The article is about the origin story of a supervillain who was suddenly announced as the biggest villain in the multiverse saga of MCU. This supervillain’s story is very interesting. His super genius intellect, unshakable will, and titanium armor allow him to face any superhero or supervillain. For fans, it’s exciting that we’ll get to see a variant of Tony Stark in the role of Doctor Doom, but it’s also concerning how challenging it will be for whoever takes on this role afterward.
The only weakness of this secret wars’ villain is arrogance. In the comics, we first saw him in The Fantastic Four issue 5, but this King of Latveria was introduced so hastily that his origin was revealed later. His mask hides the scars on his face, and he is one of the most brilliant minds on Earth who also possesses sorcery skills, having even served as Sorcerer Supreme at one point. His only aim is to make the world a better place by ruling over it.
Victor von Doom, a.k.a. Doctor Doom, has several parts of his origin story scattered across different corners of Marvel Comics, and there are different versions of this story. Here, we’re going to discuss about the origin depicted in Books of Doom.
Victor’s father, Werner von Doom, was a healer, and his mother, Cynthia, was skilled in sorcery. They were both members of the local Romani class called Zefiro, who were being troubled by the Baron King Latveria. To escape from them, Victor and his people were constantly moving from one place to another.
One day, fed up with this exhausting life, Victor’s mother Cynthia made a pact with Mephisto using her sorcery, which gave her powers to attack the Baron’s soldiers. However, in this attack, Cynthia also killed the children of that village, after which the villagers came after her, and she was killed at their hands. Before dying, Cynthia asked her husband Werner to keep Victor away from dark arts at all costs. After this, Werner gathered all of his wife’s artifacts. Among the Zefiro group, there was also a girl named Valeria, with whom Victor could forget all his problems. But sometime after this event, the Baron summoned Victor’s father, Werner, to heal his wife, but the Baron’s wife could not be saved, and Werner fled with his son.
The Baron’s men pursued them, but Werner and his son hid on a snowy mountain. Victor spent the entire night hiding with his father on the snowy mountain, and when he woke up in the morning, he saw that his father had died from the cold. Seeing his dead father, Victor had a vision of his mother, where he learned about her pact with Mephisto. The Zefiro tribe found both Victor and his father, but then the Baron’s men came and took Victor’s father’s body away. Whatever happiness Victor had left was now gone. Then Victor found his mother’s spell books and artifacts, and he started searching for his mother. When magic didn’t work, he turned to science. Combining magic and science, he managed to keep the Baron’s soldiers away from his people. With the help of his inventions, he did alone what his mother had wanted to do for their people.
One night, while walking away from his people, the Baron’s man stopped him and pointed a gun at his face. Victor fought back and, for the first time, killed someone with his own hands. This incident had a profound effect on him, and he was deeply troubled. A few days later, an American general offered Victor a chance to go to America with him, where he would create something for them in exchange for the opportunity to pursue higher studies.
In America, the military general showed Victor his lab and got him admitted to college. Victor had to create weapons for the general and simply study in college. But Victor wasn’t the only one working for the general; another bright student, Reed Richards, was also working in the same lab. Reed trusted Victor’s knowledge, and Victor respected Reed’s intelligence. Meanwhile, Victor was building bots and bombs for the military general, and at the same time, he was asking them for equipment to set up his own lab in his dorm room.
Although he didn’t respect American culture, he still attended a party where, in a drunken state, he became intimate with a girl and then suddenly grabbed her throat. The feeling he had after killing the Baron’s man came back to him. But then, he regained control of himself, let go of the girl, and left. The military forced the school to cover up the incident, and it was indeed covered up. Victor then immersed himself back into his inventions and experiments. He was very close to achieving time travel, but a few days later, Reed Richards entered Victor’s room and noticed some calculation errors in his research papers. Victor scolded him for entering his dorm room without permission. Reed tried to explain, but Victor told him to leave.
After that, Victor sat in the machine he had set up in his personal dorm room lab and activated it. Mentally, he searched for his mother in hell for weeks, and at one point, he did see her trapped by Mephisto. But his mother told him to leave. In the real world, this entire event lasted only a few hours, and in the end, the machine exploded. One of Victor’s lab assistants lost an eye, and Victor’s face was scarred. Mephisto had touched Victor’s face, and after this event, Victor no longer cared about America. He destroyed all his inventions, lab equipment, everything, and left America.
After leaving America, Victor went to Europe, where he was haunted by nightmares of his mother in hell. Meanwhile, the KGB, American military, and the Baron’s men were all after him. The Baron, working with the American government, sent Victor’s childhood friend Valeria after him. Valeria didn’t know that the Baron was behind all of this. Then, they were attacked, but a sorcerer saved them and sent Victor to a temple in Tibet.
After months of climbing snowy mountains and facing dangerous creatures, Victor finally reached the temple in Tibet. It took him five years to master the mystic arts and the technology there, becoming the best in both. He also built a device there that allowed him to get news from all over the world. Through this device, he learned about Reed Richards’ space vessel and about the Baron Latveria as well. Victor then forged a mystical armor and mask for himself and took on the name Doctor Doom. He set out with a monk named Lernin to take revenge on Baron Latveria.
Doom arrived in Latveria and stayed in the empty castle in the deserted village. This is the same village where his mother had killed children with her magic. Doom fought the guards there and freed the prisoners, telling them to spread the message that Latveria’s dictator would bow before Doctor Doom’s powers. Returning to his castle, Doom began making the same robots he had been building for the military in America. He then tracked down his old Zefiro tribe and asked them to pass on a holographic projector to the people, in which Doctor Doom challenged the Baron’s power.
One of them refused Doom, but as soon as Doom killed him, the others agreed. Soon, word spread throughout Latveria that Doctor Doom had come to free the people of Latveria. A rebellious army formed against Baron of Latveria, with Doctor Doom’s robots and the rebellious army together winning many battles. Every day, new rebels joined Doom. Then Doom sent a holographic message to Latveria, telling him to surrender now and live, that he would always be the Baron responsible for his father’s death. The Baron broke the holographic device and ordered his army to prepare for battle.
But when Doctor Doom and his rebellious army arrived, Latveria’s army made way for them. Doom went straight to the Baron and killed him in the same way he had killed the man before leaving Latveria. After Baron’s death, Doom took his green cape and cloak chain, wearing both to become the new king of Latveria. After all this, Victor summoned Mephisto and formed a pact with him. Every year, Mephisto would give him a chance to free his mother. But the more times he failed, the more the people of Latveria would hate him. But even if he succeeded, his mother would be freed from Mephisto, but her soul would go somewhere, which would not be in Doom’s hands. So, in a sense, Mephisto would win either way.
Doom agreed, and every year, he fought Mephisto to free his mother, but whether he ever won or not, he no longer remembers. So, that was the complete story of Victor von Doom becoming the King of Latveria, Doctor Doom.
Three Fantastic Four movies have been released so far, but none have explored Doctor Doom’s Latverian king or sorcerer aspects. There’s hope that Marvel Studios will bring a better version to the MCU. The later a character is introduced into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the more their origin differs from the comics, and the same will happen with Doctor Doom, where Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark variant will become Doctor Doom. But fans hope there will also be a normal version of this character that we’ll see in the MCU moving forward.
This origin story showcases the depth and complexity of Doctor Doom’s character, making him one of the most compelling villains in the Marvel Universe. The real potential of this character will be seen in Secret Wars, but there are many layers that excite fans about seeing Doctor Doom in the MCU.
