Marvel just revealed the new design for Doctor Doom’s face, and it’s pure nightmare fuel. Doom’s iron mask has always hidden horrific injuries, but Marvel is taking that concept further than ever before.
In Marvel’s comic lore, Doctor Doom suffered minor injuries to his face after a college experiment blew up. Shamed by the minor mark of his failure, he ordered the creation of a metal mask, placing it on his face before it has cooled and severely burning his face.
These injuries are part of why Doom hates Reed Richards, who warned him that his initial experiment was faulty, turning the initial scar into a mark of Reed’s intellectual superiority. Doom has wrongly blamed Reed for his injures for decades. Now, that blame just became a LOT more reasonable.
Doctor Doom Gets Fried in Midnight Debut
In today’s Midnight: Fantastic Four #1 – from Benjamin Percy, Kev Walker, Frank D’Armata and Joe Sabino – Marvel introduces its new horror-focused continuity. The issue sees Reed Richards attempting to access the ‘Negative Zone,’ characterized as an irresponsible obsessive rather than a responsible scientist.
Aided by a young friend he identifies as ‘Victor,’ Reed is hooked on mysterious pills, activating a ‘gate’ while Victor is still touching it (something Reed asked him to do.) Doom is all but incinerated, left in a corpse-like state with severe burns over his entire body. When Reed desperately asks what he saw during the experience, Victor answers only “Hell.”
Midnight: Fantastic Four Transforms Reed and Doom’s Relationship
In traditional Marvel lore, Reed Richards is essentially blameless in Doctor Doom’s injury. While asking about Victor’s calculations might have made him doubt his work, there’s no reasonable claim that Doom’s injuries are his fault – especially because the majority of them were due to Doom’s later vanity.
In ‘Midnight’ canon, the opposite is true. Reed is responsible for Victor’s horrific injuries multiple times over. Not only does he ask Victor to prep the equipment that burns him, he literally presses the buttom that activates it and is high while doing so. He’s justly arrested and locked up for his criminal culpability, only escaping because Sue Storm’s powerful corporation has him handed over to their custody.
Doctor Doom’s Mom Is Midnight: Fantastic Four’s Surprise Villain
Shockingly, the comic ends by revealing that Victor survived his injuries, recovering in the care of his mother. It seems Doctor Doom’s mom will be a major villain for the comic, using eldritch science to keep her son alive, and interrogating him about Reed’s experiment.
In classic Marvel lore, Doctor Doom’s mother is a powerful sorcerer who ended up trapped in Hell by Mephisto, with Doom attempting to rescue her once a year until eventually succeeding thanks to help from Doctor Strange. in Midnight: Fantastic Four #1, Doctor Doom’s mother appears to be a gifted scientist instead, and possibly already familiar with the energies of the Negative Zone.
With the Storm family depicted as profit-obsessed villains and Reed Richards a deeply irresponsible monomaniac, Midnight: Fantastic Four is already a radical reinvention of the franchise, depicting Doctor Doom as an innocent victim of Reed’s obsession with unearthly forces
Midnight: Fantastic Four #1 is available now from Marvel Comics.
