The Appeal of Doctor Doom

Why does Doctor Doom complement the Marvel Universe so well? It's because there'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 people trying to do good as superheroes even though it's unrewarding and causes extreme difficulties for them. Most of the characters have harder lives because they're superheroes, not easier ones. We see this most strongly with Peter Parker who faces criticism from the public, relationship problems, and money problems because he's Spider-Man. The Fantastic Four also face plenty of drama because of their superheroics, Captain America struggles with the trauma of his wartime heroism, Daredevil can't be with Karen Page, and all the characters with secret identities struggle with keeping them. The design of 60s Marvel Comics was all about using superheroics to create drama and that meant that being a superhero had to be hard, with little reward. This is why Doctor Doom rose to the surface as the preeminent supervillain for the Marvel world:

Doctor Doom decided as a child that doing good was too hard and unrewarding to bother with. The Marvel superheroes also constantly feel frustrated that doing good is unrewarding, but they do it anyway. What made Marvel unique was that the heroes had to be persistent in being selfless despite the personal challenges it caused them, while Doom gave up on being selfless because of its challenges. He embodied the selfish part of us that asks, "Why bother being good? What's in it for me?".

If doing good things instantly brought us praise and gifts with no possibility of criticism, Doom would probably do more good things. In fact, you could argue that he keeps Latveria fairly healthy as a nation solely for the purpose of receiving undying loyalty and praise from his subjects, rather than because he actually cares about them. For Doom, altruism is only about the reward, while for the Marvel heroes, doing good is worthwhile for reasons greater than their own self-interest.

 

To me, classic Marvel can be epitomized in the dozens and dozens of panels that show superheroes agonizing over their difficult lives and talking about quitting their heroics for good. If you took all those panels -- all that doubt about whether it's worthwhile to be good, all that exhaustion, all that desire to shirk moral responsibilities -- and you combined them into a single person, you would get Doctor Doom. As a child, he learned that doing good was too much hassle and he gave up on it. Doctor Doom is Peter Parker if he never recovered his costume from the trashcan.

Marvel comics were built on the idea that doing good is challenging, and Doom is the ultimate Marvel villain because he's not up to that challenge.