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Doctor Doom is one of Marvel’s greatest villains, but in his 1610 adaptation, the Ultimate Doom proved to be a dramatic departure.
Many of the changes Ultimate Marvel made when rebooting their classic catalog of characters were uwell recieved. In keeping with the comic line’s aim to modernize some of their heroes’ dated origins, it makes sense to change, for instance, the Fantastic Four from Cold War-era space explorers into dimension-hopping scientists. But some of the changes made went beyond just modernization.
Look no further than Doctor Doom. Dubbed “Victor Van Damme” in the 1610 universe, the new take on the classic villain proved to be a mix of much-needed changes and baffling alterations. Just how did Marvel reshape Doctor Doom for their new universe?
Most of the changes came at the start of Ultimate Fantastic Four when the canvas to the new universe was still blank and free for experimentation. Victor Von Doom’s classic origins as the ruler of a foreign nation who became a scarred mad scientist when an experiment went wrong in he and Reed Richard’s college days were in sore need of an update, sounding both incredibly hokey and undermining the true menace of the legendary villain. To that end, Ultimate Marvel had a strong start.
Renamed Victor Van Damme, the young heir was instead a distant descendent of Vlad Tepes Dracula whose family psychotically instilled in him his sense of entitlement and self-importance. His relationship with Reed during their teenage years was no longer a coincidence but rather a result of the government specifically seeking out super-geniuses and collecting them into the think tank. The ill-fated experiment became the same one that granted the Fantastic Four their powers. Instead of merely scarring Doom, it transformed him much the same as it did the heroes. His skin turned to iron, he developed cloven hooves and a host of new powers.
All in all, there was a lot there to create a promising start for a fresh take on the character, forcing him to build the nation of Latveria from the ground up and harboring a meaningful grudge toward the Fantastic Four. The difficulty came when Ultimate Marvel did not commit to the take on the character, scrapping almost everything that made him unique by his next appearance. Looking just like the classic 616 Doctor Doom when he reemerged, he was once again decked out in decadence as Latveria became a thriving nation. He plotted to swap minds with Reed Richards, and worst of all, there was no distinct direction designed for the character.
Doctor Doom went from saving Johnny Storm’s life and ending the threat of the Marvel Zombieverse so that he could be remembered as a hero, to seemingly scheming to take over the Supremeverse, to enacting the complicated events of Ultimatum that saw much of the world (including Latveria) devastated by natural disaster. Some of those machinations turned out to be imposters and Doombots before the original version of the character reappeared almost inexplicably. Despite the character’s initial prominence in the origins of the Fantastic Four that set him up to be their greatest antagonist, he instead became an inscrutable figure who disappeared and reappeared in their lives at random.
There were nuggets of promise in the stories that bothered to focus on Ultimate Doctor Doom, but with so many creators cycling through him and few ever getting the chance to follow up on what they built while retconning previous stories, Doom was never given his due. Rather than living up to his mythic status as he did in the original Marvel universe, Ultimate Doom became one of the most disappointing reinventions ever.
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