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Between his wedding in Fantastic Four and an explosive dinner with Storm, Doctor Doom suffered some embarrassments that may have unleashed his wrath.
WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for Fantastic Four #34 and S.W.O.R.D. #7, on sale now.
Doctor Doom has made a name for himself with his special blend of arrogance and cruelty. He sets himself up as more than man or even a king, trying with all his might and intellect to seem infallible, even godlike, and he usually has the power to back those boasts up. However, Doom is also incredibly vain, and he’s at his most dangerous when something happens that shatters the illusion or makes it seem like Doom is less than perfect.
And between Fantastic Four #34 by Dan Slott, R.B. Silva, Jesus Aburtov, VC’s Joe Caramagna, and S.W.O.R.D. #7 by Al Ewing, Stefano Caselli, Photobunker’s Fer Sifuentes-Sujo, VC’s Ariana Maher, Doom just suffered two embarrassments. While Doom has already started taking his revenge for those slights, they could have dire consequences for the rest of the Marvel Universe.
The central source of Doom’s embarrassment is his ill-fated wedding. Doom had decided that Latveria needed a queen, and he had finally found someone he believed was worthy of such a position in his general Zora Vukovic, better known as Victorious. Unfortunately for Doom, Zora had been intimate with Johnny Storm of the Fantastic Four just moments before Doom proposed to her. Although she accepted Doom’s proposal, Zora could not fulfill her duty to her king and country without telling her betrothed the truth. And in a moment of spectacularly poor timing, she chose to do so at the alter in front of several Marvel heroes.
Needless to say, Doom was humiliated and lashed out at not only the Fantastic Four, but all of his international guests, whom he intended to wipe off the face of the Earth to prevent word from spreading. The one thing in Doom’s favor that day was that the video feed was on a two-minute delay, so the rest of the world didn’t witness his humiliation, but he would have killed everyone in attendance to make sure that no one ever heard something like that had slipped past his notice.
A short time later in S.W.O.R.D. #7, Doom paid a visit to Storm of the X-Men on Arakko, the planet formerly known as Mars, to discuss the mutants’ use of Mysterium, a miracle element that had increased the mutants’ already considerable arsenal. Though Doom tried to play the gracious guest, he couldn’t resist having a slight jibe at Ororo, complimenting her for being a queen instead of “a king’s wife,” teasing her about her former marriage to the Black Panther. But Storm retaliated by asking if talking about their marriages was really in his best interest so soon after his less-than-glamorous wedding, a cutting remark that shut Doom right up.
Aside from the sobering possibility that Ororo and Krakoa’s leadership knew the true reasons behind Doom’s failed wedding, Storm took things a step further. When Doom accused the mutants of playing with forces they didn’t understand and offered to show them how to properly wield it, Ororo reminded him just how powerful the mutants were by blasting the table they were using for dinner. She left Doom on the floor as she informed him that the mutants had come far and still had farther to go, but they didn’t need someone with Doom’s reputation to teach them how to do that.
It’s a humiliating set of circumstances. To suffer the embarrassment of his bride’s breach of trust with one of his sworn enemies, then to have that failure thrown back in his face before being told off by the leader of Marvel’s ascendant empire would be enough to push anyone over the edge. However, Doom isn’t just any man. There are consequences to embarrassing someone as powerful as him. Johnny Storm has learned this the hard way, having his powers become impossible to turn off thanks to Doom.
Doom was close to forgiving the Fantastic Four that day, but because of one lapse in judgment, they’ve guaranteed that they have a lifetime of animosity ahead of them with Doctor Doom. While Doom rarely overstates the danger of dealing with higher powers, he’s arrogant enough to try because he’s had a lot of experience. He’s one of the few characters who understands how dramatically Krakoa’s cosmic ambitions for mutantkind could go awry. In all likelihood, he’s one of the few people who really does understand Mysterium and its potential costs well. And when he’s one of the few people who could help Krakoa, he may simply choose not to out of spite.
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