The Appeal of Doctor Doom
Why does Doctor Doom complement the Marvel Universe so well? It's because t here's a deep connection between the origin of Doctor Doom and the storytelling philosophy of almost all the Marvel characters from the Silver Age. The crux of Doctor Doom's origin is that his father was a healer, who was ordered to heal the Baron's wife even though it was impossible to do so, and was chased to his death when he was unable to save her life. This led the young Victor von Doom to decide that doing good is unrewarding and only gets you punished by the world, so he puts his intellectual abilities towards selfish pursuits rather than helping the world. He could do plenty of good, but he doesn't see it as worthwhile; so he instead becomes a sort of Baron of his own. This is a perfect complement to the characterization philosophy of Silver Age Marvel. Lee, Kirby, and Ditko were trying to make characters that had real problems, so many of their stories were about peo...