2099 - Doom 2099 A.D. #31 - American Dream
- Location
- Netherlands
Doom 2099 A.D. #31 (July 1995)
Cover
Today's cover is nice and cheery, ain't it? Lady Liberty, now bearing the mask of Doom to cover up her skeletal features, stands among the flaming ruins of a city - apparently they moved her inland at some point - while planes drop bombs from overhead. The most striking detail I noticed is the barbed wire between the spokes of her crown, giving her something like a halo but, you know, for the dark side. The proportions on that left hand seem a bit off, but I think the message comes across loud and clear. WAR IS HELL, FOLKS. Never mind that this technically depicts events from two issues ago…
Story Overview
American Dream
Picking up right where we left off, we witness Avatarr reeling back from getting shot in the eye by Doom - and this time around his features are decidedly more alien than the fairly ambiguous shot at the end of last issue. Green rows of scales are visible where the camouflaging mask has failed, and green blood sprays everywhere. The comic notes that an 'avatar' in classical times was an embodiment of a deity on earth, a god in the flesh. This Avatarr, broken-faced with acid streaming from his destroyed eye, must then be the god of money! A stench rises from the wound that has no right coming from a human body, and the assembled CEOs of the other megacorporations - who apparently stayed in the room to watch - back away from the thing they called their colleague and rival. Doom does not.
Doom calmly observes that the laser he fired into Avatarr's head was obviously an underestimation of what he'd need to kill the man - he concludes that the stress Avatarr is currently experiencing has less to do with the severity of his wound, and more to do with the 'neural regelation' that his scanners are picking up on - Avatarr's brain is literally melting over the hole. Those same scans also disprove Doom's initial theory for the CEO's nature - he's not a mutant at all. Indeed, there is actually nothing remotely human in Avatarr's DNA structure at all. He's an alien! Tyler Stone recoils at the suggestion that Avatarr is a creature from space, admitting he's about to be sick, and I am once again reminded that everyone in this world apparently forgot Earth was at the center of a dozen fighting space empires just a century ago…
Doom comments that Stone's response is 'arachnid reaction' - instinctive revulsion towards the alien. Jake Gallows, the Punisher, offers to fire a spray of bullets into the thing's skull to splash his brains everywhere, but Doom tells him that there are certain things this administration ought to tend to personally. Avatarr, gathering himself, asks the 'monkey' facing him to come at him, if he thinks he can manage. Doom admits to himself that he has a slight doubt about his ability to defeat Avatarr - his imaging system shows him that Avatarr is of no alien species he's ever encountered, and while the light bone structure recalls the Shi'ar and the bionics in his gut resembles those of the Phalanx, but the full picture is a total mystery to him.
Avatarr spits at Doom, launching a glob of acid into his armor which is mixed with a potent hallucinogen according to his scanning arrays. Still, it's not actually very potent acid, as it doesn't manage to bite through even the surface layer of his metal breastplate. In response, Doom launches himself forward and lands a devastating punch to the alien's sternum, smashing him into a wall as blood flies from the site of impact.
Through the hole he ripped in the alien's chest, Doom can see his lungs grow spikes to protect the destroyed tissue, and his momentary fascination at the bizarre biology on display costs him. Avatarr grabs him by the arm and then forces the spikes in his chest to jut outward, growing several feet within moments and stabbing viciously at his attacker.
Doom reels back as he narrowly avoids getting skewered by the razor-sharp spines, but one of them manages to pierce through the faceplate of his armor and squirts a helping of hallucinogenic compounds directly into his face. Avatarr, now far more smug, announces that Doom can now see the world as he sees it - that drug he's just been dosed with is one of the building blocks of life on his world! How dare Doom call himself the superior of the two of them, how dare he? The world suddenly goes full technicolor rainbow-land to depict Doom getting blasted with new sensory perceptions, and Avatarr calls him a mere lungfish, a wet and unevolved thing gulping in the oxygen of power he was never meant to know. Does he not see the richness with which Avatarr sees the world? And still, Doom dared to claim he was greater?
Avatarr takes advantage of Doom's altered state and launches a devastating super-punch into his face, a blow which manages to shatter parts of the adamantium-compound his helmet is made of and sends him crashing to the ground, unconscious.
Avatarr winces at the impact as his knuckles bleed, but he barely stops to consider his wounds. He turns towards Jake Gallows and tells him to lower his gun - he works for a new president now, Avatarr himself! First order of business is to execute the other CEOs in the room, so they can be replaced with people who know less about him. Later, they'll quietly burn Doom on the lawn, since the country's seen enough dubious icons without adding a martyr to the mix. When nobody moves in response to his orders, Avatarr insists that they jump to it - now that this President Doom nonsense is over, they have a disguised autocracy to restore! To business, gentlemen! This is, of course, the moment that Doom rises from his apparent defeat and launches himself forward in a calculated assault, landing a heavy blow of his own in the middle of Avatarr's back.
Doom seems rattled after being knocked down earlier, but he thanks the paralyzed Avatarr for loaning him his perception enzymes, since the enhanced sensory data allowed him to determine that within the bionics hidden in the alien's gut lays his central nervous system - and also that it was accessible from right behind his spine. That one vicious blow was targeted straight at Avatarr's version of his brain. Even as they speak, Doom proclaims, nanobots in his blood are flushing out his hallucinogenic excretions. Doom surmounts all. With the CEO laying unmoving on the floor in front of him, Doom then goes completely berserk. For the next full page all we see is Doom violently smashing something just off panel beneath him as green blood is splattered everywhere and CEOs look on in horror and wince at the loud cracking noises of bones being broken. Jake Gallows approves, though, the only one who's smiling.
After Doom is done with his very thorough murder and mutilation of Avatarr he asks Jake for a little help walking, since the nanoids in his blood do their work by drawing on Doom's own metabolism. They've left him without strength. He proclaims that he needs the help of Indigo, and asks to be taken to her, telling the other guards in the room to take the cadaver of Avatarr to the White House's newly expanded Communications Suite as well. The CEOs are horrified by what happened, with Tyler Stone reflecting that all this time he didn't know the truth about Avatarr - sure, they were all afraid of him, but that's the way it is in their executive lifestyle. The alien thing can't be true though, right? There's no such thing as space aliens! Just like all those old Heroic Age tales about blind vigilantes in red leotards, or magicians on Bleecker Street - those never happened either. This has to be fake. Doom has to be crazy!
Indigo comes rushing into the Communications Suite and witnesses Jake help Doom into a chair. She asks what's going on, and Jake explains briefly that Avatarr turned out to be some kind of disgusting Martian or something, a claim which utterly baffles her. Doom tells her that he'll explain later - for now he needs full access to American TV, much like she arranged during the coup. Doom would do it himself, but he's still a little… incapacitated. We see a momentary flicker of what he's seeing, and Doom is still tripping a lot of balls, seeing Indigo as a flurry of colors and shapes. Doom requests that he cadaver of Avatarr be brought over as they'll need it within the camera's field of vision, and Indigo wonders if he's really twisted enough to put a corpse on everyone's television…
Soon enough a transmission pops up on every communication frequency and media provider in the nation, and it includes a warning that going offline during the address is illegal. Doom opens his broadcast with his royal seal, followed immediately by a gruesome image of Avatarr's corpse, his alien features exposed across one half of his face while the other still looks human. Doom then starts raving at the camera, proclaiming on open air that the CEO of Alchemax Corporation, who styled himself as Avatarr, was not of this world! Look! He points at the carapace beneath false skin, the eye which is capable of enhanced perception and 'timesense.' He's not Kree, or Shi'ar, or Mephisitoid (boy, that's a deep pull!) but he is an alien with drugs for blood and… Doom seems to lose track of what he's saying for a moment, and behind him Indigo stares in horror and tries to convey that this is a terrible idea, that the people won't understand him. Hell, she doesn't even understand!
Doom soldiers on, declaring angrily that Avatarr, this thing, has controlled one of the country's largest megacorps for over a decade! Do they not understand what has happened? Their lives have been given to a thing with hallucinogens for blood! But that doesn't absolve the people - no, no… Doom won't allow them to point their finger at an alien corpse and blame them for the problems of today's America. They let Avatarr rule them, so it is their fault! They all had a choice! Doom demands restitution for this horror they have perpetrated, and declares that their incomes will be tithed to a federal fund in reparation for their ignorance. Martial law is increased, there will be more curfews! To the devil with you all!
As the gibbering Doom trails off, the transmission is cut off and a message declares that communication was lost with the White House due to a temporary fault. In reality Doom has passed out cold, the alien drugs finally overwhelming his system.
Over the next several days, the first of Doom's major changes begin to appear across the nation. Dive booths built using Cynex funds, garnished from megacorps, pop up all over the place and make America truly online. The EMP America project is achieved, and a national network of airborne maintenance platforms begin scouring the air clean of decades of abuse. Black card privileges are removed from the affluent, and there's a temporary jump in crime. The drop of the crime rate that follows is accompanied by a rise in the death rate. And the President? The President is silent…
We catch up with Doom some days later, having finally recovered from his ordeal to some extent. It was the drugs, he states to an empty Oval Office, trying to justify his own actions. He simply wanted to show the American people the terrible extent of their stupidity, their blindness in allowing an alien to assume authority in a megacorporation, but the drug-addled enzymes that hijacked his perception centers overwhelmed him utterly… and he lost control of himself. Did things, said things, he didn't mean to. Doom stares at the disembodied skull of Avatarr mounted on his desk and tells it that he did not intend to kill the CEO in the end there - the being held far too many secrets beneath his chitinous shell for that to be a good decision. He just… lost control.
Outside, Morphine Somers meets up with Indigo, who's dithering indecisively just outside the door to Doom's office. Morphine wonders if she's eavesdropping, but Indigo admits she's not just how and if she should tell Doom something he doesn't want to hear. Morphine assumes it's about the public address Doom gave while drug-addled, and Indigo points out that Doom has the alien's head in his office right now - and he talks to it. Doom lost it on a blanket national broadcast, so his credibility went down the toilet fast. Morphine figures credibility doesn't matter - what about Doom's mind? Sure, he jabbered on about aliens like he was mad, but it seems to have escaped people's attention that he tightened martial law at the same time. Perhaps when she finds a way to tell Doom that America thinks he's crazy, she can also ask him whether this alien brain juice drove him mad - or simply removed the façade…
Elsewhere, Sharp Blue has been dealing with affairs of state during the President's period of silence - she enjoyed it because it's nonlethal work, and a welcome change from her previous career as a hired gun. Today she doesn't want the job, because things have gone wrong at Hellrock. She desperately calls up the White House, demanding to speak with Doom about something very important - for if they don't deal with it Hellrock will come knocking on the Oval Office door! Behind her, the screen shows the raging hero Ravage combatting her troops…
Switching back to the Oval Office, Doom puts a hand on Avatarr's skull and wonders why the alien was on Earth - did he have an American dream? Did he help orchestrate the corporate-run America that Doom has come to end, or did he merely arrive to feed off the bloated corpus? What's in his deadhead? The technology of 2099, Doom muses, has often felt too advanced to him. Did Avatarr bring it with him? How much still remains in vaults, waiting to be released? Doom angrily accuses the alien of touching him where he is most vulnerable - his intellect. He perverted Doom's perception of the world, and stole his self-control. Even in death, he cripples Doom with endless questions. Doom grabs a flag off a nearby pole and tosses it over the skull to remove it from view, wondering once more if Avatarr has his own American dream…
Outside the White House, the enormous silhouette of Libera Cielo looms overhead, and cold chemical rain falls down on it like gunfire. There is the faint hint of screams among the martial drum rolls of thunder. Something is coming under the cover of the storm, starting in the next mainline Doom 2099 issue. The final quote is ominous: 'Every dream is a piece of suffering torn out of us by other beings.' - Antonin Artaud
Instead of going straight into Doom 2099's next issue after this and the final two comics which cap out the arc, I'll be covering a slew of tie-in issues which take place during the status quo of Doom's takeover of America circa issues #29 through #31. There's some Ghost Rider, X-Men, Punisher, Ravage, Spider-Man, and a surprising amount of Hulk. We get our first clear indications that 2099 as a whole is slowly wrapping up too, since two or three of those series straight-up end during this event, and some of the others are on their last legs. Doom himself has a little life left in him, and he'll make it to the final hurrah of the line. Or to its final whimper, depending on who you ask...
Rating & Comments
After the first issue of One Nation Under Doom chronicled Doom's grand success in taking the White House, and the next covered Doom manipulating everyone quite effectively, here we see some of the first cracks begin to show - quite literally in the case of our main character's helmet. Doom underestimates Avatarr and he pays for it, coming face to face with an entity that's a lot more powerful and capable than anyone really assumed, who manages to get the better of Doom even in death. Even if the tin-plated despot managed to come out on top in the end, his victory was pyrrhic - it came at the cost of his dignity and a fair amount of his credibility in the eyes of the public, which probably won't help him much going forward, and he's still no further to understand what's going on than before this conflict occurred.
Avatarr has been a background menace for a long time, this mysterious leading figure in the Alchemax company. He tended to be far more of a corporate danger than a physical threat, but here it's revealed that he was a supremely powerful and capable monster in sheep's clothing all along, working on his own plans which we're not privy to. At least that resolves some previous statements of his about his 'star friends' - clearly he was talking about other aliens, possibly other members of his own species. Regardless, we get no real answers to most of the questions we could ask - maybe we know some details about the biological nature of his species, but nothing about his goals or motives is made clear.
That, I think, is on purpose. It's unsatisfying in one way, of course, to have this ominous threat depart without ever laying bare its secrets. On the other hand, that observation is exactly what Doom struggles with in the latter part of this comic. He acted rashly while under the influence of the alien's hallucinogens and destroyed the only source of information he had on the subject, murdering his only lead. Doom lost control of himself, and the truth about Avatarr was lost in the shuffle, remaining a long-standing mystery that might never get a good answer. Even Doom himself has trouble accepting that fact, talking to the CEO's bare skull as if it'll give him any more insight. Whether Avatarr was the cause or a symptom of the societal diseases of 2099 is left a question mark, and might never be resolved.
This comic relies fairly heavily on the presumption that the people around Doom have no independent thought and will go along with anything he says, even if it doesn't make sense. Even if Doom is a force of nature, both Indigo and Jake are right there and neither do much more than urgently whisper that he's making a mistake - they just let him get on the radio while rip-roaring drunk on alien psychotics and spew his Giorgio Tsoukalos speech onto the airwaves. It's simultaneously a critique of autocratic systems as having a single point of failure, but it's also a bit of a betrayal of Doom 2099 as a series, since one major difference between him in the mainline comics and 2099 is that Doom actually has allies in this one, people who stand by him and are sometimes willing to tell him he's wrong. I am dearly missing Fortune's presence right now…
The key scene in this comic, though, is unassuming and doesn't have Doom in it at all. It's near the end when Indigo and Morphine Somers have a frank conversation in front of Doom's office where the President has hidden himself away from prying eyes. Somers sums up the crux of things pretty succinctly - it's all well and good that Doom got an eye full of weird drugs and started ranting about aliens on the radio, but while he was busy doing that he increased martial law, curfews, taxes on everyone, and threatened them all to boot. How much of what happened there was just crazy talk, and how much was Doom with the filters off…? Indigo can't really answer, and I feel like Somers has something of a point…
While this issue has rather little to do with the larger context of Doom's takeover, it's a pretty good bit of action, a final confrontation with Avatarr that was a long time coming, and it gives Doom his first loss in a good while - something that'll galvanize opposition against him since it makes him look like a raving lunatic to a populace that's largely been kept ignorant of the larger universe and history. It's also… a little confusing in terms of the timeline. See, in reality these issues come out once a month, so various tie-in issues come out concurrently across those months as well which take place in that status quo. But in-story only a few days have passed since this storyline got started, and Doom is only very recently President before he makes this gaffe and ruins his credibility to a large extent. How do the tie-in issues which rely on a longer Presidency work if he only had complete power so very briefly? Perhaps they'll just ignore it until it's convenient? Timelines are confusing.
Quotations from President Doom
"There are certain things this administration should tend to personally."
"Doom… surmounts… all."
"This doesn't absolve you! No! I won't allow you to point your finger at the alien corpse and say: 'It was him that did it! America today is not my fault!' You let him rule you! It is your fault! You all had a choice!"
"You have touched me where I am most vulnerable, Avatarr. My intellect. You perverted my perception of the world. You stole my control from me. And, even in death, you cripple me with questions. Did you have an American dream?"
Art Spotlight
This image of Doom laying in the Punisher's arms like he's Jesus in the arms of Mary in Michelangelo's Pietà is hysterical and I kind of want to frame it now!
Cover
Today's cover is nice and cheery, ain't it? Lady Liberty, now bearing the mask of Doom to cover up her skeletal features, stands among the flaming ruins of a city - apparently they moved her inland at some point - while planes drop bombs from overhead. The most striking detail I noticed is the barbed wire between the spokes of her crown, giving her something like a halo but, you know, for the dark side. The proportions on that left hand seem a bit off, but I think the message comes across loud and clear. WAR IS HELL, FOLKS. Never mind that this technically depicts events from two issues ago…
Story Overview
American Dream
Picking up right where we left off, we witness Avatarr reeling back from getting shot in the eye by Doom - and this time around his features are decidedly more alien than the fairly ambiguous shot at the end of last issue. Green rows of scales are visible where the camouflaging mask has failed, and green blood sprays everywhere. The comic notes that an 'avatar' in classical times was an embodiment of a deity on earth, a god in the flesh. This Avatarr, broken-faced with acid streaming from his destroyed eye, must then be the god of money! A stench rises from the wound that has no right coming from a human body, and the assembled CEOs of the other megacorporations - who apparently stayed in the room to watch - back away from the thing they called their colleague and rival. Doom does not.
Doom calmly observes that the laser he fired into Avatarr's head was obviously an underestimation of what he'd need to kill the man - he concludes that the stress Avatarr is currently experiencing has less to do with the severity of his wound, and more to do with the 'neural regelation' that his scanners are picking up on - Avatarr's brain is literally melting over the hole. Those same scans also disprove Doom's initial theory for the CEO's nature - he's not a mutant at all. Indeed, there is actually nothing remotely human in Avatarr's DNA structure at all. He's an alien! Tyler Stone recoils at the suggestion that Avatarr is a creature from space, admitting he's about to be sick, and I am once again reminded that everyone in this world apparently forgot Earth was at the center of a dozen fighting space empires just a century ago…
Doom comments that Stone's response is 'arachnid reaction' - instinctive revulsion towards the alien. Jake Gallows, the Punisher, offers to fire a spray of bullets into the thing's skull to splash his brains everywhere, but Doom tells him that there are certain things this administration ought to tend to personally. Avatarr, gathering himself, asks the 'monkey' facing him to come at him, if he thinks he can manage. Doom admits to himself that he has a slight doubt about his ability to defeat Avatarr - his imaging system shows him that Avatarr is of no alien species he's ever encountered, and while the light bone structure recalls the Shi'ar and the bionics in his gut resembles those of the Phalanx, but the full picture is a total mystery to him.
Avatarr spits at Doom, launching a glob of acid into his armor which is mixed with a potent hallucinogen according to his scanning arrays. Still, it's not actually very potent acid, as it doesn't manage to bite through even the surface layer of his metal breastplate. In response, Doom launches himself forward and lands a devastating punch to the alien's sternum, smashing him into a wall as blood flies from the site of impact.
Through the hole he ripped in the alien's chest, Doom can see his lungs grow spikes to protect the destroyed tissue, and his momentary fascination at the bizarre biology on display costs him. Avatarr grabs him by the arm and then forces the spikes in his chest to jut outward, growing several feet within moments and stabbing viciously at his attacker.
Doom reels back as he narrowly avoids getting skewered by the razor-sharp spines, but one of them manages to pierce through the faceplate of his armor and squirts a helping of hallucinogenic compounds directly into his face. Avatarr, now far more smug, announces that Doom can now see the world as he sees it - that drug he's just been dosed with is one of the building blocks of life on his world! How dare Doom call himself the superior of the two of them, how dare he? The world suddenly goes full technicolor rainbow-land to depict Doom getting blasted with new sensory perceptions, and Avatarr calls him a mere lungfish, a wet and unevolved thing gulping in the oxygen of power he was never meant to know. Does he not see the richness with which Avatarr sees the world? And still, Doom dared to claim he was greater?
Avatarr takes advantage of Doom's altered state and launches a devastating super-punch into his face, a blow which manages to shatter parts of the adamantium-compound his helmet is made of and sends him crashing to the ground, unconscious.
Avatarr winces at the impact as his knuckles bleed, but he barely stops to consider his wounds. He turns towards Jake Gallows and tells him to lower his gun - he works for a new president now, Avatarr himself! First order of business is to execute the other CEOs in the room, so they can be replaced with people who know less about him. Later, they'll quietly burn Doom on the lawn, since the country's seen enough dubious icons without adding a martyr to the mix. When nobody moves in response to his orders, Avatarr insists that they jump to it - now that this President Doom nonsense is over, they have a disguised autocracy to restore! To business, gentlemen! This is, of course, the moment that Doom rises from his apparent defeat and launches himself forward in a calculated assault, landing a heavy blow of his own in the middle of Avatarr's back.
Doom seems rattled after being knocked down earlier, but he thanks the paralyzed Avatarr for loaning him his perception enzymes, since the enhanced sensory data allowed him to determine that within the bionics hidden in the alien's gut lays his central nervous system - and also that it was accessible from right behind his spine. That one vicious blow was targeted straight at Avatarr's version of his brain. Even as they speak, Doom proclaims, nanobots in his blood are flushing out his hallucinogenic excretions. Doom surmounts all. With the CEO laying unmoving on the floor in front of him, Doom then goes completely berserk. For the next full page all we see is Doom violently smashing something just off panel beneath him as green blood is splattered everywhere and CEOs look on in horror and wince at the loud cracking noises of bones being broken. Jake Gallows approves, though, the only one who's smiling.
After Doom is done with his very thorough murder and mutilation of Avatarr he asks Jake for a little help walking, since the nanoids in his blood do their work by drawing on Doom's own metabolism. They've left him without strength. He proclaims that he needs the help of Indigo, and asks to be taken to her, telling the other guards in the room to take the cadaver of Avatarr to the White House's newly expanded Communications Suite as well. The CEOs are horrified by what happened, with Tyler Stone reflecting that all this time he didn't know the truth about Avatarr - sure, they were all afraid of him, but that's the way it is in their executive lifestyle. The alien thing can't be true though, right? There's no such thing as space aliens! Just like all those old Heroic Age tales about blind vigilantes in red leotards, or magicians on Bleecker Street - those never happened either. This has to be fake. Doom has to be crazy!
Indigo comes rushing into the Communications Suite and witnesses Jake help Doom into a chair. She asks what's going on, and Jake explains briefly that Avatarr turned out to be some kind of disgusting Martian or something, a claim which utterly baffles her. Doom tells her that he'll explain later - for now he needs full access to American TV, much like she arranged during the coup. Doom would do it himself, but he's still a little… incapacitated. We see a momentary flicker of what he's seeing, and Doom is still tripping a lot of balls, seeing Indigo as a flurry of colors and shapes. Doom requests that he cadaver of Avatarr be brought over as they'll need it within the camera's field of vision, and Indigo wonders if he's really twisted enough to put a corpse on everyone's television…
Soon enough a transmission pops up on every communication frequency and media provider in the nation, and it includes a warning that going offline during the address is illegal. Doom opens his broadcast with his royal seal, followed immediately by a gruesome image of Avatarr's corpse, his alien features exposed across one half of his face while the other still looks human. Doom then starts raving at the camera, proclaiming on open air that the CEO of Alchemax Corporation, who styled himself as Avatarr, was not of this world! Look! He points at the carapace beneath false skin, the eye which is capable of enhanced perception and 'timesense.' He's not Kree, or Shi'ar, or Mephisitoid (boy, that's a deep pull!) but he is an alien with drugs for blood and… Doom seems to lose track of what he's saying for a moment, and behind him Indigo stares in horror and tries to convey that this is a terrible idea, that the people won't understand him. Hell, she doesn't even understand!
Doom soldiers on, declaring angrily that Avatarr, this thing, has controlled one of the country's largest megacorps for over a decade! Do they not understand what has happened? Their lives have been given to a thing with hallucinogens for blood! But that doesn't absolve the people - no, no… Doom won't allow them to point their finger at an alien corpse and blame them for the problems of today's America. They let Avatarr rule them, so it is their fault! They all had a choice! Doom demands restitution for this horror they have perpetrated, and declares that their incomes will be tithed to a federal fund in reparation for their ignorance. Martial law is increased, there will be more curfews! To the devil with you all!
As the gibbering Doom trails off, the transmission is cut off and a message declares that communication was lost with the White House due to a temporary fault. In reality Doom has passed out cold, the alien drugs finally overwhelming his system.
Over the next several days, the first of Doom's major changes begin to appear across the nation. Dive booths built using Cynex funds, garnished from megacorps, pop up all over the place and make America truly online. The EMP America project is achieved, and a national network of airborne maintenance platforms begin scouring the air clean of decades of abuse. Black card privileges are removed from the affluent, and there's a temporary jump in crime. The drop of the crime rate that follows is accompanied by a rise in the death rate. And the President? The President is silent…
We catch up with Doom some days later, having finally recovered from his ordeal to some extent. It was the drugs, he states to an empty Oval Office, trying to justify his own actions. He simply wanted to show the American people the terrible extent of their stupidity, their blindness in allowing an alien to assume authority in a megacorporation, but the drug-addled enzymes that hijacked his perception centers overwhelmed him utterly… and he lost control of himself. Did things, said things, he didn't mean to. Doom stares at the disembodied skull of Avatarr mounted on his desk and tells it that he did not intend to kill the CEO in the end there - the being held far too many secrets beneath his chitinous shell for that to be a good decision. He just… lost control.
Outside, Morphine Somers meets up with Indigo, who's dithering indecisively just outside the door to Doom's office. Morphine wonders if she's eavesdropping, but Indigo admits she's not just how and if she should tell Doom something he doesn't want to hear. Morphine assumes it's about the public address Doom gave while drug-addled, and Indigo points out that Doom has the alien's head in his office right now - and he talks to it. Doom lost it on a blanket national broadcast, so his credibility went down the toilet fast. Morphine figures credibility doesn't matter - what about Doom's mind? Sure, he jabbered on about aliens like he was mad, but it seems to have escaped people's attention that he tightened martial law at the same time. Perhaps when she finds a way to tell Doom that America thinks he's crazy, she can also ask him whether this alien brain juice drove him mad - or simply removed the façade…
Elsewhere, Sharp Blue has been dealing with affairs of state during the President's period of silence - she enjoyed it because it's nonlethal work, and a welcome change from her previous career as a hired gun. Today she doesn't want the job, because things have gone wrong at Hellrock. She desperately calls up the White House, demanding to speak with Doom about something very important - for if they don't deal with it Hellrock will come knocking on the Oval Office door! Behind her, the screen shows the raging hero Ravage combatting her troops…
Switching back to the Oval Office, Doom puts a hand on Avatarr's skull and wonders why the alien was on Earth - did he have an American dream? Did he help orchestrate the corporate-run America that Doom has come to end, or did he merely arrive to feed off the bloated corpus? What's in his deadhead? The technology of 2099, Doom muses, has often felt too advanced to him. Did Avatarr bring it with him? How much still remains in vaults, waiting to be released? Doom angrily accuses the alien of touching him where he is most vulnerable - his intellect. He perverted Doom's perception of the world, and stole his self-control. Even in death, he cripples Doom with endless questions. Doom grabs a flag off a nearby pole and tosses it over the skull to remove it from view, wondering once more if Avatarr has his own American dream…
Outside the White House, the enormous silhouette of Libera Cielo looms overhead, and cold chemical rain falls down on it like gunfire. There is the faint hint of screams among the martial drum rolls of thunder. Something is coming under the cover of the storm, starting in the next mainline Doom 2099 issue. The final quote is ominous: 'Every dream is a piece of suffering torn out of us by other beings.' - Antonin Artaud
Instead of going straight into Doom 2099's next issue after this and the final two comics which cap out the arc, I'll be covering a slew of tie-in issues which take place during the status quo of Doom's takeover of America circa issues #29 through #31. There's some Ghost Rider, X-Men, Punisher, Ravage, Spider-Man, and a surprising amount of Hulk. We get our first clear indications that 2099 as a whole is slowly wrapping up too, since two or three of those series straight-up end during this event, and some of the others are on their last legs. Doom himself has a little life left in him, and he'll make it to the final hurrah of the line. Or to its final whimper, depending on who you ask...
Rating & Comments
After the first issue of One Nation Under Doom chronicled Doom's grand success in taking the White House, and the next covered Doom manipulating everyone quite effectively, here we see some of the first cracks begin to show - quite literally in the case of our main character's helmet. Doom underestimates Avatarr and he pays for it, coming face to face with an entity that's a lot more powerful and capable than anyone really assumed, who manages to get the better of Doom even in death. Even if the tin-plated despot managed to come out on top in the end, his victory was pyrrhic - it came at the cost of his dignity and a fair amount of his credibility in the eyes of the public, which probably won't help him much going forward, and he's still no further to understand what's going on than before this conflict occurred.
Avatarr has been a background menace for a long time, this mysterious leading figure in the Alchemax company. He tended to be far more of a corporate danger than a physical threat, but here it's revealed that he was a supremely powerful and capable monster in sheep's clothing all along, working on his own plans which we're not privy to. At least that resolves some previous statements of his about his 'star friends' - clearly he was talking about other aliens, possibly other members of his own species. Regardless, we get no real answers to most of the questions we could ask - maybe we know some details about the biological nature of his species, but nothing about his goals or motives is made clear.
That, I think, is on purpose. It's unsatisfying in one way, of course, to have this ominous threat depart without ever laying bare its secrets. On the other hand, that observation is exactly what Doom struggles with in the latter part of this comic. He acted rashly while under the influence of the alien's hallucinogens and destroyed the only source of information he had on the subject, murdering his only lead. Doom lost control of himself, and the truth about Avatarr was lost in the shuffle, remaining a long-standing mystery that might never get a good answer. Even Doom himself has trouble accepting that fact, talking to the CEO's bare skull as if it'll give him any more insight. Whether Avatarr was the cause or a symptom of the societal diseases of 2099 is left a question mark, and might never be resolved.
This comic relies fairly heavily on the presumption that the people around Doom have no independent thought and will go along with anything he says, even if it doesn't make sense. Even if Doom is a force of nature, both Indigo and Jake are right there and neither do much more than urgently whisper that he's making a mistake - they just let him get on the radio while rip-roaring drunk on alien psychotics and spew his Giorgio Tsoukalos speech onto the airwaves. It's simultaneously a critique of autocratic systems as having a single point of failure, but it's also a bit of a betrayal of Doom 2099 as a series, since one major difference between him in the mainline comics and 2099 is that Doom actually has allies in this one, people who stand by him and are sometimes willing to tell him he's wrong. I am dearly missing Fortune's presence right now…
The key scene in this comic, though, is unassuming and doesn't have Doom in it at all. It's near the end when Indigo and Morphine Somers have a frank conversation in front of Doom's office where the President has hidden himself away from prying eyes. Somers sums up the crux of things pretty succinctly - it's all well and good that Doom got an eye full of weird drugs and started ranting about aliens on the radio, but while he was busy doing that he increased martial law, curfews, taxes on everyone, and threatened them all to boot. How much of what happened there was just crazy talk, and how much was Doom with the filters off…? Indigo can't really answer, and I feel like Somers has something of a point…
While this issue has rather little to do with the larger context of Doom's takeover, it's a pretty good bit of action, a final confrontation with Avatarr that was a long time coming, and it gives Doom his first loss in a good while - something that'll galvanize opposition against him since it makes him look like a raving lunatic to a populace that's largely been kept ignorant of the larger universe and history. It's also… a little confusing in terms of the timeline. See, in reality these issues come out once a month, so various tie-in issues come out concurrently across those months as well which take place in that status quo. But in-story only a few days have passed since this storyline got started, and Doom is only very recently President before he makes this gaffe and ruins his credibility to a large extent. How do the tie-in issues which rely on a longer Presidency work if he only had complete power so very briefly? Perhaps they'll just ignore it until it's convenient? Timelines are confusing.
Quotations from President Doom
"There are certain things this administration should tend to personally."
"Doom… surmounts… all."
"This doesn't absolve you! No! I won't allow you to point your finger at the alien corpse and say: 'It was him that did it! America today is not my fault!' You let him rule you! It is your fault! You all had a choice!"
"You have touched me where I am most vulnerable, Avatarr. My intellect. You perverted my perception of the world. You stole my control from me. And, even in death, you cripple me with questions. Did you have an American dream?"
Art Spotlight
This image of Doom laying in the Punisher's arms like he's Jesus in the arms of Mary in Michelangelo's Pietà is hysterical and I kind of want to frame it now!
Last edited:
