Will the Real Doctor Doom Please Stand Up? – The Less Famous Comic Book Dr. Dooms

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In the latest Drawing Crazy Patterns, where we spotlight five recurring themes in comics, we examine five times that a character named Doctor Doom appeared in comics.

One of the less-famous aspects of the Marvel Comics boom of the 1960s was the way that Martin Goodman (Marvel’s publisher) and Stan Lee (Marvel’s Editor-in-Cheif and chief scripter) decided that the success of the Marvel Age of Comics should be used to “cash in” on as many cool names as possible. Goodman actually thought that a good idea was to simply TAKE once-popular characters whose publishers had gone out of business, and simply start publishing them as Marvel characters, under the theory that the characters’ intellectual property rights had been abandoned. In 1967, Marvel DID do this with a character known as the Ghost Rider, and while that did not work out that well, Marvel, of course, later re-used the NAME Ghost Rider for another, more famous, character. Similarly, Goodman wanted to take over the old Lev Gleason character, Daredevil, but when Steve Ditko wouldn’t do it, Goodman instead just had the NAME be used for, well, obviously, Daredevil.

Goodman had been around in the Golden Age, and so he obviously remembered just how big names were when the Golden Age comic boom was happening. Comic book companies would be fighting each other to see who could get a book to market first with various catchy names, like Action Comics, Police Comics, or Whiz Comics (Captain Marvel debuted in Whiz Comics because Fawcett failed to get the rights to the name Flash Comics). The same would go for names, in general, and so Marvel would often pick up some of the coolest names from the Golden Age that had gone defunct, and one of the most famous of those names was Doctor Doom, who made his debut in 1962’s Fantastic Four #5…

The funny thing is that Marvel wasn’t even the only comic book company that MONTH who remembered how cool the Doctor Doom name was! I will reveal what the other company was at the end of this look at four other comic book characters other than THE Doctor Doom who used the name Doctor Doom!

Doctor Doom tried to stop an international incident

One of the almost “lost” pieces of popular culture is the “Big Little Book.” During the 1930s and 1940s, a very popular series of books was Whitman’s Big Little Books, which were small, square illustrated novels. The “Big Little Book” format was used in a number of different formats over the years, as well, until it was pretty much defunct by the end of the 1950s, but had a revival in the late 1960s (there’s one notable Big Little Book from that era that I’ll write about in the future). One of the most important Big Little Books was Gang Busters in Action, a 1938 Big Little Book that Bob Kane swiped from HEAVILY for the first appearance of Batman in Detective Comics #27 a year later. Essentially, if there was a Bruce Wayne drawing in Detective Comics #27, it likely was a swipe from Gang Busters in Action.

Okay, as you all know by now, the earliest versions of what we think of as American comic books were just reprint collections of newspaper comic strips. In Dell’s The Comics in 1937, though, there was an unusual deal done where Dell licensed a Big Little Book, and serialized it in the pages of The Comics, as well. Obviously, the drawings had to be reformatted to fit into a comic book format, but the end result was the feature Internaitonal Spy Starring Doctor Doom, where the world’s most famous spy, Doctor Doom, helps a European country when a rival country plots to kidnap their king, and when they pull off the kidnapping even after that (since the King’s Guard all sucked at their job), Doctor Doom plots a way to rescue the king.

It’s kind of embarrassing that, in a comic book starring a dude named Doctor Doom, that the villain, known as The Falcon, is so much more interesting and cool-looking.

Doctor Doom used a shrink ray years before Marvel’s Doom did the same

It’s interesting to note that in the pages of the Fantastic Four, one of the first things that Doctor Doom used against the Fantastic Four (after he switched bodies with Mister Fantastic in Fantastic Four #10) was a shrinking ray, as that was the device used by the villainous Doctor Doom of the Fox Feature Syndicate in early 1940. Victor Fox was one of the first comic book publishers who got into the business, clearly just trying to piggyback on the success of other publishers, as noted by his infamous attempt at doing his own version of Superman with Wonderman, which National Comics successfully stopped via a lawsuit (a lawsuit that the young artist on the project, Will Eisner, would later mislead people about for the rest of his life, claiming that he testified against Fox at the trial, when in reality, he did testify on Fox’s behalf at the trial. I don’t think anyone would have begrudged the young artist supporting his employer at the time, but it was weird that Eisner claimed otherwise for so long).

Doctor Doom was a generic science fiction villain that appeared in a few different issues of Fox’s Science Comics. His first appearance saw him working on a shrink ray…

Doctor Doom appeared in a handful of issues of Science Comics through 1940.

Doctor Doom led a team of detective students to save the day

Something that is important to remember about comic books in the Golden Age is that almost every comic book company on the market was tied to a respective pulp fiction publisher. In other words, when comic books blew up in a big way around 1939/1940, the first people to notice the booming sales were pulp fiction publishers, as they were very much in the same sphere of people and distributors. Martin Goodman, of course, was famously a pulp fiction publisher before he got into comics. Fawcett not only was into pulp fiction, but it even continued selling pulp fiction magazines AFTER it got out of the comic book business! One of the most famous magazine publishers around in the 1930 and 1940s was Curtis, publishers of The Saturday Evening Post and Ladies Home Journal. A company like Curtis was LESS likely to get into comics, but sure enough, they DID have their own comic book company, Novelty Press, for a few years in the 1940s (interestingly, years later, Perfect Film bought Curtis’ distribution system AND Marvel Comics).

One of its titles was Young King Cole, about a private detective. A backup story in 1946’s Young King Cole #2, drawn by Nina Albright, one of the few female Golden Age comic book artists, introduced another private detective named Doctor Doom, and his detective students, who helped solve a crime together…

One of the hooks for the series was that Doctor Doom wasn’t really some hard-boiled detective, but more of an academic (hence Dr. Doom), and his students would sometimes doubt whether he had what it took to really capture criminals, but he would obviously always show them in the end. In general, though, they respected their teacher. The feature recurred throughout the next twenty issues or so of Young King Cole.

Stan Lee’s First Doctor Doom Was a Far Different Character

In 1957, Martin Goodman’s comic book company (it really didn’t have an official name at the time, although it was best known as Atlas Comics at the time. However, until it settled on Marvel Comics in the 1960s, the company really didn’t have a singular name) put out its own knockoff version of the popular Casper the Friendly Ghost comic book series from Harvey Comics with The Adventure of Homer the Ghost, by Stan Lee and Tony DiPreta. Of course, only Lee was credited on the stories inside (I imagine, then, that there was a whole generation of little kids who thought that Stan Lee was a comic book artist).

In any event, in the second issue of the series, Homer and his friends ran afoul of the evil mad scientist, Doctor Doom…

This Casper knockoff didn’t last too long, as this was the final issue, so Doctor Doom never got a chance to become a recurring character.

The same month that Doctor Doom was debuting in Fantastic Four, another Doctor Doom took his first bow

As I noted earlier, I said I would share which comic book company ALSO tried to bring back the Doctor Doom name the same month as Fantastic Four #5, and as it turns out, it was Archie Comics! One of the all-time great Archie comic book creators was Bob Bolling, who amazingly is still with us. He is set to turn 97 years young this June. Bolling got his start at Archie the same way a lot of other notable artists started, just doing those one-page joke pages they would often insert into various comics. He then wrote and drew a Dennis the Menace knockoff for Archie called Pat the Brat (one thing you’ll learn today is that pretty much everyone was constantly copying everyone else). Eventually, John Goldwater asked Bolling to design the characters (and then write and draw) for a series of stories spotlighting Archie and the gang when they were kids called, of course, Little Archie. Little Archie became Bolling’s most famous series, and what was so interesting about his stories was that they really felt like their own little world. It wasn’t just a case of him taking every Archie character and making them Little, he also invented a number of characters who were distinct to just the Little Archie stories.

One of those new characters was Doctor Doom, who debuted in 1962’s The Adventures of Little Archie #24, along with his numb-skulled assistant, Chester…

Doom’s plot involves robots that hypnotize people, but, of course, Doom couldn’t possibly guess that his very first plot involving the hypnotizing robots, in which they would take over the local department store, would happen to fall on the same day that Little Archie was shopping with his mother. Through a series of wacky hijinx, Archie had his big ol’ head stuck in a suit of armor, which blocked the robots’ attempts to hypnotize him. Once he realized what was going on, Little Archie went on the offensive, pulling a bit of a John McClane in Die Hard, striking at the robots from within…

While the Archie version of Doctor Doom launched the same month as Marvel’s more famous Doctor Doom, obviously the Marvel version became more famousl and as a result, Archie appears ot try to avoid any problems by only referring to their Doctor Doom as Mad Doctor Doom. Interestingly, just recently, Archie Comics introduced Mad Doctor Doom’s daughter, MEDUSA DOOM, in a comic book story.

Remember, everyone, that these lists are inherently not exhaustive. They are a list of five examples (occasionally I’ll be nice and toss in a sixth). So no instance is “missing” if it is not listed. It’s just not one of the five examples that I chose. Thanks to reader Atreyu H. for suggesting this one! If anyone else has suggestions for a future Drawing Crazy Patterns, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!

“}]] While Victor Von Doom is obviously the most famous comic book Doctor Doom, there have been a surprising amount of OTHER Doctor Dooms over the years  Read More