Probably the best look of the new armor is in this image, and it... could use some work. We'll leave aside how ostentatious and extra it is, since I'm mostly just weirded out by his arms, especially his right one. His entire shoulder/arm area looks really weird and anatomically dubious, with his upper arm kind of thinning to fit through a round hole in the side of his chest piece, and that seems to be a fair distance away from his actual armpit still. And the wrist/hand area has its own oddities. Anyway, how is Doom even supposed to strike the pose from the cover? The armor made more sense there. Is it not metal, but just looks like it? Perhaps the artists just need a bit of practice.
In-depth response later, but right now, I agree the armor is ugly.
I think that round bulbous bit his arm vanishes into is supposed to rotate, like a track ball, but if he tried to lower his arm all the way, I'm pretty sure it would cut into his armpit, which is as you pointed out, further back, but it's supposed to be further back, because the very last part of his arm is supposed to be in the ball (It's just that the ball is too large to make what they're trying work).
Such and epic issue! And I was at least half right. I wish that the war between Kristoff and the Doombot had had a great ending like this. his Doom 2099 series is beginning to grow on me. It reminds me of those really good fantasy novels where the hapless heroes wonder around exploring the world for the first few chapters, only to discover there destiny and take off in the second half of the story.
In-depth response later, but right now, I agree the armor is ugly.
I think that round bulbous bit his arm vanishes into is supposed to rotate, like a track ball, but if he tried to lower his arm all the way, I'm pretty sure it would cut into his armpit, which is as you pointed out, further back, but it's supposed to be further back, because the very last part of his arm is supposed to be in the ball (It's just that the ball is too large to make what they're trying work).
Yeah, I think it's a bit of confusion coupled with an artist mistake since they seem to fix this in future issues I've looked at. Granted, they also make brand new mistakes like recoloring the cloak a bunch, but you kind of have to accept that's gonna happen.
Such and epic issue! And I was at least half right. I wish that the war between Kristoff and the Doombot had had a great ending like this. his Doom 2099 series is beginning to grow on me. It reminds me of those really good fantasy novels where the hapless heroes wonder around exploring the world for the first few chapters, only to discover there destiny and take off in the second half of the story.
I've gone over the forthcoming content, and it seems 1995 has around ten-ish updates from the mainline universe, which is mostly Interim Doom stuff, culminating in the return of Doctor Doom. As for 2099, the entirety of One Nation Under Doom happens in 1995, and there's also two or three miscellaneous spinoff entries that fit in neither category. The 2099 content is actually a ton of issues, but I suspect that Doom's part in most of them is more as a background element, so I'll probably make compilation type updates for most of that. It still leaves me with about twice as much 2099 content compared to mainline stuff... There's a surprisingly large amount of it, really!
1996 is where things get weird since it's dominated by a crossover of 2099 and the mainline marvel continuity... and also the next time Doom apparently dies. Because, you know, he just returned from a couple years of death, so obviously he has to die again. I did warn that the 90s were a weird time for comics in general and Doom in particular.
Agreed. The 1990s were a long dark time in the history of Doom. I feel like the writers wanted to change him, but couldn't decide how, since they updated his look at least 3 times, and killed him off twice.
Interim Dooms - Fantastic Four v1 #396-397 (January - February 1995)
Cover
We return today to our ongoing coverage of Doom's extended absence in the main Marvel universe - or at least the parts which are relevant to Doom anyway. Which mostly means Fantastic Four plots, unsurprisingly enough. Given the first cover of this duology, I think it's pretty clear why I'm covering these issues - Doom's name is even in the title even though he doesn't appear! The second cover seems a bit less relevant compared to that, but that's because this is part of another one of those 'every story bleeds into the next' stream of consciousness stories that the Fantastic Four are prone to. I will cover the rest of the Watcher arc too, but not in this post. Anyway, today we're dealing with a blind monk with a big axe and a pissed off Watcher. How are these things related? And how much more annoying and assholish can Nathaniel Richards get this time, while still filling in as Doom's replacement on the side?
Story Overview
#396 - In Search of Doom!
We start the first issue with Doctor Doom striding through the streets of Latveria in a bit of classic imagery from the early days. He's greeted and wished well by various people that he passes, while he seems lost in deep thought and aloof to their concerns. Beyond the borders of Latveria he is known and feared… and presently presumed dead! Inside Castle Doom, Nathaniel Richards is ordering a servo-guard to direct the 'Doomsbot' we just saw to return, since it has done its job for the day in flying the flag. Sue Richards, the Invisible Woman, watches this display and wonders why on Earth her father-in-law is still perpetuating this ridiculous charade of acting like he's Doom. Why?
Nathan casually, almost disdainfully, turns towards Sue and argues that the answer should be rather obvious - he merely wishes to reassure the locals that their absolute monarch is well, and thus keep the enemies of Latveria at bay. Sue wonders why he'd even care, and Nathan hems and haws for a moment, before claiming that he has a personal stake in safeguarding the interests of Latveria's once and future ruler. He then tells her to get ready to leave, for time is of the essence! They have to make final preparations to retrieve his son! Sue dryly asks which one he's talking about now, and Nathan wonders if it matters. Sue snarls at that dismissive response and demands a proper answer, putting a force field in Nathaniel's path to stop him from running off. The servo-guards, triggered by the apparent attack on their new master, rush towards Sue to attack her, but she effortlessly destroys a quartet of them with invisible force fields which appear inside their bodies, to demonstrate that she can use her powers just as easily offensively as defensively by creating barbed spikes instead of shields.
Nathan tells her that she's proved her point, at considerable expense! Does she even realize how much it costs to import the circuitry needed to assemble one of those robots? Sue doesn't give a crap about the robots or the costs, getting in Nathan's face to tell him that he's been jerking her around ever since she arrived, and that ends now! She wants the truth behind the absurd fairy tale he spun about Doctor Doom being Reed's long-lost brother!
Nathan laconically muses that she clearly didn't like that particular story, and proclaims that he could always concoct another. Not that it would serve her any better, since she already knows that she can't believe a word he says! The two of them are at cross purposes, clearly. Her only concern is the true fate of her missing husband, to know if he's truly dead or merely a captive. Nathan's goals are loftier, he claims, but he chooses not to reveal them. While a servo-guard helps Nathan dress in the classic green cloak of Doom, Sue threatens that she could force him to talk. Nathan admits that perhaps that's true - but they've already discussed his credibility, haven't they? Unfortunately for her, she has no choice but to tag along and hope for the best. Sue, incensed, reflects that she might need Nathan at the moment, but arrogance like this leads to carelessness, and others have underestimated the Invisible Woman in the past. They've all lived to regret it…
On that ominous note, we visit Four Freedoms Plaza, the New York headquarters of the Fantastic Four before the team fell apart. Right now it's quiet and calm, until the silence is unexpectedly interrupted by a horrific scream of terror from Scott Lang, the Ant-Man. Ben Grimm comes running, believing his friend must be under some attack, only to find Scott staring aghast at the television. Scott tells Ben he has to look at what it's showing - he's never seen something so horrible! So repulsive! It appears to be… the classic Fantastic Four animated series, which exists in-universe and is framed as being based on the early adventures of the team. Scott knew the team was desperate for money a few months earlier, but this is almost as bad as that crummy comic book they printed about the Fantastic Four! What's next, action figures? Playsets? Plush dolls? Forget about being attacked by supervillains, they'll be destroyed by the ratings!
Ben gets tired of Scott laughing his ass off at the TV and smashes the device to smithereens with a rocky fist. Show's over! Scott warns that tantrums like that are a major reason why Ben's ugly mug will soon be plastered across his daughter's lunchbox. When Ben gets uppity about that, he swears he didn't mean any harm, and Ben thinks that's a nice line - does Scott mind if he uses it when the ambulance comes to pick him up? The lighthearted atmosphere abruptly shifts when Scott warns Ben about something that appeared behind him. Ben thinks it's a ploy for a moment, but still takes a look. In truth, the flaming image of Sue Richards has reappeared, apparently once more trying to communicate something to the two of them, calling out a warning. Scott muses that this is really weird because he thought they'd already solved this mystery during their recent romp through time and space with the Watcher! Ben decides that this is a sign that they should go find Sue - the real Sue. She could be in real trouble without even knowing it!
At that moment, in a secret citadel far away, the Watcher looks on as Ben and Scott race off to find Sue. A voice from off-screen comments that he knew the Watcher couldn't deceive them for long, and he was a fool to try. The Watcher wonders how this figure dares to insult him, but the man points out that he has little to lose if they fail. All of the Watcher's subtle manipulations and intricate stratagems have come to naught - the Fantastic Four didn't get their galaxy-spanning reputation in a lottery. They will now become suspicious, and may even attempt to confront him! The Watcher thinks that this is a pity, since such a challenge would only result in their utter destruction!
Back in Latveria, an enthusiastic Nathaniel proclaims that it's a decent day for a jaunt in the country. Sue sarcastically asks which country he's talking about, but Nathan avoids answering. They're taking Sue's time sled to their destination, using a little gizmo that Nathan brought to guide him directly to his son. Sue mutters that she's breathless with anticipation, before putting on a warm jacket composed of - what was that wonderful stuff Reed invented again? Unstable molecules? Heady stuff, but then Reed was always a precocious child… Nathan wonders if he ever told Sue about the time Reed tried to build an anti-gravity platform at age eleven? His mother's tulip bed never did recover from the crash! Sue doesn't buy the proud parent routine for a second, and Nathan smugly proclaims that he never thought she would! They soon vanish into the timestream…
Scott curses his luck, since he was just zeroing in on the location of Sue's time sled when it suddenly zapped away. That could only mean she's on the move, but she could be headed anywhere and anywhen! Scott guesses they could use Doom's old Time Platform to track her, but before he can get around to that, she pops back into reality. Ben asks Scott to get a lock on her new position before she takes off again, and Scott admits that Ben won't believe where exactly she landed!
It seems the warm clothing Nathan gave to Sue were for practical purposes, since they reappeared somewhere high up in the mountains, among ice and snow. Sue asks where exactly they are, and Nathan explains that they're isolated by the elements up here, and shrouded in mystery. This remote region has had many names over the centuries, but in this era its name is Tibet. Sue wonders why on Earth he'd believe he could find his son here of all places, and Nathan promises that the reasons will soon manifest. Sue doesn't buy it, but Nathaniel tells her off for her use of sarcasm - a woman of her refined breeding should be above such petty things! Sue wonders if he might prefer outright hostility instead, since he is the man who kidnapped her baby. Nathan waves that entire thing off with minimal comment - travel can be an enriching experience for a young boy, after all!
Sue points out that this is something she doesn't get - Nathaniel has been to the future, right? He should have known what would happen to Reed, so he could have prevented it. Nathan should have warned them of what was going to happen! Nathaniel claims she gives him too much credit, as he could discern only broad historical trends, not such trivial details about the past. Sue asks if that's truly how he sees Reed's disappearance, musing that not even he could be quite so heartless. Right? Their heated conversation is interrupted when their time sled explodes into a huge fireball behind them. Nathan rejoices that their hosts have finally arrived, but they don't seem too friendly - we're talking about a dozen well-armed figures in purple robes equipped with electrified batons, elaborate sci-fi rifles, and laser pistols. 'Death to the intruders!' they cry, for they must heed the words of their beloved Master. No outsiders may live to defile the sacred Monastery of Doom!
Sue suddenly realizes the truth of where they are - these monks must belong to the same sacred order which originally trained Doctor Doom in the dark arts, way back during his origin story! She decides it makes perfect sense that Doom would return here to lick his wounds. Nathan compliments her for coming into her own once out of Reed's shadow, but Sue insists that Reed never held her back, but was always supportive and encouraging. Not that he really needs her to defend him, of course! She instructs Nathan to get behind her force field, but he waves that off, saying this is hardly his first firefight. To himself, he admits that he doesn't intend to remain here for long anyway. With a few carefully aimed plasma bursts he will clear the necessary path for himself so he can head towards the monastery's cave entrance, a place which barely a dozen outsiders have entered in the last century. The prize he seeks is hidden inside!
Sue uses her invisible force fields to shovel half a dozen monks aside in a makeshift avalanche, and comments that she has to hand it to their boss - Doom never spared any expense when it came to outfitting his troops with the latest technology, since even here in the most secluded part of Tibet advanced blaster guns are everywhere. Not that they're any match for her!
Figuring the monks will take a while to dig themselves out, she turns towards Nathan, only to see him leaving her behind by moving into the cave. Why, that miserable schemer! At that moment reinforcements arrive and barrage Sue with their guns, and she's forced to deal with them first. Too bad… for them! Sue decides she can't afford any delay while Nathan is running around doing who-knows-what, so she goes for efficiency and starts blasting the monks aside with great precision.
Half a world away, in the great western desert of the US, Johnny Storm is having the time of his life flying circles above an archeological dig that he's been hanging out at for a few issues. He was invited along there by Bridget O'Neil as a break from the constant stress of the Fantastic Four. The past couple months took a terrible toll on him, as we covered in previous entries, but he's finally started to loosen up again. He's the original high-flying, fun-loving party boy, not some anal-retentive whiner like Spider-Man! Men want to be like him, women want to be with him, and he's just thrilled to be him! Johnny muses that it's a shame that Wyatt Wingfoot and She-Hulk had to return home, but his own calendar is still open enough to hang out at the dig for a bit longer.
Johnny soon spots a cute blonde he's seen around a couple times before and decides it's high time they meet properly. Bridget already tried to play matchmaker, and that's how he learned her name was Laura Green - perhaps it's time to give her a thrill? It's not every day, after all, that a woman gets to meet a world-famous celebrity! 'How's it going, pretty lady?' he wonders as he lands, pretending that he didn't mean to startle her. He then claims it's only fair that he took her breath away, since she certainly took his! Smooth.
The woman thinks to herself that this chowderhead is a real piece of work - because he doesn't realize she's actually his ex-wife Lyja, who is still using her Skrull powers to assume a disguise and stalk him! Wow, she's been at that for a while, huh? They don't get to actually talk, however, because suddenly a fiery apparition of Sue Richards appears between them, reaching out for Johnny. He concludes something must be really wrong, that his sister could be in grave danger - so he has to reach the rest of the Fantastic Four and fast! He flames on and asks Laura to do him a favor and tell Bridget that he had to respond to an emergency. He'll contact her - and Laura - as soon as he can! Laura decides he's not ditching her that easily - whatever else happened, Sue is her friend, and she won't stand by while people are at risk. As such she immediately runs off to go find her way to the nearest airport…
Back in Tibet, Sue decides that she must be slipping, because it took her almost a whole minute to flatten a squad of armed monks. Perhaps she needs to break out the old Jane Fonda tapes and get back into regularly exercising? She heads to the cave, but there's no sign of Nathan - but then she didn't expect him to jump out at her, did she? Just to be on the safe side she goes invisible and sneaks through the place. As she walks along, she wonders who exactly founded the monastery, and why. What was its original purpose, before Doctor Doom perverted it? She's so caught up in her musing that she's very nearly cut in half by a giant axe wielded by a masked monk - the one from the cover. The large man comments that from her soft tread and the gentle caress of her breath, she must be the American woman who cannot be seen! Sue confirms this, but points out that her invisibility doesn't seem to be doing her much good.
The monk proclaims that he rigorously trained for their inevitable struggle, denying himself his sight so he could hone his remaining senses to superhuman levels. Sue seems strangely flattered by this, asking if he really did all that for little old her? She's impressed, but he really could have saved himself the trouble. She creates an invisible shaped charge and knocks the huge man backwards into a pillar before slamming him straight up into the ceiling with her next attack, knocking him out. She comments she'd have been happy with a bouquet of roses before letting the man crumple to the ground. She apologizes for the abrupt treatment, but she doesn't have time for a prolonged battle, since she has to catch up to someone she'd hate to miss!
Sue soon passes by a very recognizable mouth-like forge, and correctly intuits that it's the location where Doom first forged his personal armor. She then mentions that there are contradictory stories of how Doctor Doom's face was scarred so hideously - some say it was the result of his own carelessness in some laboratory experiment which went awry in college, while others claim it was due to his impatience when he refused to wait for his still-molten metal mask to properly cool before placing it on his face. She doubts the world will ever know the real truth, because Doom was a master of misinformation, always rewriting his own history. Or, in this case, some new writer came up with an updated origin of Doctor Doom. She's halted in her meta-commentary when she arrives at a huge laboratory-like room dominated by a pair of sealed stasis pods which contain two blurry figures…
Sue descends the steps to approach the pods, and wonders if she's finally found Reed - is this where Doom imprisoned him, within one of these stasis chambers? But… which one of the two is his? She wishes she knew the state of his health, how severely he was injured, so she could be sure it would be safe to free him from the pod without putting him in greater jeopardy. She goes to study the control board since the tiniest error or miscalculation could result in horrible repercussions, but before she can do anything she's suddenly blasted unconscious from behind… by Nathaniel Richards.
Believe it or not, he tells her unconscious body, he was only trying to spare her the terrible consequences of her actions. While she is plagued by conscience and compassion, Nathan has no such troublesome restraints. Without a single qualm, without hesitation, he will gladly and eagerly unloose total and unrelenting evil upon an unsuspecting world!
#397 - Resurrection!
Flight 387 from Tucson, Arizona lands at JFK International Airport, but the passengers have hardly had time to disembark when a well-known celebrity suddenly bursts into flames after exiting the craft before rocketing off into the sky while fans point after him and ask for autographs. There's no time to waste - Johnny has to get to Four Freedoms Plaza as soon as possible, since his sister's life might depend on it! He could, of course, have flown to New York under his own power, but that would have left him exhausted when he arrived, and he has a hunch he'll need his fighting strength soon. He already called Ben with the on-flight phone and was told that he wasn't the only one to receive a surprise visit from a fiery image of Sue. Since the first time this happened they ended up fighting Galactus, he's almost afraid to guess what she's warning them about now!
Meanwhile, in the baggage claim area of the airport, a man is morosely staring at the various bags rolling by, complaining that his bag is always last - man, his life is so terribly boring and predictable! He takes the same vacation every year, does the same things and sees the same sights, so he swears the next year will be different. He needs a little excitement in his life, so he'll go someplace new and experience something totally out of the… ordinary?! Before his very eyes one of the large suitcases suddenly begins to twist and transform, swiftly turning into the green-skinned Lyja. While the bored man faints, Lyja decides he can't let Johnny face danger alone and begins her own trek towards Manhattan in pursuit of her ex-husband…
Over at Four Freedoms Plaza, Scott and Ben are fueling up the Stealth-Hawk, the current Enterprise-like ride of the FF which they use while Reed isn't around to maintain their usual transportation methods. Scott mentions that they can take off as soon as Johnny arrives, which happens to be right then, as the flame-faced chowderhead - Ben's words - descends from the sky engulfed in fire. Johnny complains that he didn't come halfway across the country to see Ben's ugly mug, stating that he's here to help his sister. Have they tracked down her location? Scott explains that they tracked her beacon to a mountain in Tibet, but it suddenly stopped broadcasting a little while earlier. He hesitates to mention what that could mean, but Ben refuses to even listen to such conclusions. As Johnny pitches in with his own argument about Sue's survival, a shadow suddenly falls across the three…
Uatu the Watcher shows up out of nowhere in the middle of Four Freedoms Plaza, declaring that though he is sworn never to interfere in the affairs of other planets, he has detected a distant Skrull warship which is even now speeding towards Earth. The world can only be saved if they leave immediately and intercept the ship before it enters the solar system! Johnny is skeptical, and wonders why the Skrulls would suddenly choose to attack now, and Ben agrees that something smells fishy. Besides, the last time they saw Uatu he claimed he was done being a Watcher, and that he was going to exile himself to some distant place (back in Fantastic Four v1 #392.) What gives? What happened to change his mind, and why would he show up for this? They have no interest in going on some wild goose chase again, not when they desperately need to find Sue!
For a long, seemingly endless moment, the Watcher stands immobile - and when he finally speaks, his voice is cold and somber. He apologizes for underestimating them… but he will not do so again! With that the Watcher suddenly starts blasting the room with beams of fire from his eyes, and Johnny jumps out of the way just in time, declaring that the Watcher has gone crazy! Scott doesn't get why a long-time ally like Uatu would suddenly turn against the team, but Johnny doesn't really care for the reasons right then. Their main concern is to find a way to stop him, because the guy is nearly invincible! Ben figures they said the same about Galactus and they found a way to scramble his eggs, so they can find a way to make it happen.
Johnny tries a series of high intensity flame blasts to show their former friend the error of his ways, but it doesn't seem to be doing much, and the Watcher summons a cosmic whirlwind with a gesture and spins Johnny around the room in its backwash. Ben also can't make sense of why the Watcher would turn bad and guesses they might be dealing with an impostor - but either way, he will have to distract the big guy somehow so that the Human Torch can right himself. He grabs a piece of metal equipment and goes to smash the Watcher with it, but it disintegrates before it can reach the alien, and in response the Watcher makes all the hot water pipes below the floor burst, scalding the room with steaming water. Ben isn't sure if that's actually worse than the huge bill they'll have to pay to a plumber to repair all the damage…
Scott concludes that according to everything he's read, the Watcher should be similar in power level to Galactus. So if Ben and Johnny are hopelessly outmatched by such a foe, what could he do? How could he possibly provide the necessary punch? He glances towards the Stealth-Hawk still sitting right there in the room with them, and has an idea. Hey now!
Ben and Johnny try fruitlessly to take Uatu down, but he's ignoring even concentrated Nova-bursts like they're not even there. Ben tells Johnny to forget it - he's just exhausting himself, so he should get out of there while the going's still good. It's time to bug out and execute Plan 4-W! Johnny seems to know what that means, and refuses to just leave Ben and Scott behind, but Ben tells him they don't have time for a vote and Johnny is the only one who can fly. That means he's been elected! He has to get going, now! Johnny finally relents and flies away from the fight, but warns Ben that he'd better not die in his absence!
Back in the Monastery of Doom in Tibet, Sue slowly regains consciousness after getting blasted by Nathaniel's attack last issue, nauseous and with a throbbing headache. He has trapped Sue inside a spherical prison to keep her confined while he desperately attempts to revive two figures held in stasis pods, and Sue guesses that one of them could be Reed, which would mean the other one contains none other than Doctor Doom himself! She recounts being told that Doom is Reed's half-brother and concludes it's an obvious lie like so many of Nathan's claims, but it gives him a feeble justification to resurrect the greatest menace of the age. She concludes there must be a way to awaken Reed without also disturbing Doom, and she'll find it while there's still time!
Sue explores her prison and determines that it's composed of a substance which is significantly harder than reinforced steel. No problem. She'll just thrust an invisible force field against the cage's walls, gradually increasing the pressure until it goes pop! She ups the pressure and her head begins to pound in protest, which means she must have sustained a minor concussion when Nathan backstabbed her. Still she won't let that stop her, and she concentrates through the pain and strain until finally, with a herculean effort, the sphere shatters and she is free! She races towards Nathaniel, proclaiming he's done enough harm and he needs to move away from the machine! Nathan turns to her and comments that her inherent courage and raw power never cease to amaze him, but it's a real pity that her heroism has been for naught. Because his goal is already accomplished!
At Four Freedoms Plaza, Ben tosses another chunk of hardware towards the Watcher, who again vaporizes it on approach. Ben comments that for a guy who never gets involved, he sure knows his defensive moves - but he bets that Uatu doesn't have the guts to take him on man-to-man! He's nothing without his cosmic powers! The Watcher wonders if Ben has gone insane, trying to goad him into battle with his fists like mere humans do. Ben asks what he has to lose, aside from a mouthful of teeth. Scott concludes Ben must have seen him enter the Stealth-Hawk and that's why he's putting up the charade, and he takes advantage of the Watcher's distraction to activate the engines of the space-plane and engulf the Watcher in flames.
The Watcher barely seems to notice that, and comments that it was a very impressive and ingenious maneuver - and any other adversary would surely have been incinerated. But he is the Watcher, and he has witnessed the birth of suns and the final agonies of many a raging nova! He decides he's had enough of the team's impudence and raises a cosmically empowered fist to strike them down, only for a streak of flames to pass him by. Johnny has returned, and he brought an unfamiliar weapon with him - one of Reed's legacies, a Dekion Pulse weapon which eats cosmic energy! Johnny figures the Watcher must remember how Mr. Fantastic kept preparing for every possible emergency… and that includes the Watcher going rogue!
Johnny opens fire at Ben's urging, and the Watcher seems to suffer under the sustained fire of the weapon which is driving cosmic energy out of his body, rendering him weak - even helpless. The Watcher cries out in protest, refusing to yield, and declares that he will not fall as he unleashes his eye-beams once more and utterly destroys the weapon in one shot. Victorious, the Watcher declares that he can delay her no longer, so he must now rid himself of them, petty annoyances that they are. Ben announces that this is the last chance they have to pulverize him, once and for all!
From off-panel a voice announces that even united the Fantastic Four do not possess the necessary power… but he does! The speaker is revealed to be… Uatu, the Watcher?! The Fantastic Four stare in befuddlement as a second Watcher appears, nigh-identical to the first, to prevent the first from following up on his assault. The first proclaims that finally his brother has set aside the sacred oath not to intervene… so now he can join in the fight and together they can break free from the One! They can leave this decadent plane of reality and create a new universe together! A new home for the valiant and defiant! The second Watcher proclaims that the path he suggests can only lead to madness, or worse! If the One does perish, so must they! The Fantastic Four wonder who's who, and what's going on, while Ben suggests they just clobber both of the Watchers. Johnny suspects one of them is the real Watcher they actually know, but unfortunately both of them are completely ignoring the humans at their feet as if they're completely beneath notice…
The first Watcher says farewell to his brother and decides he will spare the humans… for now. Still, he cautions them, and the second Watcher, to refrain from meddling in his affairs! Ben cries out that they're not done with him, and then turns to the second Watcher and demands some kind of explanation. Johnny asks if he's the real Uatu, but the Watcher vanishes into thin air without answering any of their questions. Johnny figures they've accidentally become embroiled in a deadly game of cosmic scope when he notices that the second Watcher left something behind. It's some type of gun-like device, but Scott mentions that only a genius on the level of Reed Richards could possibly discern its function. Johnny decides it must have been dropped for a reason, but Ben thinks that's a concern for later - they still have to find Sue!
Back in Tibet, Nathaniel is having the time of his life still as he laughs at the expression on Sue's face, while behind him the two stasis pods hiss open. Sue tries to see through the swirling mists that spread out from the pods to make out faces, hoping beyond hope that one of them is Reed. She pauses, wide-eyed, as she recognizes who's in the pod and rejects the evidence in front of her eyes. This isn't possible! It can't be him! A man with metal gauntlets comments that Mrs. Richards seems quite taken aback, that she seems just as confused to see him here as he is to see her! He can only assume she never expected another encounter with him… Kristoff, the designated heir to the throne of Doom the first!
Yup, yup! Kristoff Venard makes his grand return after his apparent death back in Fantastic Four v1 #352, an issue which came out around four years earlier. He's still wearing the super-sized exo-skeleton which makes the twelve-year old boy seem to be adult-sized, even if he is hilariously baby-faced. Kristoff profusely apologizes for his lack of manners and introduces the inhabitant of the second stasis tank - it was actually Boris, faithful retainer to Doom and one of his oldest allies! Kristoff then asks the honor of being introduced to Sue's own associate. Nathan cuts in by calling himself Nathaniel Richards, and Kristoff recognizes the resemblance to Reed, concluding they have much to discuss, since Doom's dossier about him was woefully incomplete. Kristoff can only assume that he and Boris have Nathan to thank for their timely revival.
Over in New York, Lyja finally manages to reach the Fantastic Four headquarters after a long trek, just in time to see the Stealth-Hawk take off from the tower. Doh, she's too late! Still, she won't give up to aid the man she loves, and she swears she will help! Nearby, a man mutters that weird UFOs are zooming through the skies and green-skinned ladies walk the streets… you don't see sights like that in Gotham City! Wait, is that a stealth crossover with DC? Hmmm…
Kristoff reattaches the Doom-mask of his armor so he looks less ridiculous, and decides that Sue's presence at his revival entitles him to an explanation. Sue angrily declares he has it backwards - she wants to know about his father! Nathaniel tells her off for being rude, but Kristoff claims that neither her manner nor her demand offend him, because he's intrigued by both. He confesses that he never knew his true father because he was raised by his single mother, a woman who was brutally slain by those seeking to overthrow Doom. Kristoff then recounts his adoption by Doctor Doom and his devastation when his surrogate father apparently fell in battle against Terrax. Then the Doombots came following Doom's orders, and they filled Kristoff's mind with his memories, his knowledge, and his hatred of the Fantastic Four. For a time, Kristoff actually thought he was Doctor Doom! Unfortunately this led to a bitter and unnecessary dispute when Doom returned… Needless to say he lost, which is an eventuality which must come to all who dare challenge Doom.
Kristoff puts on a tabard and cloak, attaching them with large golden buttons in the same fashion that Doom prefers, and explains that for the past several months, after his brush with death, he has spent his days recuperating in stasis while both he and Boris have patiently awaited their Master's summons. Sue wonders if that means they don't know what happened yet, and when Kristoff asks what exactly she means, they're interrupted by a monk who rushes down the stairs to meet them. The man reports to the 'young master' that radar has detected the approach of a UFO which is streaking towards their hidden retreat. Kristoff declares that they should open a hailing frequency, because unless he is very much mistaken they'll soon be joined by Mrs. Richards' teammates! Behind him, Boris smiles and thinks to himself that unless he is mistaken, Nathan and Sue suspect nothing…
At that very moment the Watcher reappears back in his observatory on the Moon. The voice from just off-panel returns, claiming to have watched his performance at Four Freedoms Plaza. He tells the Watcher that he shouldn't count on winning any Oscars, but the alien just tells him to stop bedeviling him with esoteric attempts at humor. The figure in the shadows promises to stop badgering him as soon as he deals with the Fantastic Four, but the Watcher claims they won't interfere with their plans. The man says he should know better - they are relentless, and they'll never stop until they've learned the truth. The Watcher should trust his word on that, for no one knows better than him! As the man finally comes forward from the shadows we first see his vest, which has the iconic '4' on it. In truth, he is… Reed Richards?! Dun, dun, dun!
At the Monastery, Kristoff has broken out the wine and food to welcome the rest of the Fantastic Four. Ben comments that it's all real cozy, but both Kristoff and Nathan don't exactly have a history of improving the team's quality of life, so should they really be partaking. Johnny warns him that they don't throw the first punch, and Kristoff tells Ben that he should take that advice, since he doesn't want to cause them any injury, nor does he care to be provoked. He explains that Sue informed him that they all have reasons to grieve - although there have been many erroneous accounts of Doom's demise in the past! Kristoff isn't really wrong there…
Sue moves over to Nathan and reminds him that he enticed her over here on the pretext of searching for a son other than Reed. She first thought that son was Doom, but is she now to assume he was talking about Kristoff all along? Nathan comments that it's less than prudent to make any assumptions where he is concerned. Yea, being really helpful there, Nathan. Johnny, meanwhile, comments to Ben that he recently quit the FF because he was tired of constantly risking his life, and that hasn't done him much good. He then adds that Kristoff seems as arrogant as ever, and wonders what Ben's take on the whole situation is. Ben smells a set-up, with the Fantastic Four as the patsies...
Kristoff soon intrudes on the conversation to ask Johnny if he can take a look at the device they recently received from the Watcher. Hesitantly he hands it over, sarcastically commenting that the kid should remember where he got it. Kristoff replies that the sarcasm is unnecessary, as he is well aware of the mistrust the group has for him. Scott admits that Kristoff doesn't seem so bad, if your tastes run to the egotistical… Sue figures they should forget the boy for now, since from what the others have said the Watcher should be the main focus. Kristoff agrees, naturally, and Ben rudely tells him that nobody asked for his opinion. Doom's heir mentions that he's getting real tired of the hostility, then lays out what he's learned so far - the device they received is actually the power core of a weapon which could easily extinguish a sun. Sue asks how he can be so certain, and Kristoff explains that it's actually quite similar to a prototype designed by Doctor Doom - which is kind of a scary admission, honestly. Kristoff fears that the entire solar system may be at risk, and thus they must quickly ensnare the Watcher and compel him to reveal his treachery!
To be continued…
Rating & Comments
Kristoff Vernard returns! It seems he was in the mind of Doom writers around this time since both the mainline comics and the 2099 imprint decided to have storylines that involved the character, even if the latter was only a thinly veiled reference rather than the real deal. What's more interesting, I think, is that this is technically the first time we properly meet the character when he's reasonably in his right mind - in all previous issues he was various levels of brainwashed and confused, still convinced he was Victor von Doom and acting very much like the man, right down to trying to repeat old plans of Doom's (with considerably more success.) Here, he has a starkly different personality from Doom's usual affect, even if the rest of the characters are a bit slow at catching up on that.
Before we get to Kristoff though, let's start from the top. The first issue here feels, in some ways, like it's once again trying to justify Sue's abilities and independence - not only is she talking back to Nathaniel a bunch, but she also effortlessly knocks out a whole bunch of baddies by herself, and figures out backstory details about Doom without the designated Smart Person pointing them out. I don't mind that, rah rah feminism and all that, but it's sort of undercut by Nathaniel perpetually being a few steps ahead despite being a compulsive liar who strings people along with bullshit. Stop threatening the guy and punch him already, Sue! That's really what this could have used, but instead Nathan manages to outplay her again on several occasions.
So, yes, Nathaniel is a massive piece of shit, and these comics do nothing to change that perception. For one, he's completely untrustworthy one every level, since he keeps making stuff up, strings people along with non-answers, and relies on poor excuses whenever someone points out the inconsistencies in his tales. Add to that his abandonment of Sue in the middle of battle and subsequently shooting her in the back and imprisoning her, and I'm not sure why anyone would ever put up with this dick again. Why is Sue even tolerating him at the end of the second issue when he just attacked her a short while earlier? Also, what exactly did Nathan think he'd get out of reviving Kristoff? I'll assume the claim of parentage is yet another lie until confirmed, but either way they haven't ever met, so it's not like there's a particular reason he would go all ominous about releasing true evil into the world. Even while he was posing as Doom, Kristoff only rarely actually left Latveria to pursue supervillainy, so what's the big deal?
Structurally, both these issues feel like they're just a lot of running around and not a ton actually getting things done - the first issue is all about following Sue as she chases after Nathan until they get to the cave, while the second issue extends that same scene until the stasis pods can finally be opened at the conclusion to reveal their contents. All the stuff in between, like having furious conversations that repeat previous issues' arguments, fighting with nameless guard monks, or getting captured and escaping Nathan's prison didn't really contribute much except for being page filler - even the comic promptly forgets most of that even happened and just moves on. Now, there's some neat moments in there, like Sue dismissively taking out a whole legion of bad guys because she was in a hurry, but ultimately it feels a bit hollow. You can add the segments in which Johnny, Lyja, Scott, and Ben are all spotting fiery apparitions before running around trying to get to Sue too - in other comics that would be shown once and then used as a Chekhov's gun later to explain the arrival of allies, but here we repeatedly catch up to the same characters to confirm that, yes, they're still trying to get to Sue five pages later.
I'm still convinced there's some suspicious shit going on with those apparitions of Sue, by the way - ever since it was shown that Nathaniel sometimes uses fake apparitions to communicate with Franklin, and one of the apparitions tried to convince Sue to listen to Nathan, it's hard to take them seriously. Here they appear specifically to Scott, Ben, and Johnny - all the missing members of the Fantastic Four crew. I doubt it's a coincidence that they're all gathered together again in the middle of a mission that Nathaniel personally set up, and I think he overplays his hand a bit here. I hope so, anyway, because there's little I want more than for Nathaniel to get punched in the face at this point.
Right in the middle of all of that mess, there's a significant chunk of comic which is set aside for Watcher-related conflict - just a whole extended fight scene of ineffectually flailing at a nigh-invulnerable character who keeps threatening to do stuff and then doesn't, just so the scene can last longer. It doesn't have anything to do with the alleged main plot of this two-parter, and also it involves some serious lack of pattern recognition on the part of the Fantastic Four. There's a Watcher attacking them, when's the last time that happened? It hasn't actually been that long since they got into a conflict with a rogue Watcher, so why does nobody bring that up? There's literally an obvious answer to what's happening that nobody mentions at all, and I am 150% sure that's the explanation. The bad Watcher is definitely Aron who wore a different color that day to impersonate Uatu. Are we all agreed? Even if I have no clue what that talk about 'the One' is about…
After the whole Nathan and Watcher plots are finished, Kristoff gets released from his pod. While nobody attacks him, he's immediately treated like he's a threat even when he's unreasonably courteous given his situation - old habits die hard, I suppose. His personality has taken a fairly sharp turn towards the formal and courteous here, and he's actually quite free with explanations. He even offers the Fantastic Four food and drinks as well after learning that they all apparently lost someone important to them. Johnny declares him a creep and arrogant as ever, but up to this point there hasn't really been much evidence of that - he's clearly working off his old experiences with Kristoff before he regained his identity. Kristoff actually accepts and tolerates everyone's mistrust pretty gracefully, and helps out with the scientific advice that normally would've been delivered by Reed Richards. That brings up an interesting possibility… Is Kristoff Vernard going to play the role of Reed in the team, at least for a while? That'd be a trip!
It's a bit confusing that they went with Boris as the second person in stasis, since as far as I know there was never a comic where it explained how he might've gotten injured, nor does he seem like a major enough character to really serve a huge role - he mostly just hangs out in the background in this issue. Perhaps there was just a dearth of Doom-related characters to use? That said, there is a single ominous panel in which old Boris seems to know about some dubious plot going on which the Fantastic Four are not aware of, and that signals to me that there's some weirdness going on with him. Last I knew, Boris was certainly on Doom's side but not exactly the type to get involved in any sort of supervillainy plots - he was more a long-suffering butler who just kind of worried what his charge got up to.
These two issues are pretty decent, and it's fun to have Kristoff back in the mix to fill up our interim Dooms until the real deal revives, but ultimately I don't think any of it was too inspiring. Nathaniel being a dick is nothing new, people running around isn't too interesting, and Watchers doing weird mysterious Watcher stuff before disappearing is fine, but a bit disconnected from anything else here. I won't give this a bad grade on account of several nice moments and Kristoff's return, but neither am I going to give out accolades for pretty average issues. Next time in the main universe we'll be following Kristoff, who joins the Fantastic Four in tackling a bunch more of this Watcher-related stuff, including a crossover with Fantastic Force which brings teenage Franklin back into the story as well. Yay?
Best Panel(s) of the Issues
I like the general look of this panel featuring Doom's monks surrounding Nathaniel and Sue. Probably the composition or something, the way the baddies frame the two heroes in the middle? Eh, looks neat.
Most Glorious Kristoff Quotes
"I can only assume that you never expected another encounter with… Kristoff, the designated heir of Doom the First!"
"Needless to say… I lost. An eventuality which must come to all who dare challenge Doom!"
"Mrs. Richards informs me that we all have reason to grieve -- although there have been many erroneous accounts of Doom's demise in the past!"
"Your pathetic sarcasm is quite unnecessary. I am well aware of the mistrust with which you view me!"
Nathaniel's Bad Hair Day
Nathaniel actually has a color-changing cape - it goes from clearly greenish and similar to Doom's to more blue in the second issue, when someone shows up that's also wearing a Doom-green cape in the form of Kristoff. The only time he actually had time to switch was on board the time-sled while they were transporting, so I suppose they could have hypothetically gone cloak-shopping in the 18th century or something. It's a time machine, after all…
Doom-Tech of the Week
The Statis Pods are obviously Doom-tech, and are pretty similar to the stasis-pod that shows up concurrently in the 2099 comics that came out around this time. Did one inspire the other?
Doombot Count: 52
Let's add one for the Doombot that's posing as the real Doom over in Latveria, under the direction of Nathaniel.
I agree with you. I loath Nathaniel Richards, and I think he is much worse of a person than Doom, for all that he claims to be acting for the greater good. So does Doom, and Doom at least has honor, after a fashion. Nathaniel wouldn't know the meaning of the word honor.
I suspect Boris may have been getting rejuvenated due to old age. He is getting on in years, and Doom depends on him.
I like that we are once again reminded of the existence of the Monks of Doom
After the previous issue's cover, it seems the artists figured they might as well just do it again, but with more rain! Doom is once again showing off his new armor here, which is ostentatious and fancy even compared to his last set, while his eyes glow with internal and no small amount of external fire. This faceplate resembles Iron Man a bit more than the last due to ditching the external nose, but it looks pretty decent, so I'm not going to complain too much. Same with the red cloak - it looks good enough even if I prefer the blue and obviously classic green. I'm just not sure the entire 90's spiky aesthetic is my thing, and this armor just amps it up even more than the silver-and-blue did.
Story Overview
Ramparts
While the last two issues have technically been written by Warren Ellis in the sense that their dialogue was ostensibly from his hand, the plot of that arc was still largely under control of the old writers. Here, that changes - Ellis is credited as the sole writer, period, and the issue starts very much as a reintroduction to the concept of the entire series rather than a natural continuation. We open with an image of Doom standing among flames as they reflect in his new mask - and notably his cloak is very clearly purple. It's not a discoloration thing either, because his eyes are still red! The text-boxes title him 'Technologist, executioner, revolutionary - Doom.' It also describes Latveria as being 'shielded by a mountain range and Doom' which is just a nice turn of phrase, I have to say.
The comic next turns to Castle Doom, which straddles the divide between the Latveria of Doom's heart, Antikva village, and the Latveria of his mind, the city of Gojradia. Inside, Fortune sleeps uncomfortably. As an advisor to Doom she sometimes sleeps under stone by necessity - and that feels very wrong to her, since she grew up sleeping out in the open under the stars. An alarm goes off which wakes her from her uneasy nap in the middle of the night - and it turns out to be her holographic phone going off. The image of an angry-looking man pops out to yell at Fortune, who is looking supremely off model today. The yelling caller announces that either she or her 'lousy tin woodcutter' had better get their tuchis over to him. Fortune wonders what jumped up Ironwine's butt in the middle of the night, and the man brusquely calls her a 'nafkeh' - a streetwalker - for daring to talk to him like that, and again tells her to get over to his airport this very minute!
Fortune diplomatically apologizes for her rudeness, explaining that he woke her up, and she asks what's happening at 'his' airport. Ironwine explains that a bunch of freaks just came in on an unscheduled passenger flight from Ukraine, and they all have electronic credentials supposedly supplied by Doom. Fortune asks if he's verified those credentials, and Ironwine asks if he has the face of an idiot. Of course he did that! Supposedly they're clean, with open-ended visas, internet clearance, and security access to the castle itself! Fortune decides she'll be on her way to check this out personally, and advises keeping the newcomers at gunpoint until she arrives. Ironwine once more asks if he has the face of an idiot, then hangs up after telling her to hurry. As she grabs her bag and leaves, Fortune unknowingly knocks several tarot cards off her desk, and three of them land face-up on the ground…
Fortune coughs a bit as she gets on a flier to make for Gojradia airport. The castle has excellent air filtration systems, so it's a shock to breathe in the gritty, chemical air of the Latveria she grew up in, and she wonders how big the shock must have been for Doom, who went straight from the fresh forest air of his 20th century past to the industrial present. Perhaps that's why he elected to rename the city ship of Valhalla the way he did. Valhalla is now called Libera Cielo - or 'Clear Sky' in Latverian. (Latverian, it turns out, is just what they call Esperanto in the Marvel universe…)
We next visit Doom, who opens up with the lovely phrase: 'There will be death.' Doom is at an elaborate computer console, where he's having a virtual chat with the artificial intelligence PALOMA - or Paloma, whichever - who returns for the first time since the virtual reality arc! Doom asks her if their bargain precludes her assistance even in 'this instance', and she answers that the small loss of wetware that Doom describes in his plans holds no concern for her, since she's only interested in the net. Doom muses that she inhabits such a lateral world from him, and Paloma reminds him that since she's a machine intelligence, that lateral world is all she really has. Still, before Doom freed her from Pixel's cyberspace cage she had even less! Ever since she gained her freedom, she explains, she's walked far and wide in her world, and she guards it jealously as her personal fiefdom...
Doom requests further access to Pixel's wealth, and Paloma immediately agrees to that - she has no real use for material goods. He thanks her profusely for her aid in the culmination of his efforts, but Paloma just tells him to conserve his diplomatic platitudes for the real world. She approves of Doom's plans as she believes they would enrich his world, but she warns him that if he acts to harm the net there will be death, echoing his earlier statement to her. She then abruptly ends the transmission. Doom lets out a long sigh before turning to the 'Worldboard', an interactive world map keeping track of his various plans and summarizes relevant news items. He instructs it to save the previous study under the title 'American Political Structure' before starting a new study into a place called Makhelastan, asking for its economic status and foreign corporate ties, cross-referencing them with the American transnational corporation Angel's Breath. Doom stares at the results on the screen and decides that yes… he chose well. It begins!
If you're a Latverian on the disenfranchised side of life, the narrator proclaims, the riverfront is where it ends! Under the regime of Tiger Wylde the area surrounding the highly polluted lime-green river Ciri that flows through Gojradia is a slum where Guardsmen regularly killed the inhabitants and dumped their bodies in the water - we actually saw that happen once before when Wylde was hunting for information. Under Doom, with the Guardsmen an impotent police force, it seems the 'human slurry' has piled up high there. Suits chewed up by the system, working girls too old or hurt to make rent, and friendless junkies with collapsed veins gather there, waiting by the poison river. This includes Pario - his parents knew what was coming, since his name translates to 'pariah.' He's an addict to the street drug Chain, probably the cheapest and nastiest synthetic drug around.
Majick, a local drug kingpin, finds Pario shooting up on his own supply in an alleyway and tells him that he heard some 'scablicker' on the riverfront was cutting into his trade. He then explains that his associate named Loss would really like to meet whoever thinks that they can deal Chain around these parts. Pario pretends not to know what that means and promises that he'll ask around about this mystery dealer for Majick, so they can get this guy together. Majick just pulls out his gun and blasts Pario with a bolt of lightning right then and there, then tells Loss to burn off the addict's face and identifiable areas before tossing him into the Ciri. Pario made the obvious mistake - when he started using his own sales stock, he stopped buying his fix from Majick!
Up above the city, a cargo jet powers down and begins its computerized descent into Gojradia International, the only airport in Latveria. Locally it's known as Strip Three, since the other two airports had short and violently-concluded working lives. Strip Three, however, has been run for the last twenty years by Kenneth Ironwine - and the thing about Ken is that nobody likes him, but everybody listens to him. Sure enough, we catch up with the man while he's yelling about filthy wire-faced bottom-feeding soap-dodging freaks that he wants off his airport! Fortune exasperatedly asks if he could please shut up, or die, or something. A trio of augmented people are staring at a very Illuminati pyramid with an eye on it nearby, and one of the guards explains they're netgliders who are praying to one of their peculiar religions - the Invisible College, from what he understands. Fortune looks into their credentials, including one describing a netglider with tattoos named Communion Jack.
Fortune tells Ironwine that the credentials are in order, and were indeed supplied by Doom himself, so they should get transported to the castle where they'll stay before transferring over to Libera Cielo. As for her, she's going back to bed. On her way back, Fortune reflects on netgliders, rogue cyberspace jockeys surfing the electronic world, and wonders how Doom found them, or what he wants with them. What is Doom playing at? She walks past a newsfeed, and we get snippets of what's going on in the world at large - apparently the previously mentioned Makhelastan is a nation separated from Latveria by the Mahela Mountains, and it recently erupted into rebellion after a currency crash, and some people are floating that revolution might have foreign connections. Also, the Hulk was spotted raging in California.
Fortune returns to Castle Doom, tired and desperately in need of a tent or caravan or at least a hundred miles between her and Ironwine. As she enters, however, she spots the three cards that spilled onto the floor earlier, and reads their meaning. The Ten of Swords - loving to overthrow the happiness of others. The Five of Wands - violent strife, fighting. The Emperor - ambition, conquest. She knows dropping them was an accident, but she can't help but put the three cards together into one inexorable divination - they're headed for war.
Soon enough it's morning in Latveria, and in Fortune's experience it comes in two ways - either cold and bright, air pollution notwithstanding, or cold and raining. Cold and bloody noisy is a new one for her. She rushes to the window and looks outside to see huge trapezoidal machines launch from the castle courtyard, only to then slowly drift upwards like balloons. The bangs of their launch have echoes from all over Antikva and Gojradia, with machines spreading out across the sky in all directions, and at the same time there's a public service announcement on all channels, streaming directly from Castle Doom.
Doom smugly announces that while the world outside their borders squanders the miracles of technological advances this age has to offer, Latveria most certainly does not. Doom does not. Thus, this morning he's launched a network of Environmental Maintenance Platforms into the sky, exactly in function and design as those flying over Wakanda, to scour the air clean of pollution and buffer the local ozone layer to regulate the climate. Variant devices will also be launched into the Ciri and into Fire Lake to clean them up as well, as Doom promises hew will give everyone a new Latveria, a country of clean air, clean water, and fine rains. A strong country!
Fortune catches up with Doom not long after the broadcast, and he reminds her that they once spoke about the magical quality of the air of his youth, so it pleases him that she too shall soon know its taste. Fortune curtly agrees, then tells Doom that they need to talk about all these strange people he brought into the castle. Doom tells her that she should relay to Ironwine that more individuals bearing his seal should be arriving soon and that these should not be greeted with guns and curses, explaining that they'll all congregate on Libera Cielo for a conference, where they shall not be distrurbed. In his absence Fortune should attend to the most pressing matters of state, like the officer of the Guard who is currently awaiting her in the court antechamber. Fortune just stares after Doom as he leaves with the netgliders, glaring even as Poet arrives to ask how she's doing. 'Don't ask.'
Fortune and Poet meet with Commander Josef Afusto, chief of the Guard, the closest thing the country has to a police. Poet asks if that means he was Tiger Wylde's strong arm in the old days, but Afusto explains he was court-martialed and in prison for dissent at the time. He doesn't wish for the old days, and Fortune should know that - but back then everyone had a house or was dead, and the drug trade was under control. Not so much these days.
He shows the two an image of Pario's remains, explaining that the corpse was full of Chain, a drug you could mix in your bathtub, and he was also shot with a Shockflinger, an expensive and flashy gun that appeals to druglords everywhere. Today's dead body, however, is just the tip of the iceberg - the riverfront is alive with scum, and there's doubtlessly a drug war around the corner. There's now thousands of people living in the sewer system dumping their dead on the street next to manholes…
Poet leaves the room abruptly, and Fortune follows him, worried about her friend. Poet admits that he left because of the revelation that Chain had made its way into Latveria. Fortune isn't sure why that's particularly upsetting to him, and Poet explains that he knows a lot about that drug from personal experience. It's a cheap, dirty simulacrum of DMT, a psychedelic that bonds directly into specific sites of the brain, giving you addictive nightmares. Poet spent three years addicted to Chain, once catching dermatitis from sleeping on the corpse of another dead junkie.
Fortune is aghast at this revelation, admitting she never knew. Poet explains he kicked the habit when he was fourteen years old after a kind lady picked him up and took him east to a monastery that ran a cure system for westerners. It started by drinking a bowl full of nicotine and water, which made you throw up for five hours, and it only got worse from there. The cure took ten years off his life expectancy - but at least he had a life expectancy.
Poet then explains some of the other horrible things he saw before he went to that monastery. He saw a mother shooting Chain through the eye of her teenaged daughter so the girl would be too dependent on her to ever leave home, and that same daughter turning to prostitution and dosing her customers with Chain. He learned that one of her customers was the very guy who sold her Chain, and upped the price to her… It's all horrible. Poet explains that he's been killing Chain dealers since before he started shaving, so she'd better tell the Commander to be at the riverfront at three in the morning, because he sure as hell will be there to take care of this…
Later that night, we see Poet approach a sleazy riverfront bar called the Stretching Dead Body, where Majick and Loss and a couple of other goons are playing some cruel game with a captive rat. He breaks in there guns blazing, blasting the rat's cage and telling everyone to stay put so they can die painlessly. He just starts shooting, Punisher-style, taking out several dealers in quick succession while the addicts run and hide. This entire sequence is several pages of action without any dialogue from anyone, just violence.
While the slaughter is ongoing, one of Majick's underlings sneaks up to Poet with a grenade and tosses it towards him just as he turns to fire, and the explosive detonates when it's hit by a stray shot, knocking Poet to the ground. He seems to realize what's coming then, and when Majick pulls his gun and points it straight at his face, his expression is grim. BAM! Farewell, Poet.
The final panel is of Commander Afusto, several members of the Guard, and Fortune looking over the crime scene where a dozen dead dealers are spread around the destroyed bar alongside the body of Poet. Afusto tries to comfort a crying Fortune, explaining that they were one minute too late to help - just one minute. On one side of the room, a body is propped up against a wall with Afusto's jacket covering where a face used to be, a splatter of blood on the wall behind it…
"Time and Love have marked her with her claws, and cruelly taught her that every instant, every kiss, steal something of youth and freshness." - Charles Baudelaire
Rating & Comments
It's hard to overstate how radical the shift in tone is from the previous issue, in which Doom has a time-travel wrestling match with his duplicate and witnessed his own forgotten past in his hidden volcano fortress. Here, we follow Fortune as she deals with a loud and rude airport manager, watches Doom do some political maneuvering and environmental work, and then speaks with Poet about his one-man war against the illicit drug trade which ultimately culminates in his death. This one issue alone is more 'serious real life business' than practically the entirety of this series has been up to this point, and consists of a lot of setup of forthcoming events and a pretty hard turn for Doom's characterization back towards his customary scheming villainy.
Fortune gets the main focus in much of this issue, and it's actually pretty interesting to see her deal with filling in for Doom whenever he can't be bothered to handle one national crisis or another - clearly she's exhausted and irate about her duties, but still performs them. We mostly see what Doom is up to through her eyes and ears - she is the one who figures out he's been importing netgliders from other countries and giving them free passes to the renamed Valhalla. We also hear his PSA through Fortune's ears as she wakes up in the morning, and then Doom vanishes to have his meetings and leaves Fortune to deal with things on the ground again, much to her frustration. In this issue, at least, Doom is largely a supporting cast member.
Well, I say that - but there's one scene in which Doom does take center stage as he looks at the newly introduced 'Worldboard', which is a digital map on which he plans out his future actions and which also keeps track of a variety of ongoing news stories. The focus is on the nation of Makhelastan, a fictional state near Latveria, and an American corporation named Angel's Breath. It's pretty heavily implied that Doom arranges for a currency crash in Makhelastan with the help of Paloma, since pretty soon after their conversation the nation descends into open rebellion. My guess is that Doom intends to annex the place to make Latveria a bigger and more imposing threat on the world stage, but given what I know of the larger arc that's quickly approaching, perhaps there's more to it. Either way, it's a manipulative step that's well beyond anything the Doom of 2099 got up to, short of maybe his most recent foray to Myridia.
The big twist to this story, of course, is the sudden and unexpected focus on the illicit drug trade within Latveria, which has not previously been addressed in any real form. Sure, there was some vague cyberpunk references back in the first issues, but that was when Tiger Wylde was still in charge - at this point Doom has been in charge for a while, and apparently he's been dropping the ball on dealing with the drug issue entirely, leaving dealers to carve out their own fiefdoms in impoverished shantytowns on the edge of the city. I don't think mainline Doom would have been happy with rampant poverty or drug trading in his Latveria, so this seems like something he screwed up on - perhaps cleaning the air and water is a first step in solving the more systemic problems which affect the nation? It'd be an interesting counterpoint to his more dubious activities in other nations.
The drug problem has a more personal component for one of the cast members, but I'm not sure how I feel about suddenly shoehorning in Poet's history of being a junkie at the last possible moment, just a few pages before he gets gunned down. It feels like this obsession of his came right out of nowhere, and was not alluded to in previous issues in which Poet was described as much more of a bohemian traveler without a permanent home, rather than some sort of Punisher-style crusader against this one specific drug. I guess I should compliment the series for actually exploring a less savory part of punk - addiction to psychedelics and other distractions among the have-nots of society is a pretty common element, after all. Just wish it didn't seem to randomly tacked on. I guess that's what you get when you hire Warren Ellis to rewrite your setting?
It's pretty clear that Ellis is shaking up the formula at large, by the way - not only are we focusing on Latveria for this arc, but between the death of Poet, the death of Wire (though he gets digitally reborn) and the reintroduction of Paloma, it seems the supporting cast is going to be all different from here on out in one way or another. Only Fortune seems to have survived the transition intact - other figures like Xandra, Vox, and Kaz have already vanished without much comment. Doom himself even changed quite a bit, presumably justified by regaining his memories. Gone is the more-or-less heroic amnesiac who actually seems to be connecting with people. Here's, he's once more the scheming, secretive supervillain who's planning to conquer other nations, while also falling back on his old modus operandi of praising himself for improving Latveria to demonstrate how magnanimous he truly is. It's more archetypically Doctor Doom, but it might make the character development of the first twenty-five issues of this series a bit moot…
In sum, this issue was fine for what it was - it's just not really the type of story I like to read very often. Whenever drug issues take center stage I tend to just think of those awful PSA comics from back in the day, and it's rare that the banal evils of oppressed, destitute addicts and vicious drug dealers are what I want to read about in comic books. There's enough of that stuff in real life! Doom returning to his roots is cool, and I enjoyed a variety of details here - Latverian is apparently Esperanto, 'Clear Sky' as the new name for Valhalla, the asshole airport manager, the dialogue-less action scene - but having Poet die on a spontaneous bout of being the Punisher is a weird way to write out a character…
Quotations from Chairman Doom
"There will be death."
"The damaged world outside our borders squanders the miracles of technological advance this age has to offer. Latveria does not. Doom does not."
"I give you a new Latveria, a country of clean air, clear waters, and fine rains. A strong country."
Art Spotlight
One odd thing about this comic is that Doom is wearing a purple cloak throughout despite the cover and previous issue clearly showcasing that his current outfit is red. It appears to revert to red in the following week so maybe just a coloring miscommunication?
I find myself wondering what it was like when Doom conquered Latveria the first time? How did he go about establishing his crime-free, poverty-free dictatorship?
I find myself wondering what it was like when Doom conquered Latveria the first time? How did he go about establishing his crime-free, poverty-free dictatorship?
We do eventually get to see more of that in the Books of Doom, but that's a ways off still in our readthrough. Also it's very dependent on who's writing, some authors make him super-draconian while others make him quite hands-off and somehow they're both canon.
Incidentally, with this latest post the thread has crested 1 million words of Doomy content...
In keeping with the sudden shift to hardcore dystopian vibes, it's probaby no surprise this time the cover depicts a dying guy with laser-gunshot wounds in his back collapsing in front of a poster of Doom, which he is clutching at like his life depends on it. The surface of said poster is pockmarked with a rough outline of the man while he was standing like it's a Bugs Bunny cartoon, while the header up top declares 'Death to all enemies of Doom 2099!' which I guess is in keeping with the sudden grim tone this title has gotten since Warren Ellis took over…
Story Overview
Barricades
We start this issue with the news hour - reports are coming in from riot-torn Makhelastan, which shares the same politically volatile central European region that Latveria inhabits. The local president has gone into hiding following the revelation that the state and its population are considered fully owned by an American corporation named Angel's Breath. The day before there was also a currency crash which drove the already impoverished workers into a violent revolution against the state. The imagery is stark here, with regular people in working clothes wielding improvised weapons clashing in the streets with cops wielding shock batons and riot shields. Maybe a little too familiar…
Meanwhile, in Latveria, the situation is a lot more sedate and solemn. A priest stands before the grave of the recently deceased Poet, buried under his pseudonym rather than his true name, and he reads a sermon while Doom and Fortune watch on alongside a small legion of wellwishers.
Fortune doesn't know whether to laugh or cry, since Poet didn't even believe in God - he believed in himself and guns, which is probably what got him killed. The funeral takes too long to end since it's a state function, all pomp and jabbering rather than truly heartfelt. Fortune tells Doom she appreciates the gesture, but wonders why they didn't bury him the Zefiro way. Poet wasn't one of them, of course, but he was a gypsy in his own way. Doom says he considered that, but claims he wished the world to know that Doom had lost an ally that day, and that Latveria recognizes that loss. Fortune is touched… for about three seconds.
They're approached by a woman in a stagecoach - how very retro - and Doom introduces her as the Tsarina, a probability broker from Riga. He tells the lady that they'll soon take a ride up to Libera Cielo where she will join in a conference with Queen Okusana of Wakanda and others. She's one of many rich strangers from abroad who came to visit Poet's funeral, and Fortune wonders if they were really all infobrokers and data pirates, the sort of people that Poet worked for, or if they're here for other reasons. It's clear as murder to her, now, that this fond state funeral was ultimately just a front for Doom to meet a bunch of important people so he could network. Her gaze is none too friendly as she stares after her departing boss…
In Cyberspace, we see Duke Stratosphere ride his cybernetic horse next to the so-called 'Whole Earth Gate', which is apparently sideways from California, a keyhole into safe headspace for dissident netgliders. For the first time in a long time Duke is scared down to his meat, his wide eyes filled with something that's almost apocalyptically alien to the freestyle anarchy of cyberspace. Six netgliders are dropping from the top of the world in formation - like soldiers…
We next visit the 'narcodemocracy' of Colombia, and more specifically its capital of Cali, which took over as such after the city of Bogota was reduced to sludge by 'necrotoxification.' In the streets, the cabinet-in-hiding and their troops fight drug dealers, causing nothing but civilian casualties, while up on the mountainside the president and his cartels relax behind a force field and do nothing but laugh. The Colombia of 2099 has another claim to fame, though - unknown to but a few, the man called 'Mengele for the 21st Century' is in town, something of an innovator in cybernetics named Dr. José Fleischmann. And he likes it there.
Fleischmann (which literally translates to flesh man in German) is a thin man with several facial piercings who grins and exposes his golden tooth as he comments that nobody loves you when you're frothing at the mouth. He's strapped a man who looks a lot like himself to a cross-shaped device equipped with several long, nasty-looking needles hovering over his exposed skin. The victim manages to bite out a few words, calling Fleischmann a ghoul and worse, but the doctor just replies that he knows the guy is upset - but he picked the wrong day to get wounded while fighting drug traffickers. He's honestly lucky Fleischmann found him first since he only wants to strip the guy's flesh and bone enamel off, it could have been a lot worse! He tells the man to just relax and let the sedative take hold…
The doctor gets a call and wonders what bloody Philistine feels it necessary to call him now. The caller identifies themselves as Indigo Eshun, calling in from Libera Cielo in Latveria, and she tells him that her people will soon download the material he will need into his computer, direct from cyberspace. Fleischmann explains that he already picked up his construction material off the street, so the moment his payment will be routed over from Pixel, he shall commence - to raise the dead with loving flesh! The still-aware victim of kidnapping yells out in horror from just off-panel.
On board Liberal Cielo, we then properly meet Indigo Eshun as she hangs up the phone and calls Fleischmann a madman under her breath. She's actually sitting in the same conference room Doom used in the last issue, in front of the Worldboard. She tells her phone to connect her to Ken Ironwine at the airport next, even as several people including the Tsarina approach from around the corner for the much-foreshadowed conference.
There's a sudden timeskip that's not clearly indicated, or there's a second Worldboard in another room, since we next see Doom standing in front of it as he opens a new file about the results of the secondary phase conferences which just ended. The most common reaction to his stated intentions was shock, and he notes not to discount the reaction of John Way, who built his fortune upon political liaison between American mega-corporations. He apparently left weeping. In general, however, his stratagem was sound and the players made available to Doom after Poet's demise were of great help in working out the details. Queen Okusana of Wakanda and the other monarchs and CEOs with whom he shares superficial sympathies were supportive, so the time of the Great Leap Forward comes closer. Doom feels… excited! Oof, you sure you want to go with that terminology, champ?
Over at the airport, an airplane is instructed to power down and hand over electronic control for a controlled landing. Its captain instructs the ground crew that Manager Ironwine should be waiting for them upon deplaning, but even half an hour later Ironwine is no closer to the tarmac for a courteous meeting with the passengers. This is because he's a toad. Ken is soon interrupted from eating his meal by someone entering his office and blasting his food and drink straight out of his hand and setting it on fire. Ironwine blusters that he could have the newcomer shot, calling her a streetwalker much like Fortune. Guess it's just his stopword when faced with women?
The lady is soon revealed to be the new delegate of the Guild of Mercenaries Elite to Castle Doom, offering her accreditation, and she points out that a whole world of very unpleasant people would be upset right alongside her if she got shot. Ironwine proclaims that she wouldn't have so much chutzpah if she weren't on stilts, but she replies that she's a Triploid - she actually has a third string of chromosomes that make all the difference. Also, she has orders for Ken. Firstly, there's vital equipment on her plane that must be installed at Strip Three, and secondly, many Guild elites are going to be arriving soon so it's healthier not to obstruct their entry. Ironwine mutters that between the mercenaries and the Netgliders, he should just quit and let them make an open house of his poor airport. The woman just replies: 'Don't tempt us.'
We return to news hour again, where a special is covering the collapse of authority in Makhelastan. Revolutionaries are systematically destroying all emblems and tools of the ruling cabinet and making proclamations to international news teams of a New Dawn free of American ownership. Makhelastan is described as an industrial state producing cheap cyber-interface hardware in appalling working conditions, and after the European databroker Pixel cancelled several massive orders, it precipitated the currency crash which ignited these troubles in the first place. Within hours of that event, data was dumped on all major news service nets, presumably by rogue netgliders, which revealed that both the state and population were owned by the Angel's Breath corporation, and it allegedly intended - according to leaked internal memos - to sell Makhelastani children in order to shore up the economy. The Kuwaiti pheromone farms, the intended destination of these children, remained silent on these allegations, as did Castle Doom in Latveria, which leaves the mystery of various images now covering the capital of Makhelastan. They are posters depicting the cloaked form of Doom alongside the slogan 'Sendependa Vivo' in Latverian, a language the two countries share. It means: 'Independent Life.'
Back in Colombia, Fleischmann commences his 'necromance', flooding the room's atmosphere with nanoids and then releasing the digital package that the netgliders brought into the walls of the room's 'mindtracks.' He proclaims that breathing in monomolecular steel life is a wondrous thing, to feel those tiny robots surfing the tidal air in his lungs… The crucified body nearby quickly begins to disintegrate from the skin inwards, raw materials drawn from the source by ripping themselves free in long strips, and Fleischmann wonders if the inhabitant of his walls can see the undressing of this man's soul to provide his wardrobe?
Lightning arcs through the globs of flesh which float through the room borne by nanobots, and Fleischmann likens it to their emotion and culture - lightning is their laughter! They're happy for him, everybody's happy! Except the Lord above, he's dead, because Fleischmann killed him and loved it! And now he is the Lord, José Fleischmann, and holds alone the terrible gift of life and death. That's why they pay him the primo bucks - he commands his creation to live!
A terrible morning breaks in the steely air, and there is an agonizing scream like the last word spoken in Hiroshima before the bomb. In the shrieking heart of a sudden lightning storm nanoids join together and give up their freedom in small binary songs, sketching bones. Enamel, stolen from the man on the rack, drenches them in waves. Then the mind, fired from the tracks of cyber-circuitry in the walls, seeps into the posthuman skeleton and can only watch with a single freshly formed eye as flesh wraps around his new bones like fabric.
The mind then falls back from the eye into a newly formed brain, a vast meatscape, and tries to adjust to the shift from cyberspace to headspace as memories arrange themselves in his synapses. One memory is black and reeking, a poison bloom in his skull, and the newly formed person gropes for its name. Dddd… Dddhh… Dddhhuuu… DOOM! Fleischmann grins, and welcomes a very bald Wire back to the meat.
We switch over to the Stretching Dead Body on the riverfront, the bar where Poet died in a blaze of violent electricity while trying to kill the main pusher of the street drug Chain, Majick. That asshole actually showed up there again, despite what he did - he pretty much owns the riverfront now because murder is worth status when the murder victim is one of Doom's people. He dreams of tightening his grip further on the scum living up and down the Ciri, building his very own junk kingdom. He wants to get the wagedrones of Gojradia addicted too, run the gypsies out of the country, and become president of a brand new narcodemocracy right there in Latveria. He dreams of being the law.
His dreams are rudely interrupted when one of the bar's walls explodes, tossing people in every direction with the blast. Through the flaming hole in the wall a voice comes which proclaims that he's been killing people all night, and it grows dull. Doom then enters the establishment, announcing that the community of coprophagic ticks and moral mutants that lives down here has considered itself separate from the world for far too long. The riverfront is still Latveria, and Doom is Latveria! He looks around the room and demands to be provided with Majick, murderer of Poet, or he shall scatter their thin, ruined ashes across Latverian soil.
It takes only seconds for all his new allies to betray the drug pusher, pointing him out before they quickly flee from the oncoming destruction. In a textless action scene which echoes the final scene of Poet in the previous issue, Doom first blasts Majick through a window with his gauntlet.
He then goes on the pursuit when the dealer survives and runs, blowing another wall out of the bar on his way out. Majick flees for his life, shards of glass still embedded in his face from his earlier tumble, while Doom follows at a measured pace and keeps blasting holes in the street beneath his feet until the dealer is too hurt and tired to continue. While people watch on in shock, Doom approaches Majick like he's freaking Darth Vader and raises his gauntlet for one final blast - this time at full power - and kills the crying dealer right there in the street by blowing his head off.
He then announces to the surrounding crowd that he is Doom, and if someone harms his subjects, they harm him. And then he'll harm them. He also says that if they wish to become his subjects, they should come with him… Doom soon has a new public service announcement going around on the airwaves, this time announcing that the old Tiger Wylde building in central Gojradia has become, as of this moment, the central refuge hostel. Guardsmen have begun relocating the riverfront populace to the refuge, where room and board shall be granted free to anyone without state-recognized housing or moral income.
Later, Doom stands at his Worldboard and asks for a verbal update. The screen lights up and summarizes ongoing events - in Colombia, Fleischmann managed to extract Wire from cyberspace following the death of his body, and granted him a new one. In Wakanda, the assembly of 'Panther's Rage' has commenced. In Makhelastan, a currency crash was achieved through Pixel cooperation, and Indigo Eshun and her team achieved the theft of Angel's Breath data. Also, secret communication with the Makhelastan revolutionary leader and full control of his revolution were achieved…
Final quote: "Instead of inanely repeating the old formula 'respect the law,' we say, 'Despise law and all its attributes!' In place of the cowardly phrase 'Obey the law,' our cry is 'Revolt against all laws!'" - Peter Kropotkin
Rating & Comments
The exact purpose of this story arc comes into focus here, as we continue to follow matters within Latveria with a heavy emphasis on its relationships with foreign powers - especially the type that Doom can exploit. It becomes rapidly obvious that the background news stories are building up to an eventual spark which will set off a war - predicted by Fortune and by the shorthand for this arc, 'Calm Before the War' - while Doom himself prepares his forces and cultivates every alliance and beneficial relationship he has access to for his next big push - his Great Leap Forward, as he so dubiously called it in the previous issue. Since I have a pretty good idea what this big event is going to be about - seeing as it dominates much of what remains of 2099 - I'll allow the drawn out prologue.
The situation in Makhelastan continues to degrade in this issue - we get confirmation that Doom did indeed ask Paloma to trigger the currency crash in that nation, which was only a plausible guess in the previous issue, and it's similarly established that Doom sent some of the various netgliders he's been flying to Latveria to steal information from Angel's Breath which revealed the East-European nation to be essentially a slave state owned by a megacorporation halfway across the world. The result of the economic crisis and the ghoulish revelations is a worker's revolution against corruption and the government - fill in your own comparison to the Soviets or the Arab Spring if you wish. It goes from protests to riots, to destroying the symbols and tools of the old regime, to burning down buildings, and it seems the people have a pretty good motive for basically all of it. One of the things Angel's Breath was apparently up to was selling children to the 'Pheromone Farms' in Kuwait, which just sounds all sorts of ick - no wonder the place would go up in flames! Doom may have triggered this uprising, but it looks like he didn't have to do much.
While all that stuff is going on, Doom's other main business in this issue is a bunch of networking. Poet does get his funeral, sure, but it's largely a ploy for Doom to meet with a large number of internationally notable people while having a good excuse to invite them over, since many of them did have plausible connections to the deceased due to his mercenary work and his tendency to wander across the world. In a neat twist, quite a few of the names of people and organizations that Doom gathers under his banner are familiar ones - Queen Okusana of Wakanda returns, the AI Paloma of Pixel corporation does too, and the Mercenary Guild which were last seen training Xandra. All of them had important parts to play in earlier story arcs, so it's nice to see them return. Doom's new plan involves a lot of moving parts, and he spends a large amount of time taking feedback from various important figures to tweak it, which suggests he's actually doing the proper leader thing here, rather than unilaterally taking off to conquer. I'm sure he'll get around to that part soon enough...
One of the other things that Doom chooses to do here is pretty great - he hires a modern-day cyberpunk necromancer, one who seems equal parts faith healer and Frankenstein, to resurrect the quasi-deceased Wire for him. The entire scene involving Fleischmann is a standout bit of sci-fi, with a nanobot swarm building a posthuman skeleton for a digital intelligence to inhabit, even reconstructing a brain so Wire can once more think with meat instead of bits and bytes. (Wait, they're made of meat?) Wire doesn't seem particularly happy with Doom despite honestly being pretty chill around the time of his death - he got zapped due to his own overconfidence after all, not anything ol' Vic was responsible for. Perhaps he's none too pleased with getting dragged out of cyberspace, or having a body shredded to construct a new one for him? Eh, it's neat to have him back, since we already lost Poet and Fortune would be carrying the OG supporting cast torch alone otherwise.
Speaking of Poet, by the way- this issue does actually show Doom's reaction to his death beyond exploiting the man's funeral for fun and profit. In fact, he personally goes down to the riverfront and cleans up and get some very direct vengeance. Arguably it shows that he did care for Poet to some extent, since spends quite a bit of time murdering the hell out of drug dealers and other criminals in an effort to find Majick, Poet's murderer , in order to kill the hell out of him too. I question why he'd only show up to the site of Poet's murder after a few hours, but perhaps he skipped checking the site on the assumption that nobody would be stupid enough to just go back there immediately and brag about their crimes. What follows is a pretty awesome sequence of Doom performing a full-on silent Vader chase, slowly pacing after a crying, fleeing man as he stumbles through the street with a face full of glass - and then he murders Majick right there in the view of dozens of onlookers, calling it justice.
For all that Doom apparently left the riverfront to rot ever since he first got into power, which is at least a couple months at this point, he does a lot in these last few issues to resolve some of Latveria's bigger issues - the environmental maintenance platforms are stabilizing the climate and cleaning the water, and now the issue of destitute civilians living in shanty towns full of illegal narcotics and crime is resolved by repurposing the massive Tiger Wylde building, formerly the center of government, and turning it into a massive refuge for the homeless and the criminal. You can easily read this less than charitably, of course, but it's probably a step up from the old situation, judging by what happened to Pario…
While these last few issues have been a pretty big departure from the norm for this series, I'm not sure why they're actually this lengthy. Yes, I get that it's setting things up - but a bunch of these scenes go on for a long, long time despite not containing all that much new information at all. I'm not going to complain too much about more art, but perhaps this level of decompressed storytelling is a bit lost on a storyline which is mostly just setup, with only the final scene involving Majick resolving anything at all. Have to say, though, still enjoying how unique the random minor characters are in these - both Ironwine and Fleischmann are certainly memorable! The bloat and the fairly unnecessary level of minor details about pretty inconsequential characters and plotpoints do drag this out a bit - I checked and people like Ironwine only really show up for like three issues, so the heavy coverage of their activities is a bit wasted. Eh, still good enough for 3 stars, imo.
Quotations from Chairman Doom
"The time of the Great Leap Forward comes closer, and I feel… excited."
"I have been killing people all night. It grows dull."
"I am Latveria."
"I am Doom. Harm my subjects and you harm me. And then I harm you. If you wish to become my subjects, then come with me."
Art Spotlight
The imagery in the dialogue-less chase sequence is pretty great, but I particularly like these panels, one of which is just painful-looking with shards of glass embedded in Majick's face, while the other gets way more ominous when you notice that Doom is walking straight through the flames and smoke he just set off, his silhouette's eyes glowing red...
We switch over to the Stretching Dead Boy on the riverfront, the bar where Poet died in a blaze of violent electricity while trying to kill the main pusher of the street drug Chain, Majick. That asshole actually showed up there again, despite what he did - he pretty much owns the riverfront now because murder is worth status when the murder victim is one of Doom's people. He dreams of tightening his grip further on the scum living up and down the Ciri, building his very own junk kingdom. He wants to get the wagedrones of Gojradia addicted too, run the gypsies out of the country, and become president of a brand new narcodemocracy right there in Latveria. He dreams of being the law.
⚠ Warning: This issue contains depictions of Genocide. ⚠
Doom 2099 #28 (April 1995)
Cover
Today's cover is a bit shouty, isn't it? Enormous, stretched out letters of the word 'Doom' fill up the majority of this image, framing the top of the United States Capitol building, upon which Doom has perched himself with the flag of the United States in his hands, his red cloak flaring around him like he's full-on Batman. He replaces the Statue of Freedom that's classically present there - certainly a rather ominous bit of symbolism, even if we assumed its original meaning still applied to 2099's world. I'm not sure I care for the big letters, but this cover certainly catches your attention!
Story Overview
Borderlines
Continuing on from the previous issue, we once again get a quick Worldboard update of where things stand. In Makhelastan, the workers' revolution peaks in fire as the revolutionaries set government buildings ablaze in their fury. In Colombia, Wire flexes stolen muscles after being rudely torn from cyberspace. In America, war engines thunder to life under Washington DC's cloaking fields, and something black and terrible is stamping its hooves on the land as large, heavily armed planes fly over the White House…
At Strip Three in Latveria, a passenger plane descends towards the tarmac and gives over descent control to the flight control tower, announcing that they have a special passenger on board and Kenneth Ironwine is requested via the intercom to proceed to immigration to sign a green form - a coded phrase which means that he has to arrange the possible armed arrest of an undesirable immigrant. Ironwine wonders why he still allows for landings from Colombia at all, and is surprised to see that the dubious immigrant in question is a bald, heavily augmented man who immediately starts nattering at him about having a metal humming plate in his head, before assuring him that he's Wire. Or he used to be, anyway. He is surprised he knows Ironwine, actually - and that everyone knows him! Something. Kenneth is quite shocked to see Wire alive, since he heard that the boy died in the Pacific…
Doom soon arrives in person to tell Ken that they now live on the cusp of the 22nd century, and death has less permanence than television in this new day and age. He then welcomes Wire back to Latveria, and tells him they're immediately leaving for Libera Cielo. Wire seems a bit scatterbrained and wonders what he's supposed to call his boss now - Victor? Erik? Nate? John? (Presumably references to Doom's real name, Erik Czerny, Nathaniel Richards and… not sure?) Doom tells him that 'Doom' will suffice, naturally. After they leave, one of Ken's underlings wonders what that was all about - he's never seen Doom show up in person before. The intercom chimes again, calling Ironwine away again with some other coded phrase, and he curses under his breath.
Kenneth makes his way back over to air traffic control to ask about this latest coded message, and his underling Krystine explains that the machinery that the leader of the Mercenary Guild - Sharp Blue - had installed last issue just started working. Before Krystine knew it, the system had started letting in planes all on its own, shuffling other flights around to make space to accommodate these newcomers. The two walk over to a nearby window while Krystine adds that some pilots have also been reporting stealth feedback disrupting their radios, which means the airport is putting out some sort of stealth field, and all that's before they even get to the fighter planes which started decloaking. Outside, a whole fleet of heavily armed warplanes emblazoned with black skulls descend to the ground…
Elsewhere, Doom and Wire have gotten onto one of Doom's latest experimental creations, a lifter which has no engines - the first of a new breed driven by levitation alone, a clean-power vehicle made using Libera Cielo's flotation technology. Wire asks after the floating 'bug miracle' machines high in the sky, and Doom explains they're actually Environmental Maintenance Platforms or EMPs like in Wakanda - doesn't he recall seeing those? Doom curiously asks what Wire actually did after his body died and he lived only in cyberspace, and the boy explains that he met with Paloma, the cyber deity of the digital world, and became her lover - not too surprising after the VR arc. Indeed, Wire elaborates that he's technically still there now, making love to her! Doom concludes he was correct that while resurrected in this posthuman state, Wire's consciousness now exists simultaneously in cyberspace and the real world, which will make him of great use in Doom's new world. It's just a pity that the process also drove him quite mad…
The two soon land to meet with Indigo Eshun, also a netglider like Wire, who complains that she has to get back inside because there's people surfing there without any backup. She concludes Wire must be the boy they picked out of the old Pixel files, and compliments him on his very visible, high-tech cybernetics. Wire wonders how this woman knows him, and Doom explains that Indigo and her people were actually the ones who carried him from Paloma's boudoir to Colombia for his physical rebirth. Wire realizes she was the one to put him back in meat, and immediately curses her out before viciously attacking, attempting to kill her then and there until Doom knocks him out with a minimum-power concussive blast.
Getting back to her feet, Indigo is less than pleased about the ungrateful murderous asshole and hopes Doom puts him out of his misery, but the monarch argues that mere irritation is no reason to exterminate such an asset. Indigo wonders how this unstable guy could possibly be an asset, and Doom asks her if she knows about Duke Stratosphere and the rumors that he has some secret system which allows him to move in realspace and cyberspace at the same time. It seems Duke added a similar program to Wire which allowed him to survive the death of his body, a final ace in the hole, and now that he has it back his simultaneous existence can serve their goals…
Over in America, and sideways, we visit the cyberspace conference room for the directorate of the Angel's Breath corporation, situated in Washington DC. Apparently they model it after a cloudy heaven filled with the giant floating heads of historical US Presidents, which is just so thoroughly tacky. One director of the company, Shapiro, says that the situation in Makhelastan is a flash in the pan not worth bothering them about, but a colleague named Mrs. Olin says that such thinking will see them all on skid row. They're a megacorporation with threatened assets, so it's about time they act like it! Shapiro argues that what they're seeing is a predictable reaction to local mismanagement - Pixel cancelled that huge workload for a reason and it collapsed the local economy, it makes sense. No, the more important thing to worry about is the data leak, he insists.
The director turns to an underling named Fowler and asks how exactly their ownership of both country and population became public knowledge, and Fowler explains that it was a massive, organized hack of their most secure databases by a cadre of netgliders - at least six of them in his estimation. Olin waves this off as a trashy explanation, since netgliders are anarchic solo operators by nature and everyone knows that. She turns back to the issue of Makhelastan and notes they have machinery in that country, hard assets - and suggests they do to the rioters what the Colombian president did to Bogota. Shapiro concludes that such a direct solution is what he'd expect from his personnel manager, then glances back to Fowler and muses again about the notion of organized netgliders - this whole affair really has him rattled.
Hiding out nearby on the disembodied head of a fairly young-looking Ronald Reagan (or that's who he most resembles), the netglider Communion Jack overhears the conversation and calls them a bunch of colonial wretches under his breath before contacting Indigo and telling her he's headed back home. He's referenced as a member of the Cyberdive Cadre as he exits, escaping through the net to get back to Latveria where he wakes up inside a pod onboard Libera Cielo. Splendid! Indigo is there and compliments him on his fast exit, noting he's just getting better and better, and she offers him a cup of tea. The incredibly British man gladly accepts with a 'simply top hole, old girl!' He sees Doom standing nearby and informs him that the Angel's Breath directorate are clueless - they simply don't believe that the netgliders did what they did!
Doom concludes they are fools who deserve to be crushed like the plague rats they are, and Indigo thinks that's a charming idea - but who's going to do it? A bunch of netsurfers? Doom tells her that she did not search all these netgliders out, bring them to Latveria, and give them the first jobs of their lives merely to be a gadfly at an American megacorporation. No, he has plans for them all. He tells Indigo to attend the Worldboard room in the evening for a briefing. As he's leaving, Communion Jack comments that there was something else he overheard at Angel's Breath, something rather peculiar - one of the people there said they should do to Makhelastan what the Colombian president did to Bogota. What does that mean? Doom scoffs at that and just says: 'Typical.'
We get another Worldboard update, then. Over in Makhelastan, the former CEO and president Janos Radescu was captured and executed by the revolutionary forces, while the formation of an interim worker's government has begun which declared its independence and already made diplomatic overtures to Latveria - no surprise, since Doom is indirectly running that show. Over in Washington DC, Angel's Breath increased the coverage of its stealth field while leaks from the Senate indicate that paperwork regarding war powers has been filed - the Senate is helpfully defined as the place where megacorp representatives vie for power and expansion under arbitration of the 'President.' In Latveria, the Wakandan elite squad Panther's Rage arrives, to be barracked at Libera Cielo, and a mercenary strike force of aircraft stand ready at the airport under stealth fields. Filling out the roster, the Cyberdive Cadre under Indigo Eshun is now at full strength.
On Libera Cielo, the leader of the Wakandan delegation introduces himself as Nkrumah, Commander of the Panther's Rage, and he brings Queen Okusana's compliments to Doom. He commends his Rage's loyalty to him as long as the money lasts. Doom considers this an interesting attitude for a royal trooper to have, and Nkrumah explains that being here is not a duty of honor - Doom is paying for their genius in the art of violence, after all. Doom appreciates Nkrumah's candor, noting that in war honesty is invariably the first casualty. Nearby, Sharp Blue announces that their final guest has arrived, wrapped in cotton wool from the first second her Guild stole him out of Transverse City.
This latest acquisition turns out to be a green-haired, gangly man in a black shirt bearing Charles Xavier's face above the phrase 'Charlie Don't Surf.' Heh. He concludes Doom must be his kidnapper, and is a little surprised at who it ended up being - he expected someone from Las Vegas since everyone there has trouble with mutant dissent - but instead it's the tin can guy from the New York caper instead. Go figure! He introduces himself as Morphine Somers, and immediately asks if anyone there wants to die. Nkrumah takes it as a threat, but Doom tells him to calm down, stating there will be no death here unless he performs it.
Doom's investigation concluded that Mr. Somers stood up for mutant rights for years against all odds, which is why he was brought here. He observes Somers' shirt and explains that he knew the real Charles Xavier, back in his day. He was a fascinating man who despite his superhuman powers embodied the most worthy traits of humanity. Notwithstanding the flaws in his thinking, Doom still feels privileged to have met such a man. Somers replies that mutants aren't big on rhetoric, and Doom agrees that they seem to crave actions and results, so he requests that he show off his particular action. The mutant reaches out to a nearby chair, unleashing black energy from his hand which reduces it to little more than dust. His ability is superannuation, he explains - the ability to hyper-accelerate aging. That chair is now about twenty-five thousand years old!
There's a sudden alarm from the Worldboard they're standing next to, spelling 'ALERT' out in huge red letters to boot. It seems the situation in Makhelastan has suddenly gone critical, and Doom asks for an uplink to Pixel's satellite coverage for real-time visuals. The computer quickly zooms in on a fleet of strange aircraft flying over the burning capital of Makhelastan and identifies them as the Commercial Enforcement Warflight of Angel's Breath. They approach and launch a flurry of missiles which promptly begin outgassing a yellowish substance. Doom calls it a brutal, callous, and very predictable response.
He repeats the earlier reference to what happened to Bogota - the truth is that the city was blanketed in necrotoxins, a horrifying chemical weapon which reduces the entire population exposed to it to protein-rich sludge but leaving all technology and production materials intact. The sludge was later adapted for foodstuffs, Soylent Green style.
As the horrifying, genocidal act takes place anew over Makhelastan, the toxic weapon starts converting the protesters into terrifying misshapen End of Evangelion fodder, faces melting and bodies deforming right there on screen as flesh dissolves off bones that themselves are reduced to sludge. Doom is reminded of a sentence by a philosopher from his original time, Noam Chomsky, and the simplicity and power of that phrase has long haunted him: 'U.S. foreign policy is, in fact, based on the principle that human rights are irrelevant.' The last we see of Makhelastan's destruction is one of Doom's own 'Independent Life' pamphlets, soiled with the remnants of a person's molten hand, the golden watch that had been on their wrist still pristine amid all the gore…
Fortune runs into the room at that point, excusing herself by saying she got Doom's message late, only to stop in her tracks when she sees the horrific, apocalyptic imagery that's playing across the Worldboard screen. She demands to know what the hell she's looking at, and Doom explains that it's Angel's Breath's chosen ending, of the two possible, to the revolution in Makhelastan that he instigated. Fortune is shocked at the suggestion that Doom caused this, but he confirms that he orchestrated the currency crash and advised the revolutionary leaders of Makhelastan. Fortune asks why he did that if it all ends like this?!
Doom responds by telling Nkrumah to restrain Fortune, and to be ready to cut her throat. She's shocked by this response, but Doom friends her that such is the traditional gift for treason in Wakanda. After all, didn't Fortune recently offer herself into slavery to a woman named the Neon Angel in return for her brother's restoration? Fortune is aghast at having her betrayal suddenly revealed, but Doom drives the knife deeper by revealing that he has recently regained parts of his lost memory, and they tell him that for fifteen years 'Neon Angel' has been an alias of one Margaretta von Geisterstadt - a woman who he recently killed.
Fortune slumps at this and asks how he found out, and Doom declares that Latveria holds no secrets from him. She gave her fealty to another, so Doom wonders if he can still leave his heartland in her hands knowing of her perfidy. Fortune wonders what he's saying, and Doom explains that his experiment in Makhelastan is concluded, and the Americans have proven themselves as dull, vicious and shortsighted as they ever were. Once, Doom told her he intended to save the world from itself. It is clear that the current greatest threat to the world is America, and therefore he must begin by saving America from itself!
Doom elaborates that he has planned almost exclusively for this moment since his original arrival in 2099, and introduces several members of his advisory panel, the Black Cabinet: Indigo Eshun, head of the Cyberdive Cadre, the world's first team of combat netgliders. Doom is making her Minister of Signal. She'll work alongside Wire, whose link to cyberspace gives Doom instant communication with the Cadre. Fortune is delighted to see Wire alive, establishing that Doom never would confirm the rumors of his death.
Doom tells her to be silent, then continues by introducing Nkrumah, his Minister for Enemy Relations, and Morphine Somers, who would be his Minister of Humanity, should he accept. Somers is just interested in ending mutant discrimination, and signs up when he's permitted to deal with it. The last member to be introduced is Sharp Blue, a mercenary leader whose imagination and sense of commerce will make her a fine Minister for Order. She observes that Doom has hired half the Guild on the planet and left everyone knee-deep in hints about his plans. So exactly how does Doom intend to save America from itself?
Doom raises one fist in front of him as the Worldboard switches to an image of America and its flag. He proclaims: 'By taking it over.'
Our final quote today: "Our first ancestors, our Adams and our Eves, were endowed in a higher degree than the animals of other species with two precious faculties - the power to think and the desire to rebel." - Mikhail Bakunin
Rating & Comments
We continue the trend of the previous two issues here - which is lots and lots of prepwork and setup in Latveria, with occasional news updates about the rest of the world. This issue in particular is essentially divided up into a chunk concerning welcoming various supporting characters and their fighting forces into the narrative, and resolving the ongoing Makhelastan subplot which always seemed doomed to end in tragedy, and that sure as hell happens here. Several dangling plot lines are also tied off - at least for the moment - presumably to get ready for the next big push in the plot related to the oncoming United States invasion.
Firstly, Wire gets properly reintroduced after his resurrection in the previous issue - and he's only technically the same character that he was before. Not only does he look pretty different due to returning without hair, with spooky black eyes with white pupils, and with heavy cybernetic augmentation, but he babbles incoherently and without much focus in most appearances, barely acknowledging much about his old life at all. I'm not sure if the implication is that his physical death caused this or the resurrection, but either way Wire seems pretty addled by the experience and only technically the same person. Perhaps nothing illustrates the change more than Wire violently assaulting Indigo for arranging his return to physical space - he seems none too pleased to be separated, in some ways, from his lover Paloma. I guess that little love triangle between him, Xandra and the weird AI ended up resolving after all…
Ken Ironwine gets his swan song here, since his appearances seem to be relegated entirely to this one story arc - I'll miss the grumbling curmudgeonly bastard. After dealing with the Wire situation, we get an update on the mercenary forces - or the Guild of Mercenary Elite as the comic keeps insisting. If we are to take Sharp Blue's words seriously, then most of Doom's invasion forces will end up being these fighters for hire - Doom must be using the money he gained from Pixel and Myridia to pay for all this. It is slightly puzzling that after introducing a nameless mercenary in the previous issue as the representative for the Guild, she's immediately replaced by Sharp Blue. It's not a coloring issue, the two don't share much in design, so I'm not sure why you wouldn't just introduce the actual representative immediately…
Besides Sharp Blue and her mercenaries, we're also introduced to another new supporting cast member - Nkrumah, representing the crack Wakandan mercenary unit Panther's Rage sent by Queen Okusana. He's a very no-nonsense fellow who immediately clarifies that he's not in this for honor, but for money - they're here because they're geniuses in the arts of violence, not because of some royal or divine code. Morphine Somers, the latest acquisition, proves to be a bit of a thorn in Nkrumah's side - he's a mutant with a less than favorable opinion of regular humans, who's willing to work with Doom if he is allowed to deal with anti-mutant sentiment. I wonder if his name is referencing the Summers family from the classic X-Men - think Cyclops? His eyes remind me of Gambit's.
The Cyberdive Cadre gets more elaboration in this comic after some heavy-duty hints across the past issues. It seems Doom set himself up with the world's first paramilitary hacker group to exploit the benefits of cyberspace, and one of the first tasks they received was stealing information from Angel's Breath to set off the Makhelastan revolution, and then keep a close eye on the way the company reacted to subsequent developments. Said company's VR server is tacky as hell, but its inhabitants prove to be every bit as soulless and ghoulish as you could imagine, casually discussing reasonably responses directly alongside violent reprisal and casual genocide. Communion Jack doesn't quite grasp what he's hearing, but Doom seems quite aware of the depths of immorality his enemies are willing to stoop to…
Speaking of which, the chemical destruction of Makhelastan is a remarkably ghoulish display of genocidal mania, and while some of the art is goofy due to cartoonishly exaggerated facial features, the whole process is still fairly horrifying. Necrotoxins prove to be an extremely fast-acting rotting agent which almost instantly renders every organic being into constituent elements, melting people where they stand as their teeth fall out, their skin melts off their bones, and their bodies distort until parts of them begin dribbling onto the floor. We see people fleeing through the streets, but the next panel just has a sea of pink slime with several people half-raised out of it on their arms, trying desperately to right themselves while they're little more than zombies. In the end, nothing is left but rancid green goo and all the valuables which all withstood the toxins unharmed.
It can be argued here that Doom is responsible for this monstrosity - he certainly set up the nation of Makhelastan to revolt, after all. Still, it seems the revelation that Angel's Breath enslaved the entire nation and was selling its children to foreign interests was genuine, and Doom does not appear to have influenced the actions that the company made in response, so it's a bit more complicated than that. Involving himself in the actual decision-making wouldn't have fit with the idea that it was an experiment, after all. Doom gambled with the lives of millions to see if American corporate interests knew any solution to a problem except violent, genocidal reprisal - and the answer condemns them both. Doom for foreseeing the possibility and then failing to have measures in place to prevent the actual genocide from being carried out, and Angel's Breath for actually doing it. Suffice to say, it's pretty hard to argue that Doom is still the semi-heroic figure we've followed for about twenty-five issues - he's back on the supervillainy train with possibly one of his worst atrocities on record...
I presume Doom's reason for not interfering in Makhelastan's destruction is to keep the element of surprise in his coming war, but he never gets around to explaining that because the situation with Fortune boils over. As she's demanding explanations, Doom finds an opportunity to make her face her previous betrayal, when she went with the Neon Angel at Poet's urging. I don't think we ever actually see Fortune do anything for Margaretta before she bit the big one, so I'm not sure that plotline was supposed to resolve this quickly, or in this manner. Still, Doom is remarkably forgiving to her here and still considers her as his most viable replacement while he's off to war - a remarkable show of trust in a backstabber. Perhaps this reflects Doom still maintaining some of his previous 2099 relationships, or perhaps he has larger plans for her…
With his experiment concluded, Doom's next course is clear - he intends to follow up on his promise from way back at the start of this series, back in #4, to save the world from itself. The greatest threat to that world, as shown in horrifying detail in Makhelastan, is America - and therefore Doom intends to save America from itself first. Angel's Breath was chosen as a representative corporation, I presume, because it's situated in Washington D.C. and had enough clout with the Senate to get their attack declared a legal act of war. It demonstrates that the rot goes all the way to the core. So, how do you save a nation from itself? By taking it over. Next issue of Doom 2099, we're going to war with the USA, to establish One Nation Under Doom!
This issue is a lot more politics and talking, with most of it dominated by a variety of introductions and character interactions between the old guard and the new. Lots of setup, plenty of planning, and news updates. It's not bad, and there's certainly interesting (and horrifying) parts in there, but this arc is dragging on a bit by now. It's much heavier on the 'leader' Doom than most comics which feature him, dropping most of the archaic, monarchical traditions in favor of a more modernized strongman dictatorship with him at the top and a host of elite advisors who maintain the full scope of the Latverian warmachine. Now I just want to see this new Doom in action…
Oh, technically there's a lengthy oneshot we'll have to cover before the next arc happens, one that's a bit confusing to neatly fit into the timeline for various other characters from throughout 2099, but which fits neatly after this issue for Doom specifically. See you there…
Quotations from Chairman Doom
"We are on the cusp of the 22nd century, Mr. Ironwine. Death has less permanence than television, now."
"In war, honesty is invariably the first casualty."
"There will be no death here unless I perform it."
"I am Doom. Latveria holds no secrets from me."
"Once, I told you I intended to save the world from itself. The greatest threat to this world is America. Therefore, I must begin by saving America from itself. … By taking it over."
We finally see Doom form a cabinet; Minister of Signal, Minister for Enemy Relations, Minister of Humanity, and Minister for Order. I wonder what, if any, similarity there is between these offices and those of Doom's old cabinet in Latveria? I think we saw Doom's cabinet briefly during his battle with Daredevil, but they were never identified by office.
Doom is probably embroidering on his respect for Charles Xavier, in order to win over his audience. While I do not think they have met personally at this point, his conversation with Magneto in X-Factor Annual #4 and his low opinion of Magneto's choice to reform in Fantastic Four #258, indicate to me that he has little respect for Xavier's position of peaceful coexistence.
As I predicted, Doom is no longer the friendly psuedo-hero from the early issues, as his friends are rapidly finding out. Now his relationship with them is more like how it would be in the old days.
Before we get into the next Doom 2099 arc, there's a one-shot we'll have to tackle first - one imaginatively titled 2099 A.D. This story takes place, chronologically, at this point in Doom's timeline - but it's a little more confusing for other characters. I'm pretty sure it exists, for example, in a weird outside-of-time dimension for Ghost Rider who appears to be in multiple places at once depending on which comic you read. He's both 'dead' and alive and well in different titles and I'm guessing this can be attributed to some miscommunications.
At any rate, this is probably the closest there is to another Fall of the Hammer style crossover event - though unlike that comic, many of the characters don't really meet so much as share a single issue together. Doom is here, naturally, but so are the Hulk, Bloodhawk and Meanstreak of the X-Men, Ghost Rider, Spider-Man, and the Punisher. If you look carefully, the apparent background image of Libera Cielo / Valhalla is actually an odd overlay - it appears the original cover had some kind of transparent foil wrapping containing that image and the scans of the issue tend to pick that up as well for whatever reason. Pretty 90s cover, honestly…
Story Overview
2099 A.D. - Everything Is Fair
We start with the issue's ominous blurb: A storm is coming - a tempest that will topple a government, enslave a nation, and rock the foundation of 2099! The present will be erased, the past rewritten, the future undone. Many will die, and many more will pray for death! On the eve of destruction, the last heroes of a condemned nation - Spider-Man, the Punisher, Ghost Rider, the Hulk, and the X-Men - enter the heart of the maelstrom to battle a foe they believe to be their deadliest yet. They are wrong. For in the eye of the storm is Doom…
America had better get used to the lilting rhythm of the Latverian language, Doom muses, as he overlooks the Worldboard on board his flying city of Libera Cielo. They'll need a grasp of the tongue to understand why he changed the name of Alchemax's corrupted Valhalla into the Latverian for 'Clear Sky.' The skies over America have gotten murky and gray, dense with dark clouds of bureaucracy, militarism, and corporate greed. They choke the sweet air of freedom and the promise of democracy - and Doom has come to clear the air. But the time has now come to calculate the extent of possible resistance to his plan, and Doom recalls that during the first Heroic Age back in the 20th century, superheroes were wild cards that opposed the benefits of his rule. Perhaps in this century, with the chessboard set up differently, he might stand to win these agents into his employ through co-option or corruption…
Doom reminds himself that he has his Black Cabinet for advice, support, and solace, though he reflects that there are still forces he misses whom he would wish to add to their number. Indigo Eshun explains that the netgliders can deal with the corporate and financial pyramids of Lotusland, future Hollywood, but they can't deal with the Hulk - that's like sending an email to Godzilla. Sharp Blue observes that the superheroes are geographically distributed across America - the X-Men are in the south-west, Ghost Rider lives in Transverse City, somewhere in the midwest, but so far none have popped up on the road towards Washington. Fortune comments that the only true factor in the north-east is Spider-Man - Wire quickly sings the 'does whatever a spider can' part of his old tv-show while caught up in his madness.
Fortune pulls out her tarot deck, and Morphine Somers groans as he wonders if she's going to make another tired reference to her dogeared pack of medieval torturers and mountebanks dressed in leotards, and to please spare him any more of that nonsense. Fortune replies that the confluence of random factors on their undertaking can't be denied, and so ignoring signs on the road is done at their peril. Her system of divination has been treasured in Latveria for a thousand years, which Morphine scoffs at - a thousand? He reaches out and super-ages the cards into dust, before turning a nearby scale model of Washington DC to rubble as well. He notes that Washington itself has outlived its usefulness, since the modern American 'government' only mediates border skirmishes between overfed corporations, so why even bother with it? Especially when the south-west is a hotbed of mutant activity which is his area of concern. Why would they waste their time with superstitious prattling…?
Wire responds with a barely coherent babble, then touches a computer and gets it to display random images of tarot cards for him, with the Emperor appearing behind him first. He declares that he's communing with the Worldboard - now it's a tarot oracle, a perfect marriage between medieval Latveria and the computer age, before he tosses in fancy animations that are fun to watch. He flips Judgment, Death, and the Seven of Swords - reply hazy, try again? Doom declares that this pre-war conference has clearly reached the point of diminishing returns if this kind of tomfoolery is happening, and he could better spend his time doing something more important - like shopping! The Cabinet jointly responds with a cry of: 'Shopping?!' after Doom drops that bombshell and leaves them all behind…
Fortune rushes after Doom and asks what he's keeping from them - she can tell he's holding secrets back. How can they assist him in his upcoming American campaign if he prefers to keep his thoughts, his plans, everything a secret? He's become paranoid! Doom points out that even paranoiacs have enemies, and wonders if she's already forgotten her own recent betrayal, which he paid back by having Nkrumah put a blade on her throat. She sold him down the river to Margaretta, his worst enemy, in order to ensure the safety of her brother Kaz. If only she'd come to Doom first… Fortune retorts that she wanted to tell him what she'd done, but everyone was afraid to give Doom bad news - recently he's been behaving irrationally, as if perpetually angry. Doom asks her if she thought the fate of Kaz and the death of Poet didn't touch him as well, and wonders how he is to run America while leaving Latveria to the likes of her. Nearby, a mad Wire rants about afterlife interfaces, communing with Poet, becoming Poet - banana fana foe foet…
Over in a desert somewhere in the south-west of America, the heat is relentless and barely tolerates the existence of brush and gila monsters. A man drives out there through the wastes on his motorcycle, then removes his helmet to reveal a truly bizarre costume of bug-like lenses and large sinuous breathing-pipes which connect down to a machine on his waist. He's also wearing belts around his legs, ammo strapped to his wrist, and some shin pouches because this is still the 1990's and we're not allowed to forget it. The man declares he's home at last, the place where he can relax and shelter his acquisitions, then presses the button of a fancy garage opener. In the middle of nowhere a huge multi-layered bunker appears in the ground with a full-fledged staircase. The things this man has gathered need protection from an uncaring world, and his remote keeps the cruel world at bay while guaranteeing the concealment of his world within.
Inside, the place is enormous and judging by all the ice, freezing cold. The man declares it took him forever to build this place, and to gather all the artifacts he's collected and keep them under this roof. Suits of armor from wars fought and unfought, globes that postulate better worlds than this one, works of art that can't even be displayed for fear of blocking the refrigerant that keeps his many, many books from aging. That these things should perish is the only reason he, Lohengrin, fears the passage of time - for he is a man with all the time in the world! He removes his bug helmet to reveal his wild head of red hair. and immediately starts composing a new poem or story, patching in lines from Othello as a literary allusion, as well as more bizarre things like a backwards page of Ulysses, with the structure of the USA trilogy technique with Carroll's walrus and Carpenter as Greek chorus. He even throws in an allusion to John Lennon as the walrus and biblical messiah, since he's a carpenter's son. Huh, perhaps he can even work in Scott Carpenter?
From off-panel a voice wonders if he could work on a story of his own, much to Lohengrin's shock since he expected to be alone in his sanctum. Behind him appears a blond, purple-cloaked person whose entire face is a strange green mask. He identifies Lohengrin as the best-paid soap-holo author in the world, and wonders if he can't devise some situations that reflect the present rather than just the past. He decides he'll come up with a tale - let's pretend he's the most-sought after author and collector on the planet and he has an artifact that the Theatre of Pain wants. Lohengrin asks the masked man what he's on about and how the hell he got in, but the newcomer tells him that his naivete of the way the world works is shocking. The Theatre of Pain is never denied access!
The masked man brought a friend, Polymre, who grabs a book off a shelf and promptly proceeds to eat it in the name of taking a sample - she does enjoy that so much! Lohengrin exclaims that she's snacking on the last hardcopy of the Gormenghast trilogy, and the lady claims they should have called it the Gourmet Repast trilogy because it's delicious! Ouch, that one hurt. She tells Lohengrin that he must know the artifact they are talking about, and he should bring it out lest the entire book collection becomes her buffet. Lohengrin folds and retrieves a strange pot that contains what appears to be a half-molten Spongebob Squarepants - the object is apparently an opalescent alien fossil. Just to make sure Lohengrin doesn't get up to any trickery, the masked man reaches out and taps him on the forehead, branding him with an emblem that looks straight out of the Elder Scrolls - the controlling mark of Septymbre!
Over at Lotusland Studios, a slick salesperson is talking to Quirk, a Hulk 2099 supporting cast member. He's trying to convince her that he can deliver far better numbers than her current employers, and he can put some feelers out for her. Quirk observes that it sounds like he's already got feelers out for her, if you know what I mean, and the man claims in a month he'll be standing his own company, and he'll be able to do much better than anyone else. The Hulk shows up and asks Quirk if the guy is bothering her, then looms over him and tells him that if he's using his time and resources to start his own firm - maybe he should go freelance now. He then flicks the guy out of the room with two fingers. Quirk irritably asks where Hulk got the idea that she couldn't take care of herself. Come on, as if she hadn't heard those corny lines before…
Hulk angrily reminds Quirk that he's her guardian, partner, except whenever she decides she doesn't want him around, apparently. He's through with being a glorified cop, so if she wants to be alone, she's on her own! Hulk decides he should have left her alone the way he should have left the Knights of the Banner alone, and Gawain - if he hadn't been greedy old John Eisenhart looking to exploit them, maybe they'd all still be alive. They'd still be practicing their weird rituals and spreading legends of the Heroic Age like before. Indeed, one of those tales comes to mind now, about some alien jar they recovered with the power to bring back to life those who fell in battle. As Eisenhart he would have made fun of those stories, but as the Hulk he can't afford to be a wise guy - if something could bring Gawain back, he has to at least try to find it. There are stranger things in the world, after all…
Ghost Rider 2099 #12
We briefly switch over to another comic for a scene that fits neatly into the story here. We visit a far corner of cyberspace, where Doom is preparing a program, completing a circuit - and then begins the summoning. He calls upon the Lords of the Matrix Depths in the tongues of old - Pascal, LISP, and FORTRAN. With the names of power he calls upon them and invokes them - ARPANET, ELIZA and RISC! By the Great Old Ones from whom they descend - UNIVAC, PDP-10, and ALTAIR - he demands they heed the ancient protocols of instruction, -Multics, MS-DOS, and UNIX, and enter his command. He desires access to their domain - the Ghostworks!
Doom enters the bizarre and secret corner of cyberspace where quasi-magical, quasi-deific beings hang out to make plans for humanity and beyond, the plane from which Ghost Rider gains his powers. The inhabitants are all bizarre in appearance - there's a metronome with a single eye, a disembodied Beholder-brain, a twin-headed baby, a statue of the Egyptian god Anubis, and a skeleton with a television for a head which depicts at all times the face of Mr. Spock from the original Star Trek. Spock is fascinated that a human has deduced their existence and devised a means of acquiring their attention, and Doom dismissively says that theirs is not the first netherworld whose secrets he has unlocked. Manipulating the hidden structure of the cyberspatial implicate order is little more than an exercise in comparative Kabbalistic logic, after all! Sure. The beings ask what Doom wants, and he explains he wants an audience, and he wants to cooperate regarding significant matters of mutual interest…
2099 A.D. (Continued)
In the Ghostworks, the twin-headed baby tells Doom not to pretend to be impressed by his surroundings... Indeed, they are more impressed that a megalomaniac like him would come to the Ghostworks to go 'shopping' than Doom could ever be with them. Doom corrects that he is genuinely impressed by the mixture of science and magic on display, for how could that fail to intrigue him? He's more sympathetic to them than they realize, and the vassal they call the Ghost Rider intrigues him most of all. Doom asks to borrow the Rider to retrieve an artifact for him in the American south-west. He explains that would go himself, but he doesn't want to announce his presence in the US too early, since as a historical personage his appearance may have some… resonance… for some people.
In New York, we see Spider-Man as he's fleeing from trigger-happy Public Eye cops. When one of their flying vehicles approaches him a little too closely he takes it down with a quick shot of web into the propulsion system, sending it careening towards the ground.
The smart thing to do, Spidey reflects, would be to cut the webbing on his end instead of going along for the ride, but noooo… The web finally snaps when Spidey manages to catch himself by grappling onto a nearby building, and he worries that while he might have saved his own skin, unless the cop veers towards the coast somebody else is going to end up hurt below. Sure enough, the flying car falls towards a congregation of Thor-worshippers and crashes straight into the preacher, killing him. Watching from above, Spider-Man swears the driver steered into that guy on purpose, and it becomes pretty clear that was the case when the driver turns out to be Jake Gallows, the Punisher. He declares that the idiot who got pasted was in his vehicle's way, and besides he was trespassing and holding an illegal assembly - he deserved what he got!
Spider-Man swings down to meet the Punisher and recalls that they met before, and the Punisher was also a lousy driver at that time. His duds are different, sure, but he'd recognize that face anywhere! Jake tells him not to call him that in other people's earshot - in civilian disguise he's Jake Gallows. He explains that he tried to flag Spidey down earlier, but the superhero gave a rather more hostile reaction than expected. Spider-Man points out that Jake is a member of Public Eye, and he's allergic to bullet wounds!
Jake asks Spidey if he's allergic to those fake Norse gods from a while back too - because he's pretty sure Alchemax is trying to bring them back. An Alchemax recon team recently recovered a strange artifact from a 'Knights of the Banner' cache which is supposedly able to bring the deal back to life, and Jake is pretty sure Avatarr was planning to use it to bring back the gods that were killed on Valhalla. Well, until the thing was stolen out from under his bug-eyes! The weird thing is that the artifact was taken by a mystical hand that came through a Virtual Unreality gate - and as far as Tyler Stone knows only two people could have pulled that off - Avatarr and Doom. And why would the head of Alchemax steal from himself? Some triangulation indicates that the artifact was taken somewhere south-west by Doom, and he promises he can arrange some Public Eye transports to retrieve the object. Spidey asks why he'd be interested in participating, and Jake notes that Alchemax, Stone, and Avatarr are all offering a directorship in the company for the object's return. They say power corrupts - but wouldn't it be nice to find out first hand?
Flying over the desert sands in the south-western US, Bloodhawk smells the scent of thousands of carcasses, the remains of poisoned animals that lie dead in the shifting stands below. He tries to flap his wings to cover the bodies with sand in an attempt at proper burial, and in doing so he uncovers the edge of a large metal hatch - it's a familiar vault door embedded in the ground. Who tore up the landscape to place this down there? He opens the entrance and is about to get down, before deciding to take a flying start before diving in to surprise anyone who might be waiting below. He spots giant footprints in the sand when he's up there, leading away from the area… something outrageously enormous must be in the area and it is by far the greater threat - this vault can wait!
Nearby, fellow X-Man Meanstreak rushes across the sands and cries out to the departing Bloodhawk, but even with his speed he can't catch up since he can't fly and the sand offers too much resistance to travel at top speed. Behind him a deer comments that Meanstreak only ever complains, and tells him that he should let his teammate go already. They've got a job to do! At that moment the deer animorphs back into a quasi-human form, revealing him to be the false deity Loki, or Jordan Boone, though he's gone rather green since we last saw him. He explains that they're here on a side-trip, and he's brought the ashes of Heimdall, one of his dead comrades from Fall of the Hammer, in an ornate funerary box. He hopes to learn more about the Aesir's constitution and his own by retrieving an artifact he's heard about which might save both of them from eventual doom! He then tells Meanstreak not to call him Jordan Boone anymore, or even Loki - these days he goes by Halloween Jack!
As the two descend into the vault, it seems the Ghost Rider has already caught up with Lohengrin there and is furious that he gave the alien jar away to some weirdo in a mask - does he have any idea what he's done? Does he not see how mad he is? That's not even close to how exponentially mad Doom is going to be! Lohengrin begs to be put down, saying he's influential and that he and others from the theatrical world provide happy endings for their audiences, empowering them to transform their own lives - and he can do that for the Rider too, but only if he's not killed! Ghost Rider figures he doesn't have to kill Lohengrin - just really hurt him. He conjures up a magical flaming chainsaw from his hand and goes to town on the bookcases around the room, ripping through and calling out that he hopes there's back-up floppies. Nearby, Lohengrin stumbles away from the carnage and hits some buttons to open a secret door, wishing he'd allocated more memory to it so it'd open faster…
Meanstreak runs in and concludes that of the two people in there, the man hiding at a door is no clear and present danger, unlike the maniacal cyborg that's busy flame-chainsawing the room. He runs in circles to generate a tiny tornado to lift Ghost Rider into the air, and then drops him again. Jack comments that Meanstreak probably would have thought differently about his targeting priorities if he'd seen the mark on the other man's forehead - it looked like it came from the Theatre of Pain! Meanstreak is shocked by this, since the former leader of the X-Men recently switched sides and joined that group, but Jack just has an idea when he realizes the Theatre was here, and clearly knows about the jar. Ghost Rider overhears this and demands first dibs on the jar, but Jack points out that he'll need to find the Theatre of Pain for that - and he's probably not going to find them alone! They need Ghost Rider's firepower, but he needs their knowledge - so that makes them partners for the time being.
Elsewhere, the Hulk is busy stomping around the desert looking for something to eat - and since he could eat a library if he needed to, that's saying a lot! He lands in front of a crouching Polymre who pretends to be lost and hungry, and she asks if the Hulk could spare anything for a miserable lonely waif. Hulk decides to give her a lift so they can go find her some chow, and comments that the last woman he tried to help damn near bit his head off, figuratively. Which is, naturally, when Polymre reveals herself to be a freakin' vampire and latches onto the Hulk's neck with a vicious crunch - she's making it literal! The bite apparently works really well even on the super-enhanced hero, as he's knocked unconscious before long…
The Hulk slowly wakes up again a while later to find himself tied up with chains in the presence of both Polymre and Septymbre. The latter promptly diagnoses him as a schizoid caricature of an id run amok, and gleefully concludes that whatever turned him into his present state must have involved a great deal of pain and suffering. Polymre snarks that there's plenty of food where they are - but Hulk isn't getting any of it! Septymbre explains that the Theatre of Pain literally revels in the misery of others, and thus they strapped the Hulk into a complicated device which will allow them to root out the source of his misery.
Images of the Hulk's past appear as he recounts that the poor kid Gawain trusted him, and Hulk used his trust to sell out his clan, the Knights of the Banner, to exploit them to advance his own lousy career at Lotusland. Despite the fact that he caused the death of every person Gawain knew, the kid still tried to save Hulk's life during the hostile takeover of his studio, and it all ended with his death. The Hulk would take it all back if he could, wipe the slate clean, if only it would bring Gawain back to life… Septymbre observes that the Hulk could actually do that, if only he had the artifact besides him, the fancy alien cup - it will bring one life back, and he intends to use it to bring back Polymre's beautiful sister Wintre. She was killed in a skirmish with some fringe mutants, the freaks even they don't like to approach, and was recording their sorrow for their pleasure when they… Well, that whole tale is not relevant to Hulk, now is it?
At that moment the Ghost Rider races his way into the cavernous room on his motorcycle with Halloween Jack on the backseat and Meanstreak in hot pursuit. Jack spots the Hulk and muses that monsters must lead interesting lives. He turns to Septymbre and comments that he's getting awfully grabby with things that don't belong to him, and decides he'll show how it's done. He needs that artifact more than Septymbre, and comments that the man could also use his good looks. You know what? He'll just turn into something that's even uglier than him. Fair trade? With that he transforms into a giant octopus and grabs onto the villain, declaring that he can use the artifact to restore the dead Aesir, who would protect him from the day when someone comes to take Las Vegas away from him, like certain dictators who shall remain nameless…
Ghost Rider sees that Jack nearly has his tentacles on the jar, and figures that it's a score for the visiting team. Polymre responds by clawing back at him, but Ghost Rider declares that his claws are sharper - eat chainsaw! Polymre just straight up bites through the flaming chainsaw blade and mentions that it's the first heavy meal she's had all day, and that nanotech tastes fine broiled over a low flame. She can wreck his hardware faster than he can rebuild, making him easy prey for the Theatre's traps! She touches a button in the hideout which makes Ghost Rider scream in pain, and she is glad that there's a human being behind all that after all - he's not just an android with attitude. There's genuine pain to enjoy!
Ghost Rider comments that he feels something searing through him, like the night that the Artificial Kidz tried to wipe him out by shooting him full of mycotoxin. There was no way to survive that, so the Ghostworks ended up downloading him into a new body. Zero Cochrane's body was left behind and he became the Ghost Rider instead! Polymre concludes that the Ghost Rider came for the jar to restore Zero's life - isn't that right? Nearby, Meanstreak gets caught up in some defenses and gets subjected to his own worst memories, remembering the day Serpentina was killed by Junkpile - the poor kid never had a hope for surviving, and lost her chance to be one of the X-Men before they even dared to call themselves that… Polymre realizes that this must mean the speed-freak wants the jar to resurrect his 'girlfriend!'
Septymbre fights with the giant octopus and announces that they haven't got the cup yet - and once his brand has been applied to the beast he'll be more tractable, he'll be one of them! Jack rejects being a freak, or joining any club he's a member of, or even being a team player in the first place!
He then suddenly turns into a large goat, and the shift forces Septymbre to drop the jar. Polymre rushes out to catch it, and Jack gives up on his goat form and becomes human again as he runs off, attempting to hide so he can plan out a second pass at getting the artifact. Unfortunately he's interrupted by the arrival of the Punisher and Spider-Man, who concludes that the urn with Heimdall's ashes, which Jack is carrying around his neck, must be the artifact they're looking for as it's stolen Alchemax property.
Noticing the variety of super-humans around, the Punisher concludes the artifact must be very valuable to bring out all the freaks at the same time… Jack protests, firstly stating that they're mutants, not freaks, and secondly he explains that the box with the ashes is not going to do them any good. Spider-Man figures he'll be the judge of that and retrieves it with a webline before opening the box and scattering the ashes to the wind, much to Jack's dismay. Those were the (c)remains of his colleagues! He'd hoped to revive them, but now that chance is lost…
Inside the cavern, Meanstreak and Ghost Rider are now strapped to the roof alongside the Hulk, and Polymre declares that they now have three lovely captives to torture, and with the artifact safe in their possession they can add another torturer to the number. Septymbre once more states that the alien within the jar can restore only one life, a life of their choosing, and already it seems to take on the features and form of the late sadistic genius of the Theatre of Pain whom they've missed so dearly. As flesh rises up from the jar Septymbre welcomes Mistress Wintre back to the world of the living, and she declares she's grateful to breathe, and move, and speak again, to once more embrace life and engender pain in others! For about six seconds, when the Punisher blasts the jar to smithereens and reduces Wintre back to sludge.
Polymre cries out in horror that her one and only chance to bring her sister back is suddenly gone, and the Punisher comments that she shouldn't think of it as losing a sister, but as gaining scraps of lead fired at high velocity into her brain. Or at least, that's what's coming up next! His first few shots are aimed upwards, to break the shackles of the captives and free them from bondage - if those tentacles keeping them up were alive, they sure aren't now! The art here is hideous, by the way. The Hulk jumps down and says that he hates to deprive anybody of the pleasure to assassinate these clowns, but he's been itching to throttle the hell out Septymbre ever since he got here! With that, he jumps at the masked figure…
Meanstreak wants to get some licks in, but Jack asks if he really wants to stick around and fight after what just happened. He argues they should count their blessings - they're alive, so let's leave the others to do the fighting. Work smarter, not harder! An enraged Polymre jumps at Spider-Man but he just quips and jumps out of the way before he tries to web her - but she just eats the webs, much to Spidey's disgust. He decides to end their little tango by tossing her up towards the self-defense systems that captured Meanstreak before, and she's caught up in them herself, experiencing her own worst memories. Spidey wonders what she's complaining about - she's not the one who had to beat up a girl! Hulk, still busy strangling Septymbre, comments that he's a lot of things - but not a killer, so they have to figure out what to do with these misanthropes. Hulks releases his hold and Septymbre gasp and wheezes that he's finally free - only for the Punisher to arrive and tell him no. The big green guy might not have a stomach for killing, but he loves it! He then opens fire with his giant handgun…
Later, the Ghost Rider returns to the Ghostworks and a Beholder-brain-looking thing asks him what he's brought them. He offers them a fist full of broken pot shards, describing them as 'broken glass', and explains that he did what he was told. They ordered him on a mission to get the jar back for them, and he brought it back. He just never made any promises about what condition it would be in. And that's the way it's always going to be whenever they order him to do something - he'll follow the letter of the agreement, but not always in the way they hope or expect! What did they want the jar for anyway, if not to bring him back to his body? They wanted it for someone else, didn't they? Who? Who?
Back on Libera Cielo, Doom observes that Lohengrin was cleverer than he imagined, since he stole something from under Avatarr's bug-eyes and then pinned the blame on Doom. But Avatarr will soon have far more to worry about than misplacing his toys, for all he owns will become Doom's within the next week! By the time his Black Cabinet carries out his well-engineered plans, the shadow of Libera Cielo will fall on the American shoreline and Avatarr's wretched little 'empire' will mean as much as a fistful of broken glass.
Doom would have liked to gain access to the artifact, of course, but for fortune… or for Fortune. He decides on her future - she'll rule Latveria in his upcoming absence since she loves the land and will shepherd it well despite her treachery. Whether he likes it or not, Doom admits that her counsel means much to him, and though the day may come when it will no longer be his to receive, he can't imagine himself without it. Oddly, he reflects, her concerns have become his concerns. He would have liked to obtain that magic jar, but only in order to bring back Poet for her. He was a good and resourceful soldier who will be missed during his American campaign, and he knows that Fortune feels he was unfairly taken from her. Still, she must realize that everything is fair in love and war.
If one thing becomes apparent in the months ahead, it is this - Doom, better than any man, knows war!
Next up... One Nation Under Doom.
Rating & Comments
At first blush you could see this issue as another 'Fall of the Hammer' type crossover - but in reality it's much less than that since several characters never actually meet - among them, Doom never actually interacts with any of the other main characters, he just has several scenes to himself. Similarly, Bloodhawk's part is entirely separate and seems only coincidentally associated with this story. In large part the latter's part seems to be related to an X-Men story I'm not covering here rather than the oneshot, but I guess somebody needed an excuse to get him in there to fill up some of the page space…
I have to assume that most of the characters in this issue were influenced to be involved in this affair by some outside force or another, otherwise I'd have to assume there's some serious coincidence-fu going on. What are the odds that the Punisher would recruit Spider-Man for an artifact-retrieval mission in the desert at the same time that Bloodhawk happens to reveal the hidden door that leads inside? How likely is it that Halloween Jack and Meanstreak would go out to the desert while the Hulk is running around the same area, and on top of all of that Ghost Rider is sent in by a separate party? How did most of them even learn about Lohengrin's super-hidden middle of nowhere vault anyway, when apparently the suspicion was successfully diverted towards Doom? We know that Doom was responsible for hiring Ghost Rider and Lohengrin got the Punisher's civilian self involved by stealing from Avatarr, but the rest strain credibility…
Most of this actual issue is, actually, just congregating all the various characters together in the Gila desert. There's a segment about the Hulk going off to get a breath of fresh air after getting in a row with one of his supporting cast, there's an obligatory car crash with the Punisher and Spider-Man, a random Bloodhawk cameo, and Meanstreak and Jack show up to try and resurrect the fake Aesir. Then Ghost Rider is sent in through his superiors and Doom. After a little pointless hero-fight inside Lohengrin's archive, the rest of the comic then takes place at a nearby cave-slash-supervillain lair where much of the conflict involves everyone having touchy-feely memory tours of their various backstories and regrets until the Punisher solves everything with bullets.
I presume this issue is supposed to be a sort of stepping-on point for new readers, as this is the first title which goes from just 2099 to the '2099 A.D.' label that'll be in use going forward from here, and it includes most of the big names in one way or another. It makes sense, especially since the first and last scenes with Doom also heavily play into the next major cross-title event, One Nation Under Doom. If that's the case, they probably should have written a less confusing and incoherent lead-in comic…
Members of the 'Theatre of Pain' are the main villains here, and they haven't really shown up much at all in our Doom readthrough, though they're apparently more common in the X-Men and Hulk books which take place in the south-western United States. They're essentially professional super-sadomasochists, but none of their more common characters from other books actually show up, possibly because the writers wanted to avoid messing with continuity too much. Septymbre, Polymre, and even Wintre are entirely made-up for this one issue alone, and the same goes for Lohengrin - none of these characters ever show up again, though I presume most of them get murdered off-panel by the Punisher to explain that. It makes the whole 'resurrect our old ally' schtick more of an empty gesture, since it's not like we're talking about some familiar that's returning - they literally just introduce a dead villain on the spot just to have someone to resurrect. Boring. At least make it some Heroic Age supervillain or something? Hell, maybe get them to try and resurrect Mengele or something if you want to keep in theme.
More interesting, for the purposes of this readthrough, is the framing device of the story,. We get a more extensive look at various interactions between Doom and the members of his Black Cabinet here on the eve of conquest, focusing in particular on Morphine Somers' dismissal of both fortune-telling and onerous politics. Wire shows off his insanity once more and lays out some Tarot cards, though without an explicit reading I'm not sure how to interpret them here beyond 'War!' There's also another retread of Fortune and her recent betrayal, which Doom would ordinarily punish most severely but seems to be ignoring in favor of the bigger picture. Doom appears willing, if somewhat reluctantly, to put Latveria in her hands despite her perfidy, which suggests that despite everything that's going on, he still wants to believe in Fortune. Given his otherwise paranoiac tendencies and angry demeanor, as directly addressed by Fortune in this very issue, that's a pretty interesting little twist…
The second scene involving Doom is partly in a Ghost Rider issue, and involves Doom using old computer names and languages as if they're the equivalent of Great Old Ones or ritual spells to summon eldritch techno-magical entities. It's actually really cool in concept to have a magical version of cyberspace, since the earlier one-shot featuring Necrotek already established that magic had started developing with the times and took strange new, digital forms. It makes sense that spirits or demons would take to the new medium as well, and Doom always did have a knack of summoning them or breaking into their dimensions. The actual content of the scene is basically Doom asking Ghost Rider's superiors for a retrieval mission to find the resurrection jar for him. Doom doesn't get personally involved, mostly to avoid warning people of his impending invasion, and the mission was ultimately doomed anyway - even if Punisher hadn't blown it up, Ghost Rider had no intention of handing it off to his superiors intact.
The final Doom scene explains a lot of what's going on with him at the moment, and it paints his mindset rather differently than one might expect. Doom alludes to being touched by the fate of Kaz and the death of Poet in an earlier scene, and that some of his constant anger in recent times might be related to that. It's revealed at the end that not only does Doom really regret Poet's untimely death, but he saw the alien jar as a potential way to bring him back - for Fortune. It seems Doom hasn't shed all of the baggage of his first 25 issues of 2099, and still cares for Fortune and what she says despite everything that's happened between them recently. The two might not see eye to eye, but it's apparent that Doom wishes to put his trust in her anyway, which is an oddly humanizing touch to a character who's been getting a much harsher, more totalitarian treatment in this storyline compared to the ones that came before…
Doom's scenes were fine, but that's about all I liked about this issue. Honestly it felt both rushed and meandering, what with everyone coincidentally running into each other and having several unnecessary fights interspersed with vacuous dialogue and rehashes of backstories everywhere. The Punisher and Spidey were amusing as usual, but the rest of the cast acted like dumbasses and didn't get much done. Beyond Doom, we didn't get any particularly interesting insights into any characters either, and I am highly doubtful this one-shot special will be referenced in any of the other books going forward. And then there's the art. God, the art. Suffice to say it didn't appeal to me, as it's all very scratchy 90s stuff, regularly super-chaotic and confusing, and text boxes are scattered all over the place which makes it a chore to read. Beyond a couple panels which notably step away from that style, that just made me want to ignore whatever's written there and move on to something more appealing. Something a little more modern… or retro. Either one, just not this.
Quotations from Chairman Doom
"America had better grow accustomed to the lilting rhythm of the Latverian language, else they may wonder why I've changed the name of their corrupt Valhalla to 'Libera Cielo.' In my native tongue the new sobriquet means 'Clear Sky.' The skies surrounding America have become murky and gray. Dense dark clouds of bureaucracy, militarism and corporate greed choke the sweet air of freedom and the promise of the democratic experiment. I have come to clear the air."
"I can better spend this allotted time going shopping."
"Hear me Lords of the Matrix Depths... in the tongues of old: Pascal, LISP, and FORTRAN, I speak to you! With the names of power: ARPANET, ELIZA and RISC, I invoke you! By the Great Old Ones from whence you descend: UNIVAC, PDP-10, and ALTAIR, heed now the ancient protocols of instruction: MultiCS, MS-DOS, and UNIX, and enter my command! Grant me access to thy domain, the Ghostworks!"
"Manipulating the hidden structure of the cyberspatial implicate order is little more than an exercise in comparative Kabbalistic logic."
"As a historical personage, the appearance of Victor von Doom... may have special resonance to some."
"Everything is fair... in love and in war. If one thing becomes apparent in the months ahead it is this: Doom, better than any man, knows WAR!"
Art Spotlight
With all the dodgy art, it's nice to have a clean, nice view of Libera Cielo every so often, isn't it?
⚠ Warning: This issue contains a depiction of Suicide. ⚠
Doom 2099 A.D. #29 (May 1995)
Cover
Today's cover is dramatic and evocative, but also rather cliché - it has Doom's masked face carved into Mount Rushmore right besides Lincoln while a fleet of airplanes drop rockets down from the sky and a flood of skulls descends down from the mountainside in place of the rubble pile that is there in reality. Subtle. Also, this issue was another that had the Libera Cielo transparent wrap-around, so most images have it partially visible across the actual cover image. I'll try and find a version of the cover where it's absent. One thing to note here is that Doom 2099 is known, from this point onward, as Doom 2099 A.D. and the same naming convention goes for most titles in 2099.
The exact explanation for this title change is a bit different depending on which interview you look at, but everyone is pretty consistent on the intended meaning of the letters - A.D. does not stand for 'Anno Dominus' or Year of the Lord but means After Doom. The 'One Nation Under Doom' storyline was line-wide, and intended as a major shake-up of the status quo in essentially every part of 2099. The title changes were meant to indicate that the issues took place after this event had taken place, as a sort of new beginning. Unfortunately, since the actual event was shortened from the original intent by several months due to behind-the-scenes chicanery and artist conflicts, some of the status quo changes of the Doom era are never fully explored, and various comics were fully cancelled during or shortly after this event, leaving only a couple to carry the torch to the ignominious finish line, including Doom's. But we'll get to all that…
Story Overview
American Caesar
We see a pretty spectacular image of Libera Cielo flying high above Castle Doom, and text boxes inform us of Doom's most recent communication with his Ministers and aides regarding the background of his 'Great Leap Forward.' He explains to them that the American presidency is a vestigial organ in 2099 - the President acts as arbitrator in disputes between the megacorporations that truly rule the nation, but not much more that that, and elections are merely elaborate circuses designed to disguise the investiture of someone who's sympathetic to business interests. However, one key point is that the powers of the position were never repealed. They simply became unnecessary and ignored, because corporations ensured that nobody against their interests would ever even come close to the position again. Knowing this, Doom's intent is to enter America by force, cut off the Senate, and take over the White House in order to repower the presidency by investing Doom himself as the new President of what remains of the United States!
Doom stares out from a window on Libera Cielo's observation deck, studying mercenary planes flying by in formation, until he notices that Sharp Blue, the mercenary leader, looks unusually pensive, as if she's thinking hard about something. Finding this a little disconcerting, Doom asks about her thoughts, and Sharp Blue explains that thinking is what allowed her to survive long enough to become a professional. She reflects that her ancestors were fighters as well, but they only ever fought for great causes - for honor or the like. She became a mercenary with the Guild instead because she thought there were no more great causes to fight for, except those that involved money. She became like the world she lived in, disillusioned - and yet she ended up here in the end. She thanks Doom for providing her with an honest cause - and if he tells anyone she said that, she promises he'll boil him inside his armor! Doom, amused, promises that his lips are sealed.
Turning to the Worldboard, Doom goes over the wildcards in this little game - the super-human adventurers that might get involved in the future like the Hulk, Ghost Rider, and Spider-Man. He concludes that they are for the most part inferior in their ethical development, which might mean they'll interfere or irritate - but in any case their actions will be random and unintelligent. The epidemic of the superhumanly self-righteous increases exponentially, so Doom decides he shouldn't discount foreign threats either, like the vampiric Lachryma or the revenant soldier Chernobyl, or even emerging mystics like that reckless idiot, Metalscream. He tells Sharp Blue to convey his concerns to her troops, to tell them that any of these creatures might pose a threat to them during their work. She observes that for a cold imperial dictator that sure sounded like he cares, and Doom states that at heart he's a revolutionary - he has passion. And if she tells anyone he said that…
The monolithic city of Libera Cielo slowly moves away from Castle Doom and Latveria, taking with it the warplanes of the Guid of Mercenary Elite which wrap themselves in cloaking fields with a sigh of electronic warbling. Below, inside the castle, Fortune finds a final message from Doom which tells her that he leaves his beloved Latveria in her hands while he goes to make the world a safer place for the motherland. He tells her to tend Latveria well, and should she again consider betraying him, she should remember that Doom stands forever only a gunshot away from her… Fortune closes her eyes at the message, grimacing to herself.
The warflight from Latveria soon goes transatlantic, and stealth machines activate which confuse observers and satellites alike into seeing nothing but a spot of heavy weather where the flying city is. Inside Libera Cielo, Indigo Eshun introduces the Cyberdive Cadre to their working stations, as they received a couple late arrivals who aren't familiar yet with the amenities. She makes a joke that the Cadre are like the Spanish Inquisition - nobody expects them. They are the first really organized team of netgliders on the planet, and after the little stunt they're about to pull, no one's going to treat their profession with contempt or indifference anymore! She knows some of the netgliders are there for money - Doom is paying them all like they're megacorp executives, after all - but she's there for kicks, and the promises Doom made. Freedom of information, public cyberspace access on street corners, advances in technology - she's there for the future.
The Cyberdive Cadre gets ready to jack in on a set of bed-like working stations - Communion Jack is there to make more incredibly stereotypically British comments, obviously. Minds soon unzip into the electronic world, reclothed into CGI archetypes as they plunge through signals towards the American net and the voltage war that awaits them there. Paloma and her lover Wire watch them pass by, and the former comments that she can see why the heroes of the 20th century were so terrified of Doom, if these are the things he comes up with...
Paloma asks Wire if the netgliders are aware of the changes she has wrought on the net's operating environment recently. Wire explains that they're not, but they will realize the first time one of their archetypes is hit badly enough to derez. Paloma explains that upon deresolution, people used to wake up with a headache and a melted computer - but now they shall die in both worlds! …Uh, I'm pretty sure that was already canon considering the VR arc's entire premise hinged on it. Hell, Wire died that way only a few issues ago. He asks the goddess of cyberspace why she made this apparent change, and she proclaims that she did it just because she can. She goes in for a kiss and tells Wire to go and join the Cyberdive Cadre - he can fondly await a good soldier's rewards when he returns to her. With that, Wire's archetype vanishes from her side…
Back on the observation deck of Libera Cielo, Morphine Somers is smoking a cigarette as Wire jabbers about his activities on the net, describing leaving Paloma behind and joining 'that Eshun slag' and the rest of the Cadre - he's still not over getting resleeved, it seems. Somers asks Doom if Wire always talks to himself like a lonely speed-freak, but Doom explains once again that Wire has a simultaneous existence - his mind is both with them and in cyberspace at the same time. Wire is allowed to sound a bit crazy. Doom asks Somers if he is always so morose, and Somers responds by pointing out he's a mutant - he's allowed to sound a bit morose. Wire then informs Doom that they've tied up American communications and Indigo is asking whether he wants to contact anyone state-side once this mission is over. Doom confirms that he has someone in mind - Jacob Gallows, a member of Public Eye. He still needs a Minister of Punishment, after all!
We switch over to the strike vehicle of the Panther's Rage, a crack team of Wakandan special operatives headed by the Minister of Enemy Relations, Commander Nkrumah. He advises that the forthcoming murders are a matter of reputation, not honor - there's a difference, as there is nothing regal about this work. They're being employed as gods and goddesses of violence. If they fail, Wakanda and its Queen lose face. Anyway, who would want to miss a chance to kill Americans and get paid for it? He tells everyone to get ready to ingest the sacred herb and speak the hymn within their heads. This gift, once only taken by the Panther Kings of Wakanda, widens the eyes, makes stones of fists, and builds storms in muscles. Nkrumah then turns to a woman with face paint, short-cropped hair and a pair of shiny sunglasses, and tells her to take them off - and then he calls her Xandra. Hah, it's a full-on reunion tour!
Before getting any more time with an old friend, we switch again to yet another plane. It's the Holy Spook, Command & Control aircraft for the Guild of Mercenary Elite, and it looks like a blocky Space Invaders knockoff with a big old skull on the front. Inside, Sharp Blue tells her subordinates Chill, Scratch, and Fade that she hopes they did their research, since this operation is going to be tough enough as it is. One of the mercenaries comments that they worked with Doom before (during the tail end of the VR arc) and they learned that research is always a good idea when he's involved.
Chill is a little concerned about using radioactive bullets - isn't that a bit much…? Sharp Blue sharply retorts that it's not overkill for this mission, because they'll be facing off against the American Captains, the White House's very own honor guard. They have crude but extensive bioenhancement which gives them bulletproof skin, wired reflexes, back-up nervous systems and vital organ shunts. Wakanda's Panthers should take the edge off things, but the property damage and the 'megadeath' is the mercs' responsibility, and as squad leaders Chill, Scratch, and Fade are expected to keep things running smoothly. Sharp Blue then grabs a glass of wine and states morosely that she'll have one more drink before the war…
Moving now to Washington D.C. we see the primary targets of the attack - on one side there's the light-eating black box that encompasses the United States Capitol, to the other side there's the blinding white of the Angel's Breath Corporation's central offices. That would be the very same company that killed Makhelastan with a chemical genocide. Doom delivers an APB to his troops - It begins. With a crack of thunder the roiling clouds above the city suddenly unravel to reveal the enormous flying outline of Libera Cielo, just as it unleashes its weather-manipulation technology and antigravity engines to blast the Angel's Breath building underneath it into a pile of burning rubble with a single cataclysmic flash of lightning the likes of which even Thor has never seen. As American Captains watch on in shock, the building collapses while hundreds of planes phase into existence around Libera Cielo, ready to strike. Morphine Somers, looking on from the observation deck, comments that they ought to be playing Ride of the Valkyries for this…
The mercenary fleet lets fly their huge skull-emblazoned missiles and bombard the Capitol building from afar - Doom has no need for the Senate, that congregation of megacorp flunkies, so he instructs his hired guns to kill it!
Inside, some people are incoherently screaming about bombs and terrorists while others are trying to get a call out, but the phones aren't working and cyberspace connections to corporate main offices aren't accessible either. In Cyberspace, the Cyberdive Cadre is keeping an eye out for trouble, and Indigo wonders if people are already trying to get out though the locked connections, only to find themselves stuck. She hears the start of Doom's pre-recorded PSA that starts playing across all airwaves, but while that's happening a bunch of cyberspace security operators from Stark/Fujikawa arrive on digital horseback to file the first complaints…
In his country-wide announcement, Doom introduces himself to America while he stands in front of its flag, declaring that he has a statement for the nation as a whole, butchered as it might be by artificial borders of commerce. He is making use of all TV channels to speak to them - a portent of their new lives, for as of today he is claiming the Presidency of all these fractured states as his own!
He explains that the current President doesn't consider the people to be his protectorate - in fact, he doesn't consider them at all, as the people's lives are indentured to corporations or else treated as a disease to be stamped out. The President, owned as he is by commerce, offers no solutions to the horrors of their existence, he is merely the most obvious pustule in the infection of America. Doom is here to cure that ailment. He invests himself as President by right of revolution, and declares that all Presidential powers gifted by the Constitution are hereby reactivated, and the Senate - empowered to veto this decision - are in agreement, as proven by their utter silence.
Panther's Rage troops descend with really funny-looking jetpacks - they've got two shoulder antennae like a stereotypical space alien cartoon. They start murdering American Captains soon enough, though, cutting them in half with superhuman strength and Vibranium weaponry while various mercenary aircraft land nearby and unload an army of heavily armed soldiers who start mowing down whoever they come across, exchanging fire with regular Public Eye grunts and American Captains alike. While other planes perform strafing runs and leave craters behind in the pavement, Doom continues narrating to the nation…
Doom's first act in office is the merging of all paid police forces like Public Eye and Central Security Systems into a single nationalized police service which he shall entitle 'SHIELD' - cute - and naturally the mercenary forces are its first members, in some sense. Their first act shall be to enforce martial law for the protection of the citizenry. This will involve the immediate arrest of all heads of megacorporations and transnational companies, and non-compliance by the police or the megacorps will be considered an act of war, and be responded to in kind. Thus does Doom take his first stride towards saving them all from the ruthless machine of American commerce!
On board Libera Cielo, Wire comments that everything's still holding steady in cyberspace - the Cadre is under attack, but Indigo says they can handle it. Somers is handling communications with the mercenaries and relays that Sharp Blue is looking for Doom, since she claims she has the opposition in check. He wonders if that's good news or not, and Doom notes that mercenary reports are very precise, and they mean exactly what they say. He tells Somers to call up someone to get a vehicle ready - he's about ready to get personally involved. Below, in the Cyberdive Chamber, the unconscious netgliders don't notice when one of their own, Communion Jack, violently dies in an explosion of flames that coincides with his archetype's destruction.
While dozens of mercenary aircraft fly by, Doom takes the flotation vehicle he used in the last arc down towards the ground, and meets up with Nkrumah there. The Wakandan compliments Doom for the shock tactics, since due to the opening moments of this conflict the Americans never really found their feet. As such, the strike area is now secure, though the White House is another matter. There's basically no intelligence available about any interior guard. Doom narrows his eyes at that and tells Nkrumah to lend the Panthers' strength to the Guild's work - Doom will handle the White House personally.
We only see the aftermath of what happened in the White House - blackened blood, burning doors and furniture, beheaded corpses of American Captains strewn across the carpets and decorated halls and down the staircases. Doom confesses that he was caught up in the sudden grip of decadent hubris as he entered the White House, and got a little carried away. The whole building was full of besuited, quivering monsters who stabbed the world with sticks for decades, and now faced with boneless terror the emissary of the outside world who came to find them. And Doom had the bigger stick. This place did it to him, Doom decides, and he'll not let such a loss of composure happen again. He inhales blood and smoke, the scent of revolution, and is calmed by it - a strange sense of serenity settles over him.
As we pan into the Oval Office, we see Doom standing at the windows and staring out at the ongoing war. Laying on the Resolute Desk, one hand still clasped around the trigger of a recently fired pistol, is the former President with a bullet lodged in his brain. It is a token of his serenity, Doom argues to himself, that he gave that creature in the final room a choice at all. Doom is still mildly shocked at the bravery of the decision the former President made, when he committed suicide. Not nearly as shocked as the President had been, of course, when he was forced to face the shock of the new, a shock that shall yet travel around America before Doom is done. He once more inhales blood and smoke, and declares himself a revolutionary at the windows of heaven…
The final quote of the comic is damning: "Every country has the government it deserves." - Joseph de Maistre
Rating & Comments
Well, damn. There was plenty of buildup to Doom's grand invasion over the last few issues of his comic, but here we've actually arrived at its implementation - and it's a full-on Blitzkrieg on Washington D.C. where Doom takes advantage of surprise, sheer numbers, subversive information control, and extreme force to prevent the corporate forces from lifting as much as a finger in response. Libera Cielo makes for an imposing tip of the spear and symbol of might, and the vast fleet of mercenaries alongside hired Wakandan shock troops and militarized netgliders makes for a dangerous main force to deal with a relatively unprepared and complacent government. It becomes pretty clear rather quickly that nobody in America really expected this sort of all-or-nothing response to business as usual.
It is darkly amusing to see Doom comment on the specific powers of the American presidency within the government as if they really still mean anything to anyone, since in 2099 the entire government structure is essentially a sham. The only reason anyone would even listen to Doom after his takeover is because he conquered the nation's ostensible leadership by force, and I'm pretty sure that isn't a legit way to political power according to the Constitution. Blowing up the Senate is probably not a good way to get their silent consent, either. Why would various CEOs listen to Doom at all, if not forced to do so? It all still feels pretty Doom-like, though, since putting on the outward trappings of a position is how he dealt with Latveria too - he usurped the royal family and named himself a monarch in their stead, even though he didn't have some royal bloodline. President is simply another hat for him, another fancy high-status position to adopt without really caring about the legal details.
The way Doom gets there is - violent. This comic isn't subtle about emphasizing both sides of Doom's invasion here - there's the revolutionary side in which he and others on his side consider it a sort of glorious mission for the greater good, but there's also a vicious and murderous side which involves mercilessly slaughtering thousands on the way to final victory. Angel's Breath gets blown up utterly, the Senate gets destroyed to the last man, and Doom single-handedly murders every soul in the entire White House until he forces the President to take a gun to his head and shoot himself. Doom waxes lyrical about being a revolutionary, but he also succumbs to his inner demons and loses his composure, steeping him in bloodlust which doesn't end until basically everyone is dead. War is hell, as per usual, and a regime change isn't pretty.
With the focus on the conflict, the Black Cabinet takes a bit of a backseat here in terms of communal decision-making, but we still get a bit more insight into a few of them. First there's Sharp Blue, who likes being involved in a righteous cause rather than just fighting for money, and who brought along some old friends. There's also Indigo, whose motivations for joining Doom's invasion are mostly self-serving, but favor the rest of the netgliders there as well. We'll have to see if Doom follows through on his promises to her, since the netgliders are dealt a painful blow in this issue, and a betrayal from her corner of the alliance seems plausible and problematic. Nkrumah also shows up briefly, but that scene is stolen by an old familiar face now sporting a buzz cut rather than a full head of hair. It's good to see Xandra return from her long absence, even if she doesn't actually have any lines here. She's spent her time well, it seems, to be part of an elite squad now!
I alluded to it already, but one of the more confusing aspects of this issue takes place in cyberspace. Wire and Paloma have a discussion there in which the latter explains that she recently changed cyberspace so that people whose archetypes get derezzed now die for real, rather than just getting booted out of the system with maybe a molten computer. This is very confusing, since the entire VR arc as well as several other comics in our readthrough are predicated on the concept that dying while in cyberspace leads to serious brain damage or death in real life already - it nearly happens to Wire and Doom in the first arc, and it does happen to Wire in a more recent issue, where he was only saved by Duke Stratosphere's specialized software. Why would Duke even need that if he was safe already? What gives? Paloma wasn't even free or empowered yet during much of the VR arc, so it's not like the change could have happened way back then, and it doesn't make sense that netgliders wouldn't have noticed in all the intervening months either.
Trying to make sense of this, I have to conclude that Wire and Doom were so vulnerable to derezzing in the early issues because they were thrown way outside the grid into the wastelands of cyberspace - and we'll have to take for granted that his explanation of the risks of cyberspace was just entirely wrong at the time, or wildly exaggerated. Not a satisfying explanation, but it sort of works. It doesn't really account for Wire's death, though, since he got derezzed and promptly died from an aneurysm in real life right on the page. Maybe Paloma already made the change at that time? But I'm not sure why Communion Jack would suffer a very different type of death as a result of the same trigger. Maybe the computers on Margaretta's island were boobytrapped? Ugh, I feel like somebody just completely forgot about a pretty basic canon detail of their setting and then tried to reintroduce them shortly after, which is just weird.
Leaving that aside, this comic is pretty fun - it's got several personal moments with most of our current supporting cast, the reintroduction of a bunch of old characters, and a full-on successful invasion of America by Doom's forces with a pretty epic finale. I would have liked to see a little more of Indigo's side of the conflict rather than implying it's happening off-panel, but toppling a corrupt capitalist regime in favor of President Doom is a pretty awesome alternative, and we'll be seeing the impact of that for many issues to come. Bonus points for calling the new national police 'SHIELD', Doom - I imagine it's a dig at his old foes from the Heroic Age. Nick Fury 2099, when?
Next time, we're visiting a spinoff issue that takes place around the time of Doom's first couple announcements for an outsider's perspective on the Doom invasion. Time to visit Ghost Rider 2099…
Quotations from President Doom
"I am a revolutionary, I have passion."
"I am Doom. This is my statement to this nation as a whole, butchered as it may be by the artificial borders of commerce. I am making use of all U.S. TV channels to speak to you. Consider this the first portent of your new lives - for as of today, I am claiming the Presidency of these fractured states as my own. Your current President does not consider you his protectorate. He doesn't consider you at all. Your lives are indentured to corporations, or else treated as diseases to be stamped out. Your President, owned as he is by commerce, offers no solution to the horror of your existence. He is merely the most obvious pustule in the infection of America. I am here to cure you."
"I inhale blood and smoke, now, the scent of revolution, and am calmed. ... I inhale blood and smoke, a revolutionary at the windows of heaven..."
Art Spotlight
Gruesome subject matter, but this image is pretty great.Runner-up are all the glamour shots of Libera Cielo, I suppose...
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2099 - Ghost Rider 2099 A.D. #13 - Fables of the Reconstruction
We're quickly switching over to a different title for a moment to cover a 'just after that last issue happened' interlude. I appreciate the cheeky joke of juxtaposing 'the new head of the USA' with an image of Ghost Rider's decapitated head - that's cute. We also get an image of President Doom in his newfangled armor, though he looks rather more like off-brand Iron Man than his usual self here. Still, his eyes are smoldering with fire so I guess it's still him! Honestly, that seems like an unnecessary feature of the armor and a nightmare in any place with smoke alarms, but in the end I guess it's all about presentation…
Story Overview
Fables of the Reconstruction
This story opens up by following a bunch of cybernetically augmented garbage men who are busy working on getting rid of the debris that resulted from a recent super-conflict in their streets - their business is called 'Supply Side Dumpster Diving.' One of the men, Mahler, comments to his buddy that he must have missed something since he went to bed one night and it was all the same old business, and then the next day everything that made any sense is suddenly in pieces! The other fellow, Brueghel, comments that Mahler has no perspective, that he has to be able to take a step back and see the big picture, man!
Nearby, a television flicks on with an announcement from the new President - that is, President Doom! Doom announces that a new day has dawned in America, and once again it is morning. Today, it is time for Washington to forge a new covenant with the people - a contract with America devoted to the renewal of basic values!
Mahler explains to his colleague that he can see the big picture just fine, and what he sees is that before this is all over they'll all be lying in the streets with their guts leaking out. Bruehler figures his pal sweats the small stuff too much, but Mahler insists that it's those little things that make all the difference - little things like the Bill of Rights for instance, or freedom of speech, or protection from illegal search and seizure. He's convinced that Doom is going to take a chainsaw to the Constitution and cut out the inconvenient bits - and once he's done that, who's going to put it all back together? The worst thing is that it'll happen right under their noses, and they'll never notice any of it until it's too late!
In the background, Doom continues his speech, announcing that the days of dissolution and balkanization, of a shattered superpower, are over. The myriad fragments have been gathered together - now it's time to rebuild! Make America Great Again, I guess.
While a shattered and broken Ghost Rider 2099, killed in a recent issue of his comic, slowly pieces itself back together out of stray pieces of wreckage and burned out engineering parts, Mahler and Bruehler continue their discussion. Bruehler figures you can't go around worrying about every little cog when the whole machine is broken, but Mahler doesn't agree that you should think of people as a bunch of clockwork robots. Bruehler figures the difference is not that huge, really - so what if human hardware is made out of meat? Mahler points to art and morality as uniquely organic, but Bruehler declares that culture is just another set of instructions programmed into you. As the two leave, mechanical spider-bots reassemble the remains of Ghost Rider into something a little more person-shaped.
We move over to a drinking place in the slums of Transverse City, Bar Code, which is a regular location from the Ghost Rider 2099 comics. There, a fellow called Megabite is trying to figure out how Doom managed to hijack every channel at the same time and basically shut down the internet for a while. There's a few other hackers present, including a black guy with an interesting hairstyle called Cryptoknight as well as Flamejob and Doctor Neon - the latter being another regular character from Ghost Rider 2099. Megabite suggests some software Doom might have used, but Cryptoknight shoots him down and explains that the program in question is less than useless to pull off the kind of major hack they're talking about here. No, he's pretty sure Doom had serious help from experts - he heard both Duke Stratosphere and Dixie Flatline were involved! (The latter name is actually a straight-up Neuromancer reference!) Flamejob doesn't buy this at all, and asks Doctor Neon what he thinks, but said man barely responds.
At the bar, a guy is trying to chat up Kylie Gagarin, who is yet another Ghost Rider supporting cast member, and he decided to do so by diving into politics and talking about how he sees the Doom situation shaking out. He explains that Doom will surely wrap himself in the flag and juice up all that patriotic fervor, then nationalize the transnational corporations… He pauses as he notices he lost Kylie's interest, and offers her some sweet, sweet synthetic dopamine. Kylie tells him that stuff makes her almost as sick as all his political garbage - he should save it for somebody who gives a rip! The man is a bit hesitant after that and asks what Kylie does care about. She stares down at the skull symbol she's drawn in the dirt on the countertop and tells him she doesn't care about anything, nada. Zero.
The door to the bar flies open as burly Übermensch-types with bad hair and worse clothes waltz in and tell everyone not to move - or they'll die! The head pseudo-Nazi then tells all the 'lower lifeforms' to be at ease, because he's not gonna hurt them - yet. First, he and his group gotta finish building those concentration camps, you know? Haha! The Nazi loser and a couple of his Grand Aryan Race brethren soon fill up the bar and tell everyone they can't leave - and if anyone thinks they're joking, they have no idea. No idea at all!
Flamejob recognizes them as a gang called the 'Toxic Zombies', and Megabite mentions that he used to know some of those guys before they joined up. Back then they weren't so bad, and he doesn't know what happened to their fashion sense. Cryptoknight fills in the details, here - they're actually using a drug called White Heat which does something weird to their body chemistry, some kind of cell mutation. That gives them their bad hair as well as an even worse attitude. So, 2099 apparently has shithead nazism as a drug, who knew? Flamejob decides it's time for the hacker convention to leave since the Toxic Zombies have been busting heads all over the city and might get rowdy. They're probably cruising for trouble.
Kylie talks to the robot barman about Zero Cochrane, the man who died to become Ghost Rider, and explains that she didn't even like him that much before he died, but afterwards she couldn't stop thinking about him. Then she thought maybe wasn't dead after all, and now he's dead again, maybe. It's a mess. Why does it all have to be so damn complicated? Even if he was still alive, she's not sure how to feel about that, never mind what he'd think of her. She wonders if the robot barman can calculate those odds, but he just tells her she's got the wrong man for that - he gave up understanding meat people ages ago. Too many moving parts! Outside, Ghost Rider continues to pull himself back together…
We next switch over to visit Dyson Kellerman, a recurring villain in Ghost Rider 2099 comics, whose holographic image angrily watches a wall of televisions which display Doom's recent pronouncements. He decides that nothing but utter chaos could come from all of this President Doom business. After all the work he's done preparing to bring some kind of order to the godforsaken world, years of subtle social engineering and tailored media viruses, Doom comes along to screw it all up!? It's an outrage! As he shouts this, you can actually see the outline of Doom's mask straight through Kellerman's hologram, lining up neatly with his own face. Two peas in a pod, I suppose...
Kellerman wonders if Doom, that barbaric fool, doesn't understand that the days of his kind are long passed? There's more to wielding power in 2099 than a strong hand! That very hand reaches out to push a button, and the nearest door suddenly slides open to reveal Victor von Doom... Doom walks up to the large device which dominates Kellerman's room and activates the manual override on the controls of the 'biocontrol chamber', much to the villain's shock. That's impossible! Lightning crackles across the surface of the machine as it comes apart and opens up, revealing a pristine human brain stored inside, with wires running from it in various directions. A metallic arm unfolds and brings the brain forward while Kellerman's hologram furiously shouts at Doom for daring to intrude on his personal space. How dare he do this? Doom patiently reminds Kellerman that he should properly be addressed as 'Mister President', but forgives the man for the lapse in protocol due to his condition. This time.
Doom is fascinated as he studies the brain - preservation of human tissue through polymerization is a form of immortality, allowing one to exist as a type of organic ROM, but it's not without a steep price. The frustrations of existing in such a way, interacting with the living only through a prosthetic hologram, must be quite substantial… Kellerman tells Doom he doesn't want pity and asks what the hell the conqueror wants from him. Doom explains that his Presidential agenda requires a certain leverage among the heads of the transnational corporations, an insider he can rely on, and Kellerman will have the honor of filling that role. Kellerman has no interest in becoming Doom's tool and announces that nothing compels him to turn spy, which prompts Doom to reach out to the polymerized brain. Kellerman, unnerved, asks what he's doing, and Doom reveals a tiny chip in his hand. He inserts it directly into the folds of the pickled brain, laconically informing Kellerman that it should be obvious - he's changing his mind!
He tells Kellerman to think of it as an upgrade - minutes ago he was but a common billionaire, but now he's a perfectly obedient servant of Doom! Sure enough, Kellerman's hostile demeanor fades away as the brain implant forces him in line… The brainwashed Kellerman hesitantly asks for instructions, and Doom reminds him to use his title. Kellerman calls him Mister President the second time around.
Doom instructs him to immediately cease his propaganda campaign against the being known as the Ghost Rider, since Doom has very specific plans for that individual which he doesn't want interfered with. Kellerman may, if he wishes, take comfort in the fact that Ghost Rider will have no more choice in the matter than Kellerman does! Outside, Mahler and Bruehler are still nattering on with each other, one asking about free will, the irreducible core of identity, the soul - I mean, that's gotta be copy-protected, right? Nearby, Ghost Rider reboots the copied core memories of Zero Cochrane, and activates all its systems…
Elsewhere, Anesthesia Jones - yet another recurring Ghost Rider character - calls for a virtual summit to discuss major businesses going down in the real world, and she figures they should discuss what the so-called Undernet is going to do about it. Her avatar is a lady made of stone, and she meets with Crackerjack, whose avatar is made of liquid metal, as well as Sirius, a gold robot, Lady Ada, a lightbulb in a dress, Kabal, a robot in noir fashion, and Reptilicus, who is a lizard in a jacket. Crackerjack mentions that nobody is happy about any of what's happening since they're all violently allergic to authoritarian consensus reality, but he figures they should just keep their heads down. Sirius argues that they're sticking their head in the sand like ostriches - there's clearly a law and order epidemic brewing, and the obvious nonconformists are going to be the first targets!
Kabal observes that voluntary cooperation among the group requires some degree of trust, which is predicated on shared confidence. Who among them is prepared to risk that level of familiarity? Ada adds that formal organization implies hierarchy and inequities of power, and that would lead to counterproductive conspiratorial intrigue. True communication is only possible among equals! Reptilicus is tired of her lecturing all the time, and explains that what both her and Kabal don't realize is that there's strength in numbers. If they don't hang together, they'll surely hang separately! Jones thinks that's the first sensible thing she's heard all day, and declares that the bottom line is survival. So far they've all been lucky, but sooner or later they're going to end up under a microscope…
Over in the VR sub-dimension of the Ghostworks, the various pseudo-demons are observing this meeting of the Undernet. The Egyptian god-themed being concludes that their projections were correct - the catalyzation of their desired countercultural movement has begun ahead of the original timetable as a direct result of Doom's actions, and statistical analysis indicates that these events have delayed the collapse of human civilization by 3.7 years from their original calculations. The conjoined twin babies comment that it might be enough, since negotiation with Doom has proven more constructive than anticipated. The brain adds that Doom has always been an X-factor that's resistant to stochastic methodology, but it warns that the qualities which make him useful simultaneously make him a first order potential threat…
Furthermore, it adds, they've compromised control over their experimental subject - Ghost Rider. The Egyptian god notes that what they've granted Doom has only advanced their agenda, since his proposal represented a scenario they had never considered, one with unique possibilities. The brain warily observes that there will also be unknown consequences. They've committed themselves to a scenario they've inadequately studied, and the potential for error is… inescapable. The babies agree that they've erred before, and are statistically guaranteed to do so again, as there shall always be variables which escape their notice. Some equations are inherently unpredictable, evolving systems resist entropy through increased flow of information, and by nature want to be free. Life is governed not by logic, but by a feedback loop from which arises emergent behavior…
While this philosophical discussion is going on, a tiny figure beneath the notice of these would-be-gods makes its way across to an input-out port, a human figure who flees from the simulation and flows back out to the real world, to a robot body that has reassembled itself. It's Zero's human soul. Ghost Rider wakes up to hear Bruehler and Mahler discussing the thought of man being more than the sum of his parts, and tries to figure out how he ended up where he is. Last he remembers he was being shot to bits, and he looks up his internal files only to discover he's made of nanomers - molecular nanotech. He's baffled to find he can heal himself to this extreme extent, reforming from pieces! Nobody knows what they're really capable of, the voice of Mahler states from off-screen, until it happens…
Ghost Rider looks up and is shocked to see a huge machine flying overhead, exclaiming: 'Holy Glitch!' Either he was dead for a long time, or he missed something big happening in the world. The device in the sky, naturally, is one of Doom's Environmental Maintenance Platforms…
Rating & Comments
This issue feels a lot like a filler collection of reaction shots rather than a real story, honestly, save for a single scene which kind of saves it from being ignored altogether. Most of the page space is spent on following around a bunch of minor characters - a lot of these people, like the cleaners and half the bar patrons, don't even get another issue. Most of the rest generally get less than two or three before they're forgotten. With the titular character out of commission for the entirety of the duration, then, we'll have to glean what we can from this 'interlude' type affair before we get back to the main event over in Doom's comics.
The two weirdly philosophical garbage men, Bruehler and Mahler, who discuss politics and the nature of consciousness while cleaning up refuse are an amusing wrinkle to this story, but since they never really get involved beyond spouting vaguely relevant talking points over shots of a robot reassembling, I'm not sure how much I can say. They never really land on a conclusion about anything - one of them is wary about Doom's new rule and quite cynical, the other one holds out hope. One of them would support the personhood of someone like Ghost Rider, the other's skeptical. The background chatter never really means much. It's basically Laurel and Hardy without the slapstick?
Two major scenes featuring various hackers are more concerned with introducing a slew of new minor characters rather than progressing the plot much, unfortunately. The first also introduces a new bunch of potential villains - Toxic Zombies, a bunch of drug-induced Nazis - who presumably become a nuisance in future Ghost Rider comics. Beyond that, there's some base-level reaction to Doom hacking the internet, but nobody comes to a real conclusion. The second scene is a bit more informative, suggesting that Doom's takeover has also gotten a bunch of major hacking figures to team up in a counter-culture collective which may play a role in the future. Evidently the Ghostworks were planning on having that counterculture movement around too, which I suspect means they're largely going to show up in Ghost Rider comics as a group of allies for the titular hero.
Now, the more interesting part of this comic for me, naturally, is where it intersects with Doom. We see snippets of Doom's speech announcing that he's taking over America and rebuilding it, which we could have guessed at. There's not a lot of details about what exactly his reformation would look like, but we'll be getting into a bit of that in an issue coming down the line. After that, however, we get something a little more unexpected - Doom actually shows up to headline a scene in this comic! Will wonders never cease?
Doom intrudes on the security of one Dyson Kellerman, a rich quasi-immortal fatcat who serves as one of Ghost Rider's villains. Here, Doom has apparently figured out the nature of the man's immortality and prepared for it, forcing the device that's keeping his pickled brain intact to disgorge its content. Doom came prepared here, building a mind control chip which instantly converts the disagreeable CEO into a meek slave. I quite appreciate the 'changing your mind' quip Doom delivers as he literally shoves electronics into the guy's brain, by the way... We'll have to keep an eye out for Mr. Kellerman in future issues to see what exactly Doom has him doing. More notable for this comic, I suppose, is that Kellerman gets demoted from villain status now that Doom has other plans for Ghost Rider. Ominous…
With the benefit of being able to see how many of these characters are actually relevant going forward, this comic loses a fair amount of quality. Knowing that the vast majority of them never even show up again after this issue makes the scenes sort of empty of content. The reaction to Doom's takeover was also fairly surface level for most of this issue, which doesn't really add much. The Doom scene was good and redeems the comic a little - especially if it's relevant going forward - but one decent moment doesn't really pull this one up very much. A below average 2 stars from me, just kind of there.
Quotations from President Doom
"The days of dissolution and balkanization, of a great superpower shattered in ruins, are over. The myriad fragments have been gathered together again. Let us now rebuild."
"May I remind you, Kellerman, that I am more properly addressed as 'Mister President'. However, in light of your… condition, I shall overlook the lapse of protocol. This time."
"I should think that would be obvious. I'm changing your mind. Think of it as an upgrade, Kellerman. Minutes ago, you were but a common billionaire - now you are a perfectly obedient servant of Doom."
Art Spotlight
I think some of the depictions of Doom in this issue are subpar, but I wave that off as the art of someone not used to the character. What's weird, though, is that the completed Ghost Rider is a lot less interesting than some of these depictions of his broken self. Look at this nightmare of a depiction for example:
One interesting thing about the 2099 universe is, we can actually see what would happen if Doom won. I think this may be the first time in the comics that this has happened, not counting the two or three times he has mind controlled the globe into submission, which I would not count since that is cheating. Anybody can make a utopia if everybody does whatever they say.
Now, we can see if Doom can win the hearts and minds of America, and what kind of world he would create.
Yeah, I always thought Doom's arc into President Doom was the best aspect of the 2099 universe, too. You can see how he'd appeal to the inhabitants-- the place is such a crapsack that a competent dictator might still be a step forward in a way it wouldn't be for a healthier society... Or at least people might think it might be better Doom than the Megacorps, if their life is going to be controlled by power-hungry autocrats either way.
⚠ Warning: This issue contains a depiction of Mass Suicide. ⚠
Doom 2099 A.D. #30 (June 1995)
Cover
We're back to war! Another military-themed cover this time, featuring our glorious new President surrounded by his hireling army, including a row of ersatz stormtroopers and various super-sized mega-tanks which resemble warship cannons on wheels more than anything else. Adding the mercenary planes to the mix, it's looking to get pretty dicey for anyone who wants to face Doom by force.
Story Overview
American Way
We start back at the White House, which looks very much like it does in the modern day, except for the looming shape of Libera Cielo hanging above it among the clouds. Huge craters in the lawn remind of the recent violence which took place here. Inside, Doom crosses his fingers and inexplicably lights his knuckles on fire as he recounts his recent shift to being President Doom of the broken states of America, by right of revolution. He describes his war as a desperate necessity to curtail the nation's mad rampage around the world, and seeks to remake his latest move into an act of passion to remake the Earth. He's won the war - now he only has to win the peace.
There are many bodies to be removed from the field, both literally and figuratively, and as such these early days are triage governance, tending the wounds of the country and treating its diseases…
One of Doom's first acts as President, judging by some of the email headers we see, includes shifting funds from transnational corporations towards financing the production of public cyberspace ports - dive booths - through a national company named Cynex. Restrictions on public access to information in cyberspace are provisionally lifted and cyberspace neural jacks will be made free to the public at Cynex franchises. Indeed, they'll be new and easy nanotech ones which can be inserted through injection, which were developed by Doom but based on work by Dr. Quiñones. In a rare bit of humility on Doom's part, the neural jacks thus carry her name. All of this is overseen by Indigo Eshun, the newly instated Minister of Signal.
Doom gets a call from Indigo on board Libera Cielo, and asks her how she's feeling. Indigo admits that she's still adjusting to what happened after Communion Jack blew up at getting derezzed in cyberspace. She's managing two people at the moment who have gone half-mad and refuse to return to cyberspace as a result - the fact that they can, all of a sudden, die in cyberspace is thoroughly unsettling to them. Doom mentions that he's spoken to Wire about this development, but feels like the man is hiding what exactly he knows. Indigo asks if Doom has any objection to her having a private talk with the weird little sod, and he lets her have at it before moving the discussion towards government business. Indigo explains that they're still wrestling with getting Cynex funding, but she has a couple people in cyberspace hacking into Stark/Fujikawa archives, and they keep finding a lot of strange and unreleased technology. Doom is pleased with her work, and tells her to bring the data to him in the afternoon - and to take a couple Panther guards with her when she leaves the safety of the flying city.
Doom soon leaves the Oval Office, and the chatter of workers renovating the building ceases when he appears. Doom muses that these Americans were hired to paint over bloodstains and rewire the White House to support the majestic communications systems he requires, and they're quickly learning to fear him - it was high time to teach some Americans that particular talent. With that thought he pushes open the door to the Nixon Room and greets the people inside, all the heads of every last transnational megacorp in America. Its kings, if you will. He expected to find captains of industry, dynamic figures, capitalist superheroes - instead he got a table full of sniveling worms.
Doom moves towards one of the people guarding the table - Jacob Gallows of Public Eye, secretly the Punisher. He thanks the man for ensuring the delivery of these creatures to his table, and tells him that they'll have to speak later. He then announces to the room that as of this moment, all corporate entities on American soil are hereby nationalized. While everyone seems shocked by this declaration, it's Avatarr who is most aghast, demanding an immediate explanation. Doom sarcastically mentions that those ridiculous eye decorations of his must restrict the ability to see in front of his face - because yes, this is most certainly happening! Alchemax and all other corporations are nationalized, to be controlled by the state and their funds directly attached to the White House, which means that Stark/Fujikawa's attempts to block funding from Cynex are useless. Doom can just take the money. Furthermore, the currency system that allowed for some people to have unlimited funding will end, and anyone who has more than a gold rating shall compulsorily gift the surplus to the government. Gold cards, as of this moment, are the highest permitted wealth rating, destroying the concept of billionaires altogether…
One of the corporate leaders jumps up and declares Doom can't do that, and he'll stop him! He'll claim his drugs as a tax rebate! While one of the Panther's Rage tells him to sit down or die, Doom notes that the man's drug bill could bankrupt this administration, but he promises the man he'll be paying some of the tithed money. He then introduces another item on his agenda - the Environmental Maintenance Platforms. He lays out the climate-controlling nature of the devices and states that he intends to float a vast network of them across America to repair what the corporations have destroyed. And it will be these corporations who will construct them, under government contract. Avatarr scoffs, declaring that the cost in lost sales of anti-pollution drugs alone would annihilate the economy, and Alchemax will not participate.
Doom states Avatarr has no choice in the matter, since for the first time in his life he's directly accountable to someone - Doom. Avatarr just tells him that they'll see about that, and the President smugly agrees. He then tells the table that they all have to understand that actions have consequences, and any act they perpetrate upon the American people will be scrutinized and punished by Doom. In this regard, they shall now learn their first lesson: Doom is going to kill one person in the room, and the CEOs get to choose who it will be!
Across the country, we see Sharp Blue and her entourage of mercenaries as they visit an island called Hellrock. Even through the force field she's using she can smell the place - rotten meat, maggots, chemical fungus encrusting mutroid children, human bile dissolving rocks. Fade wonders how anyone can live there, and Sharp Blue explains that they don't - that's the point. They just exist, and everyone tries to forget about the place and its inhabitants, but they can't, since it's a gash in the American psyche. Sharp Blue picks up a mutated baby and muses that Hellrock needs to be cleaned up as a cornerstone of Doom's new environmental policy, but she doesn't see a way to do that without utterly destroying it.
We get a bunch more email headers from Doom, noting that feasibility studies for a mass-transit teleportation project have begun, to be constructed by Alchemax on behalf of Sharp Blue, Minister of Order. The first-stage proposal is to construct three Gating Fields, mile-wide teleport platforms linking New York, Transverse City, and Los Angeles together, facilitating clean, instantaneous mass transit.
Back at the White House, Morphine Somers is pondering his role of Minister for Humanity as he takes a stroll across the bombed-out lawn where a bunch of enemy troops are seemingly bound to stakes which have been driven into the ground. Somers jokes that they could probably use a cigarette like his, but they can't have 'em.
He spots Nkrumah standing watch and asks how the whole 'god of violence' trade is doing. Nkrumah mentions that he gets to be threatening and unpleasant to a far finer class of people these days, and asks for advice from Somers as an American, since he feels he's perhaps not insane enough to understand what exactly he's looking at. It turns out a contingent of Thorites have shown up to protest Doom's takeover.
Nkrumah recalls that Thor is indeed mentioned in Panther King T'Challa's journals, and decides that these people must be in shock since Doom would be a scriptural villain of Satanic proportions to Thorites, who worship a 'hero' from the heroic age who fought Doom in that era. It also explains the scent he's been smelling - firestar, a cheap but highly flammable substance. Moments later one of the Thorites flicks on a lighter, and within seconds the entire crowd is caught up in the inferno as they burn themselves in a desperate suicide protest right in front of the White House.
Somers is shocked at the carnage, but Nkrumah says this is the way of fanatics - gripped by a religion of dubious provenance, there will surely be more like this in the future. To them, the Devil sits in the White House, and this is their way of protesting his presence. Nkrumah figures they should bring it on - they shall build a fine road on their bones. There's another email header, then - all business contracts between U.S. corporate entities and foreign interest are temporarily frozen, awaiting investigation on ethical grounds. Any contracts involving acts deemed unethical will be severed without recompense by order of Nkrumah, Minister of Enemy Relations.
Back in the Nixon Room, one of the CEOs, Pynchon, cries that Doom's ultimatum that one of them shall die is unfair - Kellerman is there only in holoprojection, so how would he even be able to die? Doom explains that Jacob Gallows has two of his men with the infirm Mr. Kellerman at his true location, and should he be chosen, they will deliver the deathblow. Also… in the future, Doom demands to be addressed as Mister President! Okay, calm down Prez, sheesh… It figures that Doom would be just as exacting about formalities and protocol in this role as he tends to be for his royal one back home…
The Worldboard pops back up for a moment, recounting the global reaction to Doom's Great Leap Forward. In London, cops hired by the ruling megacorporation Icy Eye instigate pogroms against civilian netgliders, since the Cyberdive Cadre has revealed the true talent and danger of rogue netgliders. In Wakanda, Queen Okusana presides over the funeral of the two Panther's Rage soldiers killed at the White House - her endorsement of the Doom regime is described as 'lukewarm.' In Latveria, there is total radio silence…
Over in Libera Cielo we visit the Signal Pit, Wire's favorite place in all of the floating city. The blank walls quietly reverberate with every conversation in cyberspace, which is why he loves it - loves crouching in the corner, half-insane, sometimes catching even a whisper of his own voice among the quiet cacophony. He exists simultaneously in both the real world and cyberspace, and ever since life hasn't been too good for him - not that he noticed much, because he's gone quite mad. But today is worse, because he discovered the names of the two Panthers who died taking the White House. One of those two names is Xandra. Wire doesn't intend to ever come out of the Signal Pit again…
In the Nixon Room, Doom asks the group of CEOs if they've made their decision. The various corporate leaders nervously glance at him and sweat covers their brows as they claim to have very nearly come to a conclusion, if they are permitted but a few more moments. Doom leans over to Gallows and points out one among their number is Tyler Stone, a true parasite - he recognizes Doom as the healthier, stronger host organism and Avatarr is but a dim memory to him now. Many such people will be made available to him for… punishment. Gallows narrows his eyes at this reference to his other identity. As the final minutes tick down, every distrustful and hateful gaze lands on the same person, the same colleague…
Doom concludes by the subhuman display of quivering and perspiration in front of him that his subjects have made their decision. Tyler Stone is the one to actually speak, naming Avatarr as the person they would see dead. Avatarr is furious, calling Stone a motherless reptile. When everyone else starts standing up and leaving in concert with Stone, he calls the whole lot of them cheap little rapists. Where are they going?
Doom laconically jokes that with their black card rating removed, buying more of their very expensive clothes will become difficult - he imagines they wish to protect their garments from bloodstains. Avatarr, furious, declares Doom won't kill him - he can't! Doom just stares back at Avatarr with half-lidded eyes and wonders if that's right. The CEO gets deranged at this point, yelling that Doom knows nothing, because he's a joke and Avatarr is laughing at him! All of America is laughing at him, the whole world! Doom hears no laughter, pointing one finger at Avatarr and launching a pencil-thin laser from the tip which impacts one of Avatarr's eyes. The shocked leader of Alchemax reaches up with one hand to cradle his head as bizarre and viscous yellow fluids flow from where his eye used to be. As he removes his hand, jaw agape, he's revealed to be less than entirely human below the surface of his skin…
Final quote: "In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but in his face." - Diogenes
Rating & Comments
This issue has an interesting structure since it's essentially one central plot event - Doom's meeting with the megacorporation CEOs - interspersed with a bunch of vignettes related to Doom's various supporting cast members and their new role in the administration. Despite the cover image, this issue basically treats the actual war as a fait accompli, since Doom managed to blitz into office at the end of the last issue and is now going about installing his rule of law. We're perhaps a few days out from that initial assault, but bodies still litter the lawn outside, so it can't have been very long. Still, the first substantial changes are being implemented in the nation by its new leader.
One of the first actions of Doom while in power is to fulfill his promise to Indigo and her Cyberdive Cadre, expanding the rights and freedoms of the netgliders that helped sweep him into power. Classic model Doom probably would have dropped them the moment their job was finished, so I view these actions as evidence that some part of 2099's more compassionate self still shines through the prickly exterior of a Doom who has regained his full memories and faculties. There's other behavior which can be used to show this as well - for one, using the EMPs to clean up the environment is a pretty clear helpful move for everyone, especially when pollution is part of the ongoing business model of this world. Insert topical criticisms of the oil industry and capitalism here, of course. Naming the freely available neural jacks after Dr. Quiñones instead of himself is another point in Doom's favor, showing that he's not all ego…
Leaving Doom to his own devices for the moment, various side characters get a moment to shine in this issue in vignette form, though since there's a bunch of them none are terribly in-depth. Indigo is first, and most of her current activities involve protecting her netglider team, interrogating Wire at some point, and stealing megacorp technology. I'm sure we'll get back to her later. Elsewhere, Sharp Blue and her entourage inspect Hellrock, a putrid mutant wasteland of pollution that desperately needs a clean-up effort, though how relevant that place will be going forward is anyone's guess. For now it's just sort of there. Morphine Somers and Nkrumah face off with a bunch of suicidal Thorites and steel themselves for more fanatical opposition in the future, but that's about all we get from there. All these scenes feel like they're essentially previews, teasers of what sort of plots the various members of Doom's cabinet will be tackling going forward. I'm not sure if we'll see most of that if Doom isn't involved, but a lot of it might be happening off-screen anyway, so who knows?
One plot thread which feels rather underserved here, even compared to some of those fairly anemic scenes mentioned before, concerns some of the oldest guest characters in the book: Wire and Xandra. Not only does Wire's appearance consist of two sets of duplicated panels of him cowering in a corner, but we get informed through an off-handed mention that Xandra freaking died last issue, as one of only two Wakandans killed in the assault on America. Maybe it would have been a good idea to show that particular development, comic? I know Xandra hasn't been around for a while, but the writers brought her back in the run-up to this event for a reason - and I doubt it was to kill her off-panel. Wire has barely returned from death either, but now he's basically a gibbering wreck again instead of contributing anything. What's the point, exactly, except to just kind of torture the poor sod? Was it just an excuse to write out dangling plot threads?
While all that is happening, Doom's main concern during this issue is his ongoing reorganization of the USA, and dealing with its previous lords and masters. Rampant capitalism was the order of the day, with a bunch of megacorporations and their billionaire CEOs controlling the levers of power while vying with each other for territory and technology, so Doom's response to that is to just cancel wealth. He not only nationalizes the megacorporations and put the money into funding large projects like Indigo's nation-wide cyber-initiative, but he limits all people's wealth to just quite rich instead of so impossibly wealthy that credit cards are literally infinite.
So, wealth redistribution combined with a heavy-duty expansion of the government for the stated purpose of expanding people's rights and access to services? Sounds like Doom is a bit more left-leaning than some people probably would have guessed, though I guess it's hard to pin down his politics with precision. Authoritarian, sure, but beyond that you'll have to start assuming. We'll get into it in a future issue which has more explicit details on Doom's government and how it functions so we can perhaps get a clearer idea. Suffice to say the CEOs are none too happy with this takeover of their nation, and protest vehemently…
Incidentally, other details of Doom's rule are transmitted through various e-mail headers. Among them are a mass-transit teleportation network to be constructed to facilitate trade across the nation, and the complete freezing of any business contracts with foreign entities until they're investigated on ethical grounds. Big decisions, but we don't quite see the repercussions yet. We similarly don't yet get an update on what's going on in Latveria, save for the fact that there's ongoing radio silence. What we do see is that Britain decided to launch a pogrom against its own citizens, because I guess making self-destructive decisions is just sort of their thing now. Heh.
Due to constant consolidation and corporate mergers, there are actually only six 'Kings of America' who end up in the Nixon Room, and several of them have shown up in our read-through before this. Avatarr and Tyler Stone from Alchemax are there, naturally, as well as Dyson Kellerman from the Ghost Rider issue. Filling out the lineup are Mr. Hikaru from Stark/Fujikawa, Mr. Pynchon from a drug-related company, and a sixth unnamed woman from an unknown company. While a couple of these people don't really contribute, we get a pretty clear view of the ones who do - Pynchon and Avatarr are both filled with unbridled rage, while Tyler Stone is a snake who would readily go along with Doom if it means he keeps his power, and Hikaru is generally displeased but doesn't speak up. None of the people there are happy, naturally.
To showcase his absolute power and confirm just how serious he is to this collection of billionaire CEOs, Doom uses the threat of force - he instructs his new subjects to choose one from among them to die. Doom's ultimatum is an interesting little powerplay on his end, but I feel like it's a trick. We know that Doom can directly control what Kellerman will do, and we also know Tyler Stone would be in it for his own skin. Doom also has at least some leverage on the others, particularly Hikaru from Stark-Fujikawa due to Indigo's hacking. Though it seems like a tense stand-off here, the conclusion seems inevitable from the start - in my view Doom fully intended to take out Avatarr since he's obviously and loudly the most problematic of the CEOs in the room, and the one he would likely still feel vengeful against due to the events of Fall of the Hammer. He just used the opportunity to force the other CEOs into submission by making them complicit.
The entire ongoing Presidential plot is interesting and quite different from what came before, and while the scattershot vignette style of the issue means none of the side-plots developed very much, it does leave the impression that this event is about the entire Doom administration instead of just the man himself. Pitting Doom and Avatarr against each other again is fun, since they've had a bit of a feud going ever since Libera Cielo was stolen, and the alien wrinkle at the end was expected ever since Avatarr talked about his 'star-friends', but it's good to see these things finally play out. I didn't care much for the Wire-related scene in this issue though, and it feels a bit rushed to just sort of close off the 'war' only one issue in. That went by real quick! Guess that's why it's a blitzkrieg… Giving this three stars, but on the high end of that.
Quotations from President Doom
"I am Doom. I am President of these broken states of America, by right of revolution. I have made the desperate necessity to curtail this nation's mad rampage through the world into an act of passion destined to remake the Earth. I have won the war. Now I must win the peace."
"Any act you perpetrate upon the American people will be scrutinized and punished by Doom."
"In future, Pynchon, you shall call me Mister President!"
Avatarr: "You know nothing. You're a joke, Doom. I'm laughing at you. All America is laughing at you. The whole world." Doom: "I hear no laughter." [Shoots Avatarr]
Art Spotlight
There's a bit of art reuse in this issue - aside from the Wire page, there's also a repeated motif where every time an e-mail header shows up, so does this shot of Doom's eyes:
Honestly, I don't think doom is left leaning so much as a tyrant. Megacorps are an alternate route to power that may come to quibble with DOOM's power, so DOOM abolishes them. The hyperrich, likewise, and so he abolishes them. He will not suffice for there to exist means to power other than DOOM, and that's directly it.
As for the pollution, I think DOOM just... dislikes waste. He's not efficient, god no, but DOOM has never been one for conspicuous consumption. If a thing is to be done, it is to be done right. That, or by ruling America he sees the quality of the nation as a reflection as the quality of him and his leadership, and DOOM has always been proud in the development of Latveria.
I think Estro has it on the head. Doom definitely won't permit rivals and he wants any country he rules to look good, not be a blasted, toxic wasteland.
Speaking of which, is it just me or did the artist and/or colorist make the mistake of making Hellrock look too much like a national park?
While Doom probably rigged things, it would have been pretty funny if, given the choice of one person in the room to die, all the CEOs pointed at Doom. Or, if they didn't have the guts, some random guard.
While Doom probably rigged things, it would have been pretty funny if, given the choice of one person in the room to die, all the CEOs pointed at Doom. Or, if they didn't have the guts, some random guard.
I think DOOM would honestly appreciate the chuzpha, if they had all said "DOOM". He'd probably compliment their courage. And then, you know, kill all of them. Can't let that stand, after all.
Doom basically treated the CEOs the same way he treated the feudal nobility of Latveria when he took over there, and the situation is pretty parallel. The free-market system has been broken so badly by 2099 that the CEOs essentially function as feudal lords. They don't have to do anything to maintain the quality of their businesses. They own the law, and can just crush any business that opposes them, unless it is another megacorporation.
Interim Dooms - Fantastic Four v1 #398-399 (March-April 1995)
Covers
Welcome to Kristoff hour! Okay, technically the ongoing storyline contains both Nathaniel Richards and Kristoff Vernard, but clearly the latter is more worthy of the name Doom. That, and he's actually on the cover here! I'll mostly be focusing on his involvement and summarizing a fair bit of the background plotting in these issues since we're dealing with a bunch of stories where the plot is largely irrelevant to anything Doom-related… It's just kind of what's going on in Fantastic Four while Kristoff is hanging out with them for one reason or another. It's all part of the buildup to the eventual capstone to the interim Dooms era, however, so I can't really skip it entirely… Let's just get started.
Story Overview
#398 - Watchers Lie!
We open this comic with Kristoff still working on the mysterious device dropped by the Watcher last issue, while Nathaniel and Sue both hover over his shoulders like a devil and an angel. Kristoff goes full Spock and says: 'Fascinating!' before telling his companions that his initial theory appears correct, and the artifact they found is actually a component of a larger weapon capable of destroying a solar system. He then compliments Sue on her excellent laboratory, since it is extremely well-stocked and sophisticated for something located aboard a starship like the Stealth-Hawk. Sue can't take any credit for that, of course, explaining that the ship came fully loaded like this - it is actually an experimental spy ship made by the Skrulls. Kristoff is surprised the aliens would willingly share such a ship, and Sue jokes about that, stating that the aliens were similarly surprised.
Kristoff next discusses a more painful topic for them both, namely the alleged deaths of both his beloved master, Doctor Doom, as well as Sue's husband Reed Richards. Knowing Doom as intimately as he does, Kristoff cannot conceive of him ever embracing death - not even if it guaranteed the destruction of the hated Reed Richards. His Master would never settle for such a hollow triumph, but instead devise a brilliant strategy which would force his greatest enemy to admit Doom's superiority! Sue asks if that means he believes that Doom is still alive, and Kristoff insists that he does. Sue isn't sure how to feel about finally finding someone who agrees with her about Reed and Doom surviving, since she knows so little about Kristoff. How could she trust him? Is she a fool to even try? He's still a child, and yet his loyalty to Doctor Doom is clear. Will he prove a powerful ally, or a deadly adversary…?
Nathaniel Richards approaches the Watcher's artifact with greedy eyes, only to run into an invisible barrier which blocks him from getting close to it. Sue snaps at Nathan to keep his hands off the merchandise - she's seen what happens to things and people that interest him! They have an annoying tendency to disappear! He tries to claim Sue is just making a bit of fun when he gets odd looks from the rest of the crew, and tells Sue that they wouldn't want outsiders to get the wrong impression of their happy family, would they? Ugh.
Scott Lang, hanging out elsewhere on the ship, spots Johnny brooding and has a moment of personal crisis when he realizes that a small-timer like him is now on a spaceship headed for the Moon with the freaking Fantastic Four. What is he even doing there? He goes to Ben for some moral support, but the big lug tells him that a problem just reared its ugly head! Tensions escalate in the Moon-city of Attilan, home of the Inhumans, as the local leader General Ator sends out a message reminding us that the Fantastic Four were told to avoid the Moon after they defied the Genetic Council of the Inhumans. That happened in a recent issue of Fantastic Four Unlimited where they helped out the royal family of the Inhumans. Anyway, when the Fantastic Four don't instantly turn around, Ator orders the launch of a warning salvo of missiles.
After dodging those missiles with some quick flying by Ben, Sue turns the entire ship invisible using her powers to avoid further conflict. The Inhumans are confused since the Skrulls never developed cloaking technology and they're convinced the Fantastic Four don't have the resources to engineer their own, and amid the confusion the Stealth-Hawk lands next to the citadel of the Watcher undetected. Though Sue is pretty strained by such an intense use of her powers, she tells the others to get ready to make a break for the building, since it's only a matter of time before the Inhumans realize where they went. They don't want to be caught on open ground!
Ben wonders if 'the kid' and Boris are also going to trek along, and Kristoff sharply announces that he will not be patronized - he goes where he wishes! He's the rightful heir to the dynasty of Doom, and he will not be left behind! Sue is hesitant to expose a young child to danger, but she figures Kristoff could easily steal the ship with his advanced intellect, so it's probably better to have him close by to keep an eye on him. Ben decides 'dynasty boy' can come, but only if he stops being so mouthy. Kristoff questions whether Boris will be safe on the ship by himself, but Ben tells him that they'll raise the defensive shields so it should be pretty secure. Boris thanks him for the courtesy, but to himself he thinks of Ben as an ignorant gargoyle. Oof…
The Fantastic Four, Kristoff, and Scott quickly make their way into the Watcher's citadel, marveling at the huge machines and devices everywhere. Sue recounts that Reed theorized the building's structure somehow transcended three-dimensional space, so they should all stay close together or they might end up lost. While Scott is wide-eyed at all this alien craziness, Kristoff wonders why the Watcher hasn't shown himself yet. Surely he'd be aware of their presence inside his home?
At that very moment the glowing image of Uatu's head appears in front of the group, explaining that they could not have entered the citadel without his permission, and he regrets to inform them that their journey was in vain. He cannot reveal the knowledge which they seek! Sue demands to know why the Watcher has been playing around with them recently, retelling the previously mentioned storyline in which the Watcher lied to them about exploring an alternate future in which the Fantastic Four died to save the world from Galactus. Thinking back on it, however, they realized Four Freedoms Plaza existed in that reality, which would never have been built if the Four had truly died when they still lived at the old Baxter Building. It was all an elaborate lie! Ben complains that they don't even know if they're talking to the real Watcher or that two-bit phony who recently attacked them at the tower, so what gives…?
Back in Attilan, the Inhumans discover where the Stealth-Hawk has landed and General Ator gives the order to call his personal assault squad to take care of things, since ignoring his wishes and invading Inhuman territory cannot stand! The Crimson Cadre soon assembles, consisting of Rootar the Irresistible, a Groot-like tree-man, Margoyle the Gargoyle, Eelak the Agile, who's just a wrinkled green dude, as well as Pulsus the energy-person and Glaboo the Hulk-ish mud monster. Ator declares it's a glorious day, for they shall soon take arms against the Earth's greatest fighting force, the Fantastic Four!
Back in the Watcher's citadel, it seems that Nathaniel is up to his old tricks and has slipped away from the group, but he has to hurry since he wants to be back before his absence is noticed. He places a transmat receiver down which should allow him to teleport back to this location in the future when he has more time to explore. Soon, very soon he'll plunder the Watcher's secrets, and then he can embark on his true mission! Outside, on board the Stealth-Hawk, Doom's loyal retainer Boris is doing a little bit of digging while everyone else is gone, exploring the databanks of the ship to learn more about Skrull technology. That's… weird? Boris is surprised when the ship's sensors alert him to a power of incredible magnitude which presently manifests itself inside the citadel of the Watcher!
The Fantastic Four are still badgering Uatu for answers, and the Watcher has actually appeared in person at some point after that first image appeared. The bald giant insists that there are cosmic forces at work which are so far beyond the furthest reaches of mere mortal kan that he dares not explain. He is then called by name from off-panel as energy starts pouring into the room, and the Watcher quickly tells the humans to run, to seek shelter and safety. Even he lacks the necessary power to withstand the entity which now approaches! A huge glowing hole starts forming behind the Watcher, like a tear in the fabric of reality, and it very nearly sucks the humans in with negative air pressure - Johnny and Ben narrowly hold on to surrounding solid objects while Sue makes invisible restraints to keep herself and Scott upright. She tells Kristoff to get cover as well, but the boy tells her it's not necessary - he's magnetized his boots to the floor so he won't be moved! He immediately identifies the rift as a dimensional gateway, just as an unknown alien is emerging from it.
From the wormhole appears a Watcher with a very bulbous, mushroom-like head covered in veins - okay, yeah, I'm not entirely sure if there's any way to describe this guy without sounding a little problematic, honestly. The being announces that the most critical juncture fast approaches, and the One has need of Uatu. He has been summoned to defend the One! Uatu declares that he is no warrior, that his duty is only to observe, and his responsibilities lie with Earth. The big-headed Watcher responds that the sector which he has faithfully watched no longer matters - only the One matters now! Come now, he cannot deny the fateful call of He-Who-Summons! Uatu, despite all his power, doesn't seem to be able to escape the vortex dragging him inside, and soon disappears…
While the evil Reed Richards from the previous issue observes from afar that Uatu has been summoned just as anticipated, the hurricane winds in the citadel die down, though the spatial rift remains behind. Scott notices that once again a strange technological device was left behind in Uatu's wake, and Sue decides the Watcher must be leaving them like a trail of breadcrumbs to follow, which indicates they should enter the rift too. Nathaniel strenuously disagrees with this conclusion, reappearing from his brief sojourn elsewhere to claim that it would be utter madness to leap inside some unknown dimension. Besides, they have no right to interfere in the affairs of cosmic beings! Logic dictates they return to Earth! Sue just impatiently replies that nobody asked for Nathan's opinion. Heh.
At that very moment the flaming image of Sue once again appears in the air, declaring that they should heed the words of Nathaniel, for only he holds the key to survival! Nathan comments that it's a pity the real Sue isn't as pleasant as that version. Sue reaches out to her double and asks her not to go, but she disappears again like before, and Nathan comments that this clearly wasn't her first manifestation judging by everyone's reactions. Scott explains that this image of Sue has been warning the Fantastic Four of trouble for a while now, but that doesn't necessarily make her trustworthy. After all, Nathan is not exactly a model citizen who should be trusted. Nathan doesn't dispute this, but insists that they should still head home.
Kristoff incredulously watches all this go down and concludes that Doctor Doom was right about the Fantastic Four all along - without the guidance of Reed Richards, they would never have been a threat to him at all! Now they're following random apparitions around, seriously? Ben wonders if he has something to say, and Kristoff explains that even a child could have designed the technology needed to produce a simple flaming image in the sky. Sue considers that phrasing and wonders what exactly he's suggesting with a good helping of suspicion, but that train of thought is interrupted when an explosion erupts in their midsts and another Watcher appears - it's the bad, snarling one they fought before. He is technically the second Watcher in this issue, not the first, unlike the previous issue where he was the first, not the second. This is a headache to keep straight, okay?
The bad Watcher announces that the universe is reaching a most pivotal point - which means he has but little time to exploit Uatu's absence. Ben recognizes him as the joker who tried to splatter him across Four Freedoms Plaza and goes to attack, but the Watcher responds by blasting him straight out of the side of the building where he goes skipping across the Moon's surface for a solid mile.
The Watcher then cackles and says that it was satisfying to do that - Ben always did grate on his nerves. As for the rest of them, well, he's never been their biggest fan either… The Uatu-double steps forward as a wave of red ripples across his clothes and armor, revealing that he was never Uatu at all, but actually Aron the Renegade! (What a shocker!) He announces that they are all rapidly nearing the end of the universe, a climactic and glorious finish to all reality - but none of them will ever live to see it! Nathaniel apparently did not foresee this complication and taps something on his wrist, teleporting away under the excuse of a 'strategic retreat.'
A mile away, in a freshly formed crater, Ben drags himself upright and mutters that he really should stop leading with his jaw. He looks up to realize he's surrounded by the Crimson Cadre, who tell him that they're his death squad!
Back on Earth, Nathaniel rematerializes on one of Doctor Doom's old transmat-pads beneath Castle Doom. His stolen servo-guards ask him if his mission went well, and Nathan admits he's had better days. He complains that he was aware Kristoff was young, but that someone should really teach the boy a little bit about discretion! He nearly gave the game away! We then see another part of the lab, where the familiar image of the fire-engulfed Sue is serenely floating above a technological device. Hah, I was right! One of the robots asks if they should shut down the holographic wave generators, but Nathaniel tells him he shouldn't - due to his daughter-in-law's stubborn streak the situation has just turned critical. If she and her associates are to survive, they'll need help from someone who's courageous, powerful, and naive enough to dare challenge a rogue Watcher. Only one volunteer springs to mind…
#399 - Watchers Scheme!
Back in the Watcher's citadel, Aron reaches out with one hand and catches everyone there with his telekinesis, lifting them up into the air. He explains that for the past several months he has been masquerading as his fellow Watcher, Uatu, subtly maneuvering the Fantastic Four to distract everyone from Aron's true goal. That explains all the lying and deceiving associated with that previous time-and-space trotting adventure, too. Johnny muses that he can tell what everyone else is thinking, since Sue is clearly goading Aron to talk until the team is ready to strike, while Scott has been around long enough to follow their lead. Kristoff, though, was raised by Doctor Doom - he's new and untested, and it's doubtful he can be trusted…
Aron continues by recounting that back in Fantastic Four v1 #373, shortly after a good deal of Aron's cosmic power was stolen by Doctor Doom, Uatu took him to the other Watchers inside a stasis tube. He was about to face judgment for his repeated interfering with mankind when all the Watchers were suddenly called away, summoned to defend the entity that they've named the One. A desperate battle rages even now for the fate of the universe, and it's a fight the Watchers are destined to lose! Only Aron shall survive!
Sue makes a crack about Aron sounding like a bad movie villain, then calls out: 'Now!' Sue, Johnny and Kristoff each pitch in for the ranged assault on Aron with invisible force, gouts of flame, and the laser-blast of a rather powerful handgun respectively. Johnny compliments Kristoff's shooting and admits that he never even saw the boy pull that pistol, and Kristoff explains it's actually a molecular disruptor designed by Doctor Doom, and he's honestly surprised that the Watcher's physiology could survive its highest setting. Johnny asks incredulously if that means Kristoff just seriously tried to kill Aron, and the kid bemusedly wonders if Johnny wasn't. Scott tells them this is hardly the time to discuss the proper use of lethal force, but Johnny still makes it clear to Kristoff that the Fantastic Four doesn't commit senseless murder. (I mean, it's justifiable self-defense at least, right?)
Sue isn't sure Aron is going to give them any choice but to go for lethal damage, and considers using the power that Doom stole from Aron in order to destroy him - some of it might still be stored somewhere within the citadel after their conflict in Fantastic Four v1 #375! Aron compliments her on that strategy, which she apparently blurted out in front of him, but unfortunately he cannot allow it to be implemented! He blasts Sue with eye-beams which seem to evaporate her entirely, and Johnny desperately demands to know what was done to his sister. While Ben is still fighting the Inhumans that cornered him in the previous issue, Boris watches events on the Moon's surface from inside the Stealth-Hawk and comments that the Thing is as witless as he is insufferable, but he must not die. Not yet! With a skill you'd hardly ascribe to an aged peasant, Boris then activates the ship's vast weapons array…
Aron declares he still has more than enough power to obliterate all of them, even if some of his might was depleted due to Doom's interference in that previous story arc. Kristoff whispers that clearly the only hope they have is to follow the plan Sue came up with, and he tells Johnny that he should distract Aron while Kristoff personally goes to locate and secure the storage battery which still holds Aron's purloined power. Johnny follows that advice, weirded out that he's taking orders from the arrogant creep, and he thinks it's crazy to let him anywhere near Aron's power - but he needs to know what happened to Sue, so doesn't dare leave the fight without finding out. Scott runs up to Kristoff and figures he can't blame Johnny for looking aggravated since the boy hasn't gone out of his way to make any friends on the team. Scott asks if he can help out, but Kristoff mutters acerbically that Scott should do what he does best - reduce himself to the size of an ant and try to keep from getting underfoot! Even in his current, weakened state, Aron is far too powerful for the likes of Ant-Man. Scott understands the derision, but refuses to give up on meaningfully contributing.
Elsewhere in spacetime, Sue finds herself stranded on a chunk of floating space-rock and concludes she's clearly no longer in the citadel. Aron must have hit here with some sort of teleportation beam! She stands up and realizes in horror that she recognizes exactly where she is - this is the area of subspace known as the Negative Zone! She's been dumped on one of many asteroids that are slowly being drawn into the antimatter planet below, a place which annihilates anything that strays too close in a devastating explosion. She concludes it can't be an accident, and Aron must have had a reason to send her here of all places. Why did he deliberately separate her from the others?
A voice from off-panel answers that question, musing that perhaps Aron was an old romantic at heart, as a stretchy arm comes into view. See is stunned to see Reed Richards fly towards her using a jetpack. Her husband asks for her forgiveness, explaining that he never meant for them to be apart, and he can't tell her how sorry he is! He proclaims his eternal love for her, and solemnly swears they will never be separated again! Sue runs up to him and is glad to see him, and reflects that it's so sudden and unexpected to see him alive. She can't imagine why Aron would even bother to reunite them. She pauses, her pleased expression fading to anger as she suddenly shouts: 'No!' before violently pushing Reed away from her.
Johnny keeps Aron busy for a while, but even his most advanced techniques like flame duplicates and nova blasts don't prove enough to put much of a dent in the rogue Watcher's armor. Aron muses that he seems to have lost sight of Johnny's friends… where did they go, exactly? It turns out Scott chased after Kristoff after he went to find the lost power of Aron. The kid actually found something, since Scott finds him entranced with some glowing gizmo. Kristoff spends several minutes working on it and frantically making adjustments, though Scott can't tell exactly why.
Aron soon arrives and shouts to Kristoff that he has to move away from the storage battery, and the kid only narrowly avoids getting blasted with another volley of eye-lasers. Aron grandstands a bit about his power and Kristoff responds to this by doing some grandstanding himself - he declares that he's unimpressed by the alien's bravado, for he is Kristoff Vernard, rightful heir to the dynasty of Doom! Aron angrily asks how he dares to mention that wretched swine, since Doom stripped him of his cosmic power and humiliated him before his peers and… wait, why is everything suddenly getting bigger? Aron is actually swiftly shrinking, and moments later Kristoff gets smaller too as he's exposed to Scott's shrinking gas as well. Why? Kristoff doesn't understand why he too must suffer this indignity! Ant-sized Scott tells a similarly tiny Kristoff that he should get with the program already - they both know that this stunt only worked because Scott caught Aron by surprise, and it's only a short-term fix. Kristoff argues he could have defeated Aron without such needless theatrics, but Ant-Man tells him they can discuss it while they get to safety!
Back in the Negative Zone an angry Reed has inflated his fists to attack Sue and declares that she must trust him, must drop her invisible force field, as his hyper-harness jetpack can carry them to safety! Sue accuses him of not being her Reed Richards at all, but some other version from a parallel world. Indeed, from the scar on his face she recognizes him as the same Reed whose Earth was destroyed due to his carelessness, the evil Reed Richards the team fought in that previous Watcher-related storyline. He presumably survived his apparent death there due to Aron's intervention. The 'Dark Raider' figures all of that is irrelevant - if Sue could love one Reed, she could eventually accept another!
Sue calls Dark Raider insane, and he doesn't disagree - but perhaps she can heal him! She should think about it - they both lost the greatest loves of their lives, and deserve a second chance! Sue doesn't want anything to do with this guy, but the Raider comments that she may be a little more headstrong and opinionated than his Sue, but he's sure they'll learn to adjust. He then uses his stretching to entirely surround the force shield that Sue is putting out and decides he can use this to fly them out of the debris zone even without her permission. If Aron is correct, the two of them might soon be all that's left of mankind, and it'll be their responsibility to repopulate like a modern-day Adam and Eve…
Sue angrily tries to escape from this warped funhouse mirror version of her husband, first extending her shield and then adding serrated edges, which finally gets the Raider to back off. He declares time is running out, as soon they will impact the antimatter planet below and cease to exist - they can't continue this fight! Sue agrees, and tells him that she's more than willing to accept his surrender. To herself, Sue admits she's not half as confident as she sounds, since she's already feeling the strain of projecting so many force fields in rapid succession after already exerting herself turning the Stealth-Hawk invisible earlier…
Ben is still beating up the Inhuman attack force sent to fight him, and pulls up a huge chunk of moonrock to topple over the horde of enemies, declaring it's clobberin' time! Just as the Crimson Cadre regroup to try a new tactic, however, a huge explosion suddenly erupts nearby. The Stealth-Hawk hovers overhead while Boris floats closer in a Fantasti-car, asking if he caught everyone's attention now. He advises Ator to withdraw his troops since the next missile will be aimed straight at the heart of Attilan. While Ben wonders how some old coot figured out how to move or reprogram the Stealth-Hawk, Ator calls Boris's bluff and proclaims that the Fantastic Four would never sacrifice innocents to save one of their own. The old man responds that this is true - but Boris has spent his life in the service of Doctor Doom. Are they perhaps familiar with him?
Silence chills the air as General Ator recognizes the name, and hastily salutes the old man before turning around and fleeing with his tail tucked between his legs. On this day the Fantastic Four have won a great victory… and greater enemies! He swears they haven't seen the last of the Crimson Cadre as they hurriedly run away. Boris then floats closer to Ben and tells him to come along, as he suspects the rest of the Fantastic Four will eagerly welcome his services back at the Watcher's citadel. Ben looks suspicious about Boris but figures the old man is right, and compliments him on the nice bluff about blowing up Attilan. Boris curiously wonders who ever said he was bluffing…
Back in the citadel, Aron angrily curses out the Fantastic Four as he returns to his usual huge size, declaring that their pitiful minds cannot even comprehend how invincible he will become once he has regained the cosmic power that is rightfully his, moving closer to the container! Scott figures this is the end for them, but Kristoff watches on with glee and declares that victory is theirs! Aron reaches for his lost power, but it suddenly lashes out at him and sucks in bright pink rays of pink energy, causing Aron to crumple to the floor. Scott immediately guesses Kristoff was able to jury-rig the device to suck even more power from the Watcher instead of returning it, calling him 'Kristy, ol' kid' in the process - Kristoff does not appreciate the appellation at all. It's unsuitable for a royal heir! Johnny flies into the room and decides that what Kristoff lacks in personality, he clearly makes up for in smarts - he's truly as smart as Doctor Doom himself! Something that he's sure they'll live to regret, eventually…
Aron crawls back to his feet and Johnny demands to know what he did to Sue. Where did he send her? Aron angrily declares that they shouldn't delude themselves into thinking they've already won - it's not beyond his ability to transform apparent defeat into triumph. Instead of obliterating them now, he will simply allow them all to perish in the coming cataclysm with the rest of their insignificant race! With that Aron fades away from the room, much to Johnny's horror.
Kristoff tells Johnny to pull himself together, pointing out that they're in the middle of a citadel devoted entirely to observing the phenomena of the universe - they should be able to use the equipment here to discover where Sue ended up. Kristoff notices something is troubling Scott, and the Ant-Man explains that he's not entirely sure what the Watchers might define as a cataclysm, but it doesn't sound good! Kristoff figures they can't allow themselves to be distracted with idle speculation, and they should focus on retrieving Sue before doing anything else.
In the Negative Zone, Sue has been using her force fields to leap-frog from one asteroid to another, but the Dark Raider keeps zeroing in on her whenever she briefly becomes visible to rest her powers. He has a major mobility advantage on her due to his jetpack, and he keeps shouting that she can't escape since they belong together. He knows her better than she knows herself, he says, and he understands how she thinks, because she taught her how to fully exploit her powers! Sue becomes visible and declares that he keeps confusing her with his own Sue Richards, a woman who died, and he doesn't have a clue how the current version of Sue thinks. Otherwise he would have realized that she was deliberately luring him into position so she could do… this!
Using her invisible force bolts, Sue slips a blast beneath the Dark Raider's armpit and blows up his hyper-harness, removing his mobility advantage entirely. The Raider angrily shouts that it was the only way to get safely out of the debris zone, but Sue tells him that exploding is the least of their problems since both the Raider and Aron mentioned the actual end of the universe. The Raider confirms this, and explains that the Big Crunch is coming, and the cosmic expansion generated by the Big Bang will go in reverse, pulling all planets and stars into a primordial mass. The reason the Watchers are involved? They're causing it!
Sue is skeptical that Uatu, their friend, would be part of something like that - he's saved the Earth on countless occasions! He's never willfully aid in the destruction of the universe! The Raider tells her not to be naive - the Watchers are aliens with their own agenda. He explains that Aron only agreed to spare the Raider's in return for his assistance - he helped the alien to modify the Ultimate Nullifier! Well, that's not a scary thought at all. Suddenly the Raider slips off the asteroid, and Sue rushes forward to catch him. He tells her not to bother, that he'll save himself… after he disposes of her! It was a ruse, since he uses his stretching powers to elongate a fist to punch her in the back of the head.
While Sue recuperates on the side of the asteroid, her head pounding and the world spinning, the Dark Raider discovers that he's not dropping back to solid ground like he expected - something's wrong. He's been caught in some kind of subspace current, and he's being pulled through the void without any way to stop himself! He thought he could stretch to safety, but he can't even seem to control his limbs anymore, so he calls out for help, calls out for Sue. Unfortunately she can barely even concentrate due to the hit to her head, and while she tries to reach out with her force fields, she can't manage it and lingers on the edge of unconsciousness. The Raider descends closer to the antimatter planet below, and when he realizes he's doomed, destined for death, he finally seems to snap out of his bad behavior for a brief moment. He asks Sue for forgiveness, and his final words are an apology for hurting her. With a flicker of light he vanishes, annihilated into his constituent energy.
Back on Earth, Kristoff has reprogrammed the Watcher's computers to track Sue down, and the monitors display her knocked out on a stray chunk of asteroid debris in the Negative Zone. Ben has arrived back from his trip across the Moon's surface and wonders how Sue ended up in another dimension, and Johnny explains that Aron teleported her there - it's a long story that he wasn't present for. Ben asks where Nathaniel is, and Johnny admits he didn't even notice the man's absence, but he figures they can't worry about that now. Ben demands to know why Kristoff isn't zapping Sue back home yet, and the kid explains that such is beyond the capabilities of the device they're using, or anything else they have at their disposal. Everything in the citadel was designed, after all, for the Watcher - they're intended for the purpose of observation only! They're helpless to reach Mrs. Richards, nor can they save her. All they can do is stand and watch as she is relentlessly drawn closer and closer to the antimatter world below, towards her inevitable destruction!
To be continued…
Rating & Comments
I like my cosmic Marvel nonsense well enough, of course, but I have to admit that the Watchers in particular were never my favorite element of that particular slice of the pie. In this case, the Watcher-related story feels more like a lackluster filler half the time rather than an actual adventure, and it falls into repetition. There's an obvious reason for this - and it has to do with nice round numbers. See, this is the Fantastic Four comic, and we're at issue #398 and #399. Which means the anniversary issue #400 is right around the corner, and that naturally needs to be some big dramatic event to end a storyline, as with other round numbers in the past. Obviously. We've even covered a few of those. So what do you do if you're basically ready to tackle that story but you still have like three issues left to fill until you get there, and nobody has any good ideas on how to use them? You stall.
In the first issue, then, there's a bunch of setup for a fight between the Thing and an Inhuman assault squad - a conflict that has no real relevance to ongoing events and will ultimately die with a bit of a whimper when they slink back home at the urging of 'Boris.' It still means several pages of dealing with a missile attack and a bunch of random one-shot characters, though, spread out across a fair chunk of these two issues. Beyond that, there's also a bunch of recapping of events from a few storylines ago, recaps which were also included in the last couple storylines, so it gets rather repetitive. I get that you want to keep readers informed, but if you're not even really going to use that information in the issue, why bring it up every time? Then, of course, we get a reprise of the previous issue's fight with Aron the Rogue Watcher - never mind that said previous fight already ended with Uatu fetching Aron to come deal with this 'One' business, only for that to be ignored here…
Despite being a bit of a stall-fest, the first issue does have some neat moments to consider - Kristoff and Sue find common ground in believing their respective loved ones survived their apparent death, which is sweet. Sue gets to be the cool hardass in general, actually, demonstrating some great control of her powers and deploying a nicely acerbic tone when it comes to Nathaniel and his assholery. Kristoff sees straight through Nathan's bullshit too, so you can tell which two are my favorite characters in this issue, heh! And for all that he's a very hateable asshole, the reveal that Nathan's been orchestrating this flaming image of Sue all along is a bit of sweet vindication. Actually, judging by Kristoff's comments, it might actually be one of his inventions rather than Doom's…
The second issue is more about fighty-fighty-punch-punch stuff between the team and Aron, between the Thing and the Inhumans, and even between Sue and alternate evil Reed. Still, the way those fights shake out actually make this issue more engaging than the first - they don't go in ways you might expect. Firstly, the fight between the team and Aron showcases Kristoff's power through his implausibly effective molecular disruptor pistol (courtesy of Doctor Doom) and his on-the-fly manipulation of a power source to suck a Watcher dry with only minutes to work on it. Bringing back a bit of continuity from the previous storyline featuring Aron and Doom is pretty neat, especially since it makes total sense that Kristoff would be able to easily handle technology that Doom explicitly had a hand in creating. The comic also has a fun time highlighting Ant-Man's inferiority complex and the amusing relationship he's building up with Doom's ward as a result. It may seem like it's all just Kristoff putting Scott down here, but there's more going on here than that - they have an unconventional adversarial friendship thing going on, and I'm here for it.
The Thing's fight with the Inhumans is unremarkable for the most part, save for the ending. Boris comes in to help out, by somehow reprogramming the Stealth-Hawk to follow his orders while he threatens the aliens as if he's Doctor Doom himself rather than just a civilian who has a history of caring for the masked monarch. It's not the first indication that something weird is going on with him, but there's plenty of hints that he's not, strictly speaking, exactly who he claims to be - or Boris was secretly way more competent than he ever let on in previous appearances. For the moment, however, his secret competence benefits the team. It's rational that people might suspect Kristoff after this, since he and the fake Boris were found at the same time, trapped in those stasis tubes, so that could justify some paranoia going forward even if Kristoff is on the level. Good stuff!
The final conflict of the second issue, then, is the big one on the cover - Sue versus an evil Reed. The Dark Raider is a character who's basically popped up in one storyline and a bunch of cameos, but only here does his full insanity come into focus. The Raider is convinced that he can just coerce a Sue from some other universe to fall in line and be his wife, which is pretty disgusting. The implication that he's used to a more meek and subservient Sue are nauseating given how much of a dick this Reed is, having doomed his own world out of negligence or worse. He proves pretty underhanded in this fight too, where despite Sue's clever tactics and judicious use of her more advanced powers, Reed still tries to go for the suckerpunch in the end. He gets hoisted by his own petard, sure, but that was just a lucky break on Sue's part. There's a whole messed-up relationship metaphor in here too, between Reed trying to envelop Sue to control her, and Sue growing serrated edges in response!
While the second issue is definitely better than the first, I'm not too enamored with either of these comics - they're okay but mostly just for momentary character beats rather than the overall story, which meanders and stalls and never really concludes. Aron, for example, gets beaten twice within like three issues here, but he's still not actually down and out at the end of this issue, teleporting away instead. The Inhumans just slink back home without ever really concluding their plot either - anemic as it was. And what's up with Nathan sneaking away from the group twice in two issues to do random other things? Why put up a big protest about what the team is planning when he can't even be bothered to keep an eye on them in the first place…? I'll round this one up to 3 stars, I guess, because Kristoff is here, but it's close.
Best Panel(s) of the Issues
I liked the detail on this splash page featuring Aron in full regalia alongside the current lineup (sans Ben.) It's nothing special but it looks neat.
Most Gloriously Villainous Kristoff Quotes
"Fascinating!"
"With your indulgence, Mrs. Richards… I must return to a subject painful to us both! The alleged deaths of my beloved Master and your husband! Knowing Doctor Doom as intimately as I do, I cannot conceive of him embracing death - not even if it guaranteed the destruction of the hated Reed Richards!No… the Master would never settle for such a hollow triumph! He would devise a brilliant strategy… which would force his greatest enemy… to acknowledge Doom's superiority!"
"Doom was right! The Fantastic Four would never have threatened him without the guidance of Reed Richards!Apparitions indeed! A child could have designed the technology needed to produce a simple flaming image!"
"Kristoff Vernard is unimpressed by mere bravado, alien! I am the rightful heir to the dynasty of Doom!"
Doom's Bad Hair Day
Kristoff randomly drops his green tabard for this purple affair in a single panel, and nowhere else. It's in a panel where several other costumes are also miscolored (but not Ant-Man's for some reason) so it must've been some oversight, or a poorly implemented take on strange lighting...
Doom-Tech of the Week
The Holographic Wave-Generator is most likely the same device Nathan used a bunch of issues ago to make that falsified transmission to his grandson, and it was confirmed to be Doomtech at the time. Though my own theory is that Vernard constructed it - hence mentioning that a child could make it - that still technically makes it Doomtech! I suppose the Cosmic Energy Battery on the Moon is leftover Doomtech too from a previous storyline, so that kinda counts. These are both more continuity than new things, but they're there!
