how justice was perceived and done. Instead of the idea of the idea of the posse, or the idea of exerting justice by and for yourself, it was something that became professionalised and turned to the domain of the state.

It's similar to 19th century trend of romantic novels about the aristocracy, just as they were losing their political and economic stranglehold. A lot of those were romantic stories about marriages between the old aristocracy and commoners—fantasies about social movement, just as Batman are fantasies about justice.

I mean, if superhumans did exist in the real world, with inscrutable motives or even motives that were all too close to more recognizably human motivations, would people not be rational for being suspicious of them and their intentions for society? Not to mention how a number of them are at least social elites already by virtue of their wealth or positions in their civilian lives, and then they become costumed "heroes" (in part) due to said wealth and position and act (even more) like they're above the laws and rules that govern everyone else due to a combination of their acquired or innate abilities and wealth and resources. If you think about and look at it long and hard enough, the superhero concept is full of troubling crypto- or proto-fascist implications and messages, especially when you get into the thorny issue of super-intelligent heroes withholding revolutionary, even transformative inventions from the public because "the world isn't ready" or superheroes in general beating up disenfranchised and/or mentally ill individuals that are painted as unironic, unexamined bad guys to make that seem ok.

I think that's what Watchmen tried to discuss, but everyone took the wrong lessons from it.

But I think you need to consider the mutable and corruptive nature of fascism when talking about this. You can literally find fascist (or authoritarian) trends everywhere, if you look enough. That doesn't make them dangerous, it is only in certain combinations that they become so. In a way, the costumes of the superheroes are there to signal that the fantasy of the superman who will lead us is in fact a fantasy.

That doesn't mean you can't criticise or examine superhero comics from standpoints of ethics and values. You should! But sweeping statements isn't critique.

[Missing Username]

That doesn't mean you can't criticise or examine superhero comics from standpoints of ethics and values. You should! But sweeping statements isn't critique.

I think that the combination of fascist trends that make it look dangerous is already there at play.

No one held Marvel writers at gun point to write that the only good Marvel Earths in yhe whole Multiverse are those under a fascist regime. No one forced them to write heroes trusting fascist dictators with the education of their children, or to make a fascist dictator the biggest idol of a character aimed at young readers, or to have their smartest characters so positive about fascism, or to make their heroines so weak in their knees and their hearts when meet a fascist, and the list goes on.

The first issue of Slott's Fantastic Four had the people of Latveria fighting for the return of fascism, and some pannels of it were homages to paintings representing the French Revolution. How is this not in bad taste?

[Revolutionary_Jack]

...some pannels of it were homages to paintings representing the French Revolution. How is this not in bad taste?

What does the French Revolution have to do with fascism? Actual fascists hated the French revolution for you know doing stuff like giving equal rights to minorities, including Jews, and Roma, as well as abolishing slavery for the first time in European history.

I guess Dan Slott wanted to compare Doom to Napoleon, and Napoleon is an example of a figure who was seen as both tyrant and liberator. Napoleon was popular among oppressed people like Poles, and Jews, because his regime was beneficial to them.

[Missing Username]

What does the French Revolution have to do with fascism? Actual fascists hated the French revolution for you know doing stuff like giving equal rights to minorities, including Jews, and Roma, as well as abolishing slavery for the first time in European history.

But I am not the one equating the French Revolution to a fight for fascism. That was Marvel.

Why do it? I suppose for the same reason they wrote that, in all the Multiverse, the only good Earths are those under a fascist regime.

[Sandy Hausler]

Doom doesn’t qualify as a fascist dictator either. Unless you think dictator=fascist. Which it doesn’t. You can be a fascist and not a dictator and vice versa.

Dr. Doom doesn’t run Latveria on any racist or bigoted ideology. He has never called for genocide or so on.

I don't think racism is a necessary part of fascism, though it's common. Dictionary.com defines fascism as:
governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism

I don't know if Doom's form of government utilizes aggressive nationalism, but he otherwise seems to fit the definition.

[Iron Maiden]

I don't think racism is a necessary part of fascism, though it's common. Dictionary.com defines fascism as:
governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism

I don't know if Doom's form of government utilizes aggressive nationalism, but he otherwise seems to fit the definition.

Even though Doom is a Romani and the tribe he belongs to were treated as outcasts, he really only focused on taking his vengeance out on the former ruling family. He did kill the King and one of his sons, Prince Zorba. Prince Rudolpho was killed by the Red Skull.

My theory is that Doom practices a kind of feudal socialism. The standard of living in Latveria is pretty good, there a are schools and health care for the citizens. There are no elections and whatever cabinet exists is on the whim of Doom. Sometimes you see a PM or maybe a local burgomeister but not much else.