In a feature about ‘permanent’ changes to characters later being reversed, see how Doom’s face was re-scarred after being healed in 2015’s Secret Wars
Today, we look at how Doctor Doom’s face got scarred again after it was seemingly healed “for good” in 2015’s Secret Wars crossover.
This is “Never Gonna Be the Same Again,” a feature where I look at how bold, seemingly “permanent” changes were ultimately reversed. This is not a criticism, mind you, as obviously things are always going to eventually return to “normal.” That’s just how superhero comic books work. It’s just fun to see how some of these rather major changes are reversed. This is differentiated from “Abandoned Love,” which is when a new writer comes in and drops the plot of the previous writer. Here, we’re talking about the writer who came up with the idea being the same one who resolved the change. This is also differentiated from “Death is Not the End,” which is about how “dead” characters came back to life, since this is about stuff other than death.
DOOM SAVES
Secret Wars was an excellent crossover event by Jonathan Hickman, Esad Ribic and Ive Svorcina that was based on the idea that the Multiverse was collapsing on top of itself, with alternate Earths coming to share the same space as the regular Marvel Universe Earth and the only way to delay the inevitable destruction of the Multiverse was to destroy those other Earths. Namor and a group of villains including Thanos actually went off to destroy a bunch of these other worlds, but eventually, the Ultimate Universe Earth was the next Earth and that one fought back enough that Namor and his crew couldn’t destroy it and so the Multiverse basically exploded. Luckily, Doctor Doom had acquired the powers of the Beyonders (the Beyonder was the powerful cosmic being in the first Secret Wars event of the 1980s) via the Molecule Man and Doom then cobbled together a new world made up of various realities all smooshed together into one Battleworld where Doom was the king of all reality. He also had Invisible Woman become his wife and Valeria and Franklin Richards as his children.
However, showing the problem with Doom being in charge, despite literally controlling all reality, Doom could not even fix his scarred face…
DOOM IS HEALED
Luckily, a few heroes from the previous Marvel Universe survived the destruction of all reality in a “life raft.” Among the survivors was Reed Richards. The surviving heroes fought back against God Emperor Doom and in the final conflict of the series, Doom realizes that it is true that he WASN’T suited to being the person who saved reality and that, in the end, it was Reed Richards all along who was the true right man for the job. So Doom cedes his Molecule Man powers to Reed and Reed sets out with his restored wife and kids to go try to fix the rest of the Multiverse (after first restoring Earth).
At the end of the final issue, we see Doom back in Latveria and we see that Reed left him one last gift…he had healed his face!
INFAMOUS IRON MAN
The now-healed Doom decided that if his repeated attempts to conquer the world never worked, perhaps he should instead just try to do acts of good in the world? He abdicated his throne in Latveria and decided to become a hero. He befriended Tony Stark (much to Tony’s shock, as he really didn’t think he would ever become buddies with Doctor freakin’ Doom) and when Tony was killed in Civil War II, Doom took it upon himself to take over as the new Iron Man (CBR’s own Dustin Holland recently wrote about Doom’s tenure as the Infamous Iron Man).
So things were going well for Doom. He was actually doing GOOD in the world and it felt great to him. Here’s the problem, though. Doom had worked with a lot of supervillains over the years. Heck, he was even part of the villain equivalent of the Illuminati known as the Cabal. So when he suddenly started ARRESTING supervillains, it did not sit well with the other villains out there, especially Doom’s former Cabal teammate, Parker Robbins, the Hood (the demon-possessed villain who had sort of created a union of supervillains). When Doom was going to capture an escaped supervillain, he learned that it was a trap set by Hood and the other villains. In their brief battle (which Doom ended by simply escaping, a move that shocked the other villains), the bad guys discovered that Doom’s face was normal looking, something that shocked (and kind of irritated) the other villains, who had all heard the stories of how messed up Doom’s face was under the mask. Their assumption was that he just made up those stories as part of creating a myth about him.
In any event, in the final issue of Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev’s time on the Iron Man series (Bendis was doing two Iron Man series, with Doom starring in one and RiRi Williams starring in the other one as Tony Stark’s OTHER successor, Ironheart. Maleev drew Infamous Iron Man. The books then combined and Maleev drew part of the combined series), Invincible Iron Man #600, Doom defeats the demon that possesses Parker Robbins, but in the process, Doom’s face is badly scarred again…
The now-once again scarred Doom lands back in Latveria in a daze. He is then convinced to return to take control of Latveria, which had devolved into a civil war in his absence. In Fantastic Four #1 (by Dan Slott and Simone Bianchi), Doom accepts his old mask to cover up his scarred visage once more…
Thank to my pal, Bill Walko, for suggesting that I feature this one after my recent post about how Marvel keeps trying to give Doom new costumes that never last. He was curious as to what Doom’s current status quo was, vis a vis his scarred face.
If anyone else has a suggestion for Never Gonna Be The Same Again, please drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!
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