Thursday, February 6, 2025

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 720: DR DOOM

(Science Comics 001, 1940)

Dr Doom, another super-villain with his own series (I swear that they're rare over all but 1940 sure is a fertile year for them), lives in an unspecified future and is your classic mad science polymath, as demonstrated by his various schemes:

In his very first outing, Dr Doom decides to do some extreme testing of his latest formula and uses it to shrink Jan and Wanda, two otherwise-nondescript youths who just happen to also be his recurring nemeses going forward. They escape of course and, after defeating a crab and regaining their former size, haul him back home to Jupiter with them to face justice.



Of course Dr Doom also escapes and makes his way back to his laboratory. His next two schemes are also shrinking-based: in Science Comics 002 he kidnaps people (including Jan and Wanda) and forces them to battle insects to the death, while Science Comics 004 sees him shrinking Jan and Wanda's home city of Daru on Jupiter to use as his personal playground. This adventure ends with Doom himself shrink and on display in a museum of oddities, an event which seems to put him off the field of shrinking entirely going forward.

In Science Comics 005, Dr Doom unleashes cosmic ray mutations from the depths of the Grand Canyon in a bid to conquer the US. Also the Grand Canyon is expanding for some reason? This is perhaps the most incoherent Dr Doom story and ends with his equipment just exploding for no particular reason.


The shock of his last scheme failing so thoroughly seems to have had a profound effect on Dr Doom, because at this stage he enters his "revenge on humanity" period. To that end, in Science Comics 006, he develops and unleashes the Grey Mold Disease and sets it loose on the world until he is forced to reveal the antidote by Jan and Wanda when they threaten to inject him with the even more deadly Green Mold Disease.

Next, in Science Comics 007, Doom uses a magnetic ray in an attempt to throw the entire Earth off its orbit and into the Sun, but misjudges the gravity on his planetoid base and goes flying off into space himself while fleeing from Jan. As always there is no word on how he gets out of this seemingly inescapable doom, but this is the one I'm most curious about.


Science Comics 008 is a bit of a break for Dr Doom, as he settles down in Long Island with his amazing screaming robot Lodi. Attempting to wipe out humanity is pretty hard work, so Doom and Lodi are taking it easy by merely blasting various humans into a hostile alternate dimension filled with cannibalistic ogres. 

(this and the previous story also appear to be set in or around 1940, which likely means that they were either a) repurposed from some already-finished art or b) produced by someone who didn't particularly care about continuity. See also Jan and Wanda going from space adventurers to reporters for the New York Daily Star)


Dr Doom's appearance in Big 3 001 is another stab at destroying humanity, as he facilitates a Venusian invasion by producing deadly mists. Two notes about this one: 1) the Venusians are amazing looking little weirdos and 2) his attempted revenge on Jan and Wanda by making them but not their potential offspring immune to the mists so they must wander alone through a dead world is harsh as hell.


Dr Doom's final appearance (and only appearance in 1941) in Green Mask 004 involves him attacking passing space shipping from a base on Uranus. It's a bit of a ho-hum scheme to go out on, but at least it features some weird little homunculus creatures that Doom makes out of cats. More villains need more little critters around just kind of being moderately useful.

In a lot of previous adventures Jan and Wanda haul Dr Doom off to prison or just kind of leave him to rot in whatever bombed-out laboratory they just escaped from but this is the one where they genuinely attempt to kill him by bombing his lab from orbit. It's pretty understandable after all of the trouble he's caused them, but they don't bother to confirm the kill and so we leave Dr Doom alive and stranded on Uranus. Did he ever got out of there to vex them again? We can never know.

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