Fantastic Four #10

The Return of Dr Doom

By Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers

Villains: Dr Doom

Guest Appearances: Alicia Masters

So, What Happens?

Reed is investigating the limits of Sue’s invisibility when they are interrupted by the signal flare. After struggling to get into the Fantasticar hangar they head across the city on foot, causing a car accident and nearly burning a crowd of passersby before they reach Alicia’s apartment.

The Thing had summoned them to see Alicia’s latest sculptures of their foes. They are all very impressed although the presence of a Sub-Mariner statue causes some tension between Reed and Sue.

At the Marvel comics offices Lee and Kirby are working on ideas for the next issue of the Fantastic Four comic when in walks Dr Doom. He demands that the comics creators bring Richards to the office for a story conference and when he arrives Doom gases him and takes him to his castle.

He reveals that he had been saved from death by the alien Ovoids and taught the ability of swapping personalities with another body. He subjects Reed to this just as the rest of the FF crash in.

The team ignore the cries of Reed in Doom’s armour and swiftly capture him and leave him in an air tight cell before heading back to New York with Doom still in Reed’s form.

Doom/Reed immediately sets about stealing a load of Zoo animals and shrinking them down to miniature size. The others are suspicious but are convinced by Doom’s explanation that he had to do it because dinosaurs would have evolved into a sentient species if only they had been smaller.

He plans on shrinking down the rest of the FF, a process that will supposedly increase their powers and transform the Thing back to Ben Grimm.

Reed manages to get out of his prison and makes it to Alicia Master’s apartment. She is won around by the gentleness of Reed-Doom’s voice but Sue is on hand to knock him out with a flower pot. Ben and Johnny arrive and attack “Doom” only for Ben too to feel that he seems too good to be their enemy.

They bring him back to the Baxter Building where the real Doom is instantly hostile towards him and desperately tries to get his shrinking ray finished.

Johnny creates an image of some lit dynamite which Reed in Doom’s armour instantly throws himself on to save everyone else whereas Doom as Reed tries to hide in a pipe using Reed’s stretching powers.

The shock of the events loosens Doom’s mind transfer and the two rivals return to their own bodies. In the conflict that follows Doom accidentally triggers the shrinking ray and is shrunk down to nothingness.

So is it any good?:

It’s hard to really classify it. It has its good moments but it’s such a long way from what you think of when you think of Doom. It’s interesting just how much of his classic characterisation really requires Latveria and the unassailable ego of a ruler.

Here he wants to mind swap in order to gain Reed’s physical powers, and in fact with those powers he makes short work of the Doom armour (admittedly Reed wouldn’t know how to use it instantly) and then spends ages working on a shrinking ray to deal with the rest of the team. He doesn’t really come across as the ultimate bad guy in this story, he spends some of it smashing up Lee and Kirby’s ash tray and stealing zoo animals.

The ‘rescued by the ovoids’ section is probably the ultimate example of any comics death being fixable. The sheer throwaway stupidity of it all is quite special.

I did like a lot of the visuals, Ben reading a paper with the headline ‘Zoo animals missing’ as he is surrounded by miniature bears and camels is great.

It’s a very inventive issue visually for Reed’s powers and I liked the way that it built up the one to one rivalry between Doom and Reed and made that the real focus of his wrath and I liked the way Kirby twisted Reed’s features to show Doom’s evil while he was possessing Reed’s body. So it’s an interesting step forward for Doom but we aren’t really at the finished article yet and it leaves you really wanting to see that version.

The issue focuses mainly on Reed. Johnny gets to almost blow up the Baxter Building and then save the day with one of the totally outré uses of his powers that became the norm in his solo series.

Sue moons over Namor some more but does at least get to knock out Reed with a flower pot. It is however a good issue for the Thing. His relationship with Alicia is developed, with Kirby still using a puppet motif on her first panel, and both he and Alicia can see past the obvious and notice something good in Reed trapped in Doom’s armour.

Are there any goofy moments?

The Baxter Building is so high tech that it has nuclear locks on the interior doors. Nuclear locks that will explode and kill everyone if they get too hot. Nuclear Locks that Reed allows Johnny to experiment with creating non-hot flames on. It’s incredible that the FF have survived for almost 600 issues.

The stolen shrunken zoo animal section is just bizarre. Especially Doom’s story about evolving dinosaurs; which the team totally buys. Is he trying to create mini Kangaroo and Giraffe people? I’d guess Kirby just fancied drawing dinosaur astronauts walking on the moon and Lee had to pad it out somehow.

The scenes with Jack and Stan are fun, although if their relationship with Reed is real and they simply draw what Reed tells them then I’m not sure why Jack was inventing villains for the team to fight.

Johnny’s dynamite mirage powers are just stupid.

Doom hanging onto the meteor is just as silly as it was in issue 6.

Trivia:

The Ovoids appeared again in John Byrne’s She Hulk run and one was part of the Star Blasters, a team of aliens searching for the Star Brand in the pages of Quasar. Here they are just a brief explanation of how Doom escaped certain death in issue 6.

The Ovoid mind transfer has appeared far more frequently than the Ovoids themselves most notably by Doom to escape Terrax in issue 260.

Doom’s shrinking to nothingness at the end unlocked another area of the Marvel Universe, the sub-atomic worlds, and the team follows him there in issue 16

Doom swapping forms with one of the heroes has become something of a tradition. He next does it, with Daredevil, in issue 39 and swaps with Reed again during Chris Claremont and Mark Millar’s runs.

Is it a landmark?:

Not really, it would get referred to a lot in the 80s due to the revival of the Ovoid Mind Transfer but it’s an oddity really rather than a landmark.