Imaginary Worlds - Why The Future is (Doctor) Doom

Episode Date: November 6, 2024

All Hail Doom! The supreme ruler of Latveria has successfully defeated The Fantastic Four and The Avengers. Marvel Studios is bowing towards his will, casting Robert Downey Jr. as the iconic villain and betting their fortunes on Doctor Doom! But Victor von Doom is more than a classic bad guy. He is one of the most complex characters in Marvel history. I talk with comic book writers Mark Waid, Brian Michael Bendis and Ryan North about the ways they’ve depicted Doctor Doom, from noble intensions gone away to horrific acts of selfishness. And cultural critic Mark Hibbett discusses why he believes the history of Doctor Doom reflects America's ambivalence towards dictators and the role they play on the world stage.  This week's episode is sponsored by Sol Reader and ShipStation Go to solreader.com to and use the code IMAGINARY at checkout to receive 15% off your purchase of Sol Reader Limited Edition. Go to shipstation.com and use the code IMAGINARY to sign up for your FREE 60-day trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. This past summer at San Diego Comic Con, Marvel made a huge announcement. Robert Downey Jr. was returning, not as Iron Man, but as Dr. Doom. What can I tell you? I like playing complicated characters. They're also paying him $100 million. Reportedly. This announcement brought up a number of questions. If you don't read Marvel comics, your first

question might be, who is Doctor Doom? We're going to go deep into that later. But first, why is Marvel doing this? Enthusiasm from the fans was waning. So were the box office numbers. Marvel had another storyline going with a different villain that was not working for various reasons. So they're doing a hard pivot.

Doctor Doom will be the next big villain in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Next question, how is this possible in the MCU storyline? Spoiler alert from the last Avengers movie in 2019, Iron Man died saving the universe. Now the same actor is going to play Dr. Doom? Well, Marvel is setting up a new version of the Fantastic Four along with their arch-nemesis Dr. Doom. And it looks like these characters will be introduced in a parallel universe before they cross over to the main one. Third question, is Downey really playing Victor Von Doom? Marvel has already set up the idea that there are multiple versions of the characters in parallel universes,

so he could easily be a variant of Tony Stark who went to the dark side and everyone calls him Dr. Doom. But Downey says he is playing Victor Von Doom, and the pitch to him was that Marvel wanted to do the character right, and not make him the generic bad guy that he was in the previous Fantastic Four movies that were made by a different studio. I had not read a lot of Fantastic Four comics since I was a kid. I remember the Fantastic Four very well. Reed Richards, Sue Storm, her brother Johnny, and Ben Grimm, who everybody calls The Thing because he looks like he's made out of rocks. But I didn't have a clear memory of Dr. Doom. I remember that he wears a green cloak.

Underneath he has a metal suit. And he wears a metal mask where you can only see his eyes peering through. And I remember that he's the ruler of a fictional country called Latveria, which is supposed to be somewhere in Eastern Europe. What else is there? It turns out a lot. In fact, Dr. Doom is often described as the best villain in Marvel Comics. And as I kept exploring the deep history of this character I discovered there are eerie parallels between Dr. Doom and people in power throughout history, right up to the present moment. Like a lot of villains, Victor Von Doom has a sympathetic backstory. He comes from a disenfranchised minority. His official Marvel biography says that he was quote, born to poor gypsies,

although many fans prefer to use the term Romani. When he was a child, both of his parents died. He vowed revenge against the government, and he trained himself to be indestructible and undefeatable. Mark Hibbett wrote a book about Dr. Doom. Dr. Doom is like Batman, except instead of going around just using all his money to beat people up, Dr. Doom uses his intelligence to take over the state. And in taking over the state, he then rules the state so nobody else will ever have to

go through that. Since this character has been around for over 60 years. If you read his Wikipedia biography, it's a big inconsistent mess. But Mark put the character in a new context for me. He has read and watched almost every version of Dr. Doom across different media and noticed a pattern. He says, throughout the Cold War, Dr. Doom echoed America's attitudes towards Eastern Europe

when he first appeared in 1962. I mean, he looks like the Cold War. That's what he is. He is cold, he is stale, he's riveted in. He's science and he's sort of mysterious Eastern European ideas of magic and fairy tale. He combines both of these aspects of Eastern Europe. One of the selling points of Marvel early on was that there's no Gotham, there's no metropolis.

These comics take place in our world with just a few fictional countries like Latveria or Wakanda. And contemporary politics often found their way into the storylines. Like in 1976. There's an issue of super villain team up, which is advertisers having the strangest guest star of all. And the strangest guest star of all is Henry Kissinger, who teams up with Dr. Doom, much to the annoyance of the Fantastic Four themselves. And this is when we're seeing the idea of American foreign policy being a dark thing

something that shouldn't be trusted America is allowing itself with actual supervillains and what happens then is that the Fantastic Four then work to overthrow Dr Doom. Reed Richards has a one-man invasion of Latveria he comes in and he basically takes over the revolution the revolution is led by the hereditary monarchy, Prince Zorba. But Prince Zorba is weak, and the influences, as all non-Americans, are weak and need help with their revolution. And when they finally overthrow Dr. Doomer's leader,

Reed Richards shakes the hand of the leader of the resistance, said, over to you now, off you go. This is seen as a really good thing. Those comics were written when the Vietnam War had just ended. And faith in the Machiavellian art of Cold War real politic was at an all time low.

Then in the Reagan era, a more conservative writer named John Byrne took over the Fantastic Four. When John Byrne has Dr. Doom calling the Fantastic Four to Latveria and he says to them, look what you've done, Latveria is in ruins because the people could not govern themselves. Zorba, who was the former revolutionary leader, becomes a tyrant himself. The implication is not an implication, it's stated very clearly. Zorba is a tyrant as bad as Dr Doom, but he's not as efficient as Dr Doom. He can't run

the country. The people rise up because Dr Doom never took taxes from them. Zorba takes taxes. Doom didn't do that because he could just go and steal things and blow things up without need for money. And so the Fantastic Four are forced to agree that Dr Doom was a better ruler for Latveria than the Latvarians themselves. They meet a mother who cries with joy to see Dr. Doom because he's returned to save them. They overthrow the country and then Dr. Doom murders the revolutionary leaders and the Fantastic Four can't do anything about it. They have to go home realizing that, well, this seems to be the best for them.

That's kind of how it goes through the rest of the Cold War. And is communism ever mentioned during any of this time in terms of his relationship to communism? There is indeed. I've got a quote for you, in fact. Dr. Doom takes back control of Latveria. He says to the Fantastic Four, when I seized control of my native land, she was a pitiful joke of a country with a feudal monarchy that was slowly destroying her. Within months, Latveria would have been swallowed by the communist lands which surround our hills.

America has had an ambivalent attitude towards dictators. Officially, we don't like them. We love democracy. In reality, we don't like them. We love democracy. In reality, the US has a long history of supporting dictators or putting them in power. If they're loyal to us, there can be a stop gap against our enemies from communism to Islamic fundamentalism. After 9-11, Dr. Doom easily made that transition

in the comics. In one storyline, Doom had been sent into exile, and without him, the Latvarian government was selling arms to terrorists. It's quite a straightforward cut and paste of going, here is the body we face now, what do they do? They're terrorists, and they have weapons of mass destruction. And obviously Dr. Doom's weapons are very mass, very destructive. And Nick Fury has to put together a team of superheroes to again have an unauthorized invasion.

I mean, the metaphor is quite heavy here, but there's an authorized secret invasion of Latveria in which a team of superheroes go in and it goes horribly wrong. Because of the damage that the American superheroes do to the people of Latveria during the course of this, some months later the Latverian government take revenge and send a supervillain suicide bomber to America and the suicide they're not wearing a bomb, they are a living bomb, they explode and kill thousands of people. And it's barely even a metaphor. The story is saying, because of American actions abroad, which were not legal, these are the repercussions,

this is what's happened to us. Dr. Doom's power doesn't just come from America's implicit support. He is a master of both science and sorcery. Typically, a character picks a lane like Iron Man and technology or Doctor Strange and magic, but Doom can take on both of them. And his desire to rule the world is not just based on a thirst for power. He truly believes that he could do everything better than everybody else. And sometimes he's right. There's a graphic novel in the 1980s called Emperor Doom.

Where Dr. Doom takes over the world and is entirely successful. Everything he does, it goes really, really well. This is in the late 80s. So Dr. Doom comes in, he immediately gets rid of apartheid, he immediately Doom comes in, he immediately gets rid of Apartheid, he immediately ends World Hunger, he immediately gets rid of all nuclear weapons and it works great. Everything's brilliant, everybody's happy, and then the Avengers get together and decide to overthrow him and within half an hour of the Avengers overthrowing him, Apartheid is reinstated. The farms that Dr Doom set up are destroyed and nuclear war is on the cards again.

Hawkeye says to Captain America on the way back, Cap, did we do the right thing here? And obviously as a reader, you're thinking, I don't think you did Hawkeye, this is pretty bad. And Captain America says, we did for freedom. We must be free to make our own mistakes. And you sort of think, well, yeah, if you're in a quinjet flying away from it, or cat, that's probably fine. It's probably not

fine for the people who are now starving because of your actions. I asked Mark, where are these storylines coming from? Are the writers actually pro-dictatorship? Or are they creating thought experiments? He thinks it's the latter and the writers are responding to each other. And he thinks this conversation reflects the liberal conservative divide in America. I think it's really interesting to see this in something as American as superhero comics, where it's this clash of these two different flavors of is it freedom to do whatever you like or freedom from harm? And I think that's what's going on with these Dr. Deem stories happening. It's like, what do we want? Do we want to be free? Do you want to be safe? Do we want to be fed? Do we want to never

go hungry? Which is what often the Latvians go for. The appeal of power, the appeal of strong government is always laid out very strongly in all these. And often I think the people who are writing these stories, especially, kind of tend to fall mildly in love with this idea despite themselves. They're trying to tell a story that says, this is a really bad thing, but then in creating a story where the heroes have to fight

against the bad thing, they kind of make it a good thing. I decided to pose that question to some of the writers who have been depicting Dr Doom in this century, and they also have competing ideas about how the character should be portrayed. When I want to shut out the world, one of my favorite escapes is falling into a good book. And I mostly buy ebooks to save on space in my apartment. But it's hard to be a reader in 2024. You have to somehow ignore your inbox, ignore social media, try not to doom scroll, and just when you're getting into a book, a text message will pull you out of it. That's why reading technology company Soul designed the Soul Reader. It's

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Use the code IMAGINARY at checkout to receive 15% off your purchase of Soul Reader Limited Edition. With many characters in comics, there's often a debate among the fans about which version they prefer. Do you want your Spider-Man to be a wise-ass high school student with teenage problems? Or do you want him to be a neurotic adult trying to hold down a job and a relationship? Do you want your Batman to be a dark loner with no one to talk to except Alfred? Or do you want him to have a Bat family with several different Robins, Batgirls, and other sidekicks and allies? There's no right answer, and the spectrum reveals interesting aspects of the characters.

It makes them more dynamic and durable. They can be reinvented for different audiences and still feel authentic. One of the questions around Dr. Doom is, do you want him to be a truly evil villain, or do you want him to be the noble Doom with good intentions gone awry? There are even disagreements about what's behind his mask. We know that he's scarred, but how scarred is he? Mark Waid wrote the character in the early 2000s. I do subscribe to the theory that doom scars a little tiny scar under his eye. Every time

we actually do something in the comics to fill people reacting in horror to his face, a little part of me dies inside because I really think that Doom's ego is such that the scar that he hides is probably the size of your fingernail. It's oblivious to most people unless they're looking closely, but that's all he sees when he looks in the mirror. Along the spectrum of noble doom to evil doom, Brian Michael Bendis wanted to test how noble he could make doom. Brian is famous for creating another Spider-Man character named Miles Morales and for writing the comics

that the Jessica Jones Netflix series was based on. When Brian wrote the character of Dr. Doom, he depicted him as being comfortable taking off his mask. That is my favorite, Jim. He is genuinely charismatic. I mean, like you've said, my favorite part is that people meeting him and being thrown off about how much they don't want to murder him. Like if you say, Dr. Doom's gonna be like, oh, I better, I'm gonna murder him, right? And then he walks in the room and immediately you're thrown by his energy. The charismatic, arrogant, beyond measure,

but arrogant because he is that good. Like that's when you meet someone's arrogant and like, oh yeah, you should be arrogant. You're literally the best. That is my favorite. Because it's harder to write, it's more off-putting to write, it's more of a challenge,

and you see them in the real world. In one of the storylines he wrote, Dr. Doom tries to be a hero. In fact, he tries to be Iron Man. At this point in the chronology of Marvel Comics, which was 2016, Tony Stark was in a coma. Now, Bryan had always suspected that Victor Von Doom was secretly envious of Tony Stark. Their masks and armor don't look that different.

And he imagines that deep down, Victor looks at Tony and thinks, Tony Stark, I'll say you have all the fucked up shit I have, but you forget out a way to like be in society, like, like, and to be revered and be an Avenger. Whereas I am, you know, a part time dictator, that him coming to terms with the fact of who he admires, like in his adult life, with who he that who actually aspires to be, and then realizing once he was gone, it was Tony was a like a character arc I was dying to dive into. In this scene, Doom goes to the Iron Man arsenal because he wants to combine his armor with Iron Man's armor. It's being guarded by a hologram of Tony Stark. Here's the actor Luke Daniels

reading from Bryan's comics. Iron Man, please don't. I wasn't asking permission. It is what needs to be done. So it was almost like a live experiment in storytelling, to see would the audience buy into this. That's when I brought up Walter White as an example of you could feel that watching Breaking Bag or Vic Mackie on the Shield, that there was a level which the audience, like we're with you until we're not. And it's up to you to figure out where that balance is without selling out the idea. So when he does heroic things, but he is Doom, he's not Iron Man, but he's doing heroic things,

where does that put us as an audience? You know, where do you enjoy playing with like the moral alliance or complicitness or just sort of that again? Like you're talking about as an audience member. You're you're kind of Rooting for Walter Wright or rooting for Tony Soprano and yet you're not you know, like how did you play with that? There's a quote about from those, from that era of television, about like, why are these broken men so appealing to watch week after week, sometimes for a decade?

I think it was the creator of Baking Bad that said that some people like watching the money, and also some people, they call it competency porn. Where like, these people really, like, I'm never gonna make meth and I don't wanna know anybody makes meth, but it's really interesting to watch how good he is at figuring out how to make the meth.

Like that or Tony Soprano is really gonna die today. And it's really interesting to find out how he's not. That competency porn became like, all right, so everything's working against him. He has new tools, nobody trusts him. No one's ever gonna like no one in the Marvel Universe is gonna go, all right, good. Yeah, right. Like the enemy knows it. So there was a moment in writing where someone he does something really big. Someone says, you know, this

doesn't make up for all the nightmare. Like this is and he goes, I know. Like, like, yeah, I'm that I know not that oh, I thought this all fixed everything. Him going, no, I'm fully aware of who I am and what I've done. Like, when he admits, I'm never going to be able to win you back, but I'm still going to do it. That's almost a heroic gesture. Other than the fact that he did all the villainy, you know. — Like when Dr. Doom comes across the thing. Who doesn't believe that Doom can make up for what he's done, and now be a hero? — What happened to you? I told you. Epiphany. And I had given it a great deal of thought.

If I thought my time would be best spent behind bars for my crimes, if I thought I would learn something more profound than what I've already learned, I would gladly put myself away. But I think we can all agree, I can do far more to right my wrongs from out here. Ryan North is currently writing the Fantastic Four for Marvel Comics, and his version of Doom is very much a villain, but not just any villain. You can't just sub in any other villain in a Doctor Doom story, because to me, Doctor Doom always gets a win.

Even when the Fantastic Four defeat him, he gets something out of it. He also agrees with the theory that I've heard, which is that Doom's biggest flaw is his jealousy of Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four. That rivalry brings out the worst in Doom. Doom's tragic flaw is his ego, where he wants to help the world and he wants to make sure that everyone knows that doom did it and do someone who's who's given you this gift and that leads to a lot of problems a lot of situations in which if you were simply able to step aside and let someone else take the glory things would be better. But if you have this guy who can do amazing things but always wants to make sure that his name is on it and he's the guy who's getting all the credit for it and even more so that Reed Richards gets none of the credit for it. That pettiness, that rivalry that defines to some extent both these men but to a large extent Victor Victor Von Doom himself, is something that always to me gets in the way of what he's doing.

So this was one of Ryan's storylines. The premise, the background of the story is that Reed Richards has set a building a year ahead in time, and in that building was his own children. And the only way to get them back safely was to wait a year. One of these children is named Valeria, and she is actually Dr. Doom's goddaughter. And she is one of the few people that Dr. Doom respects, I would say even loves.

He really cares about her. There is a complicated backstory behind this. When Valeria was born, she was in peril. Doom was the only person who could save her life. In doing so, he created a magical bond with her, which gave him leeway over the Fantastic Four. But he also ended up forming an emotional bond with her, and he became her Uncle Doom.

He shows up and he's like, no, Reed, I will do it better. I will do this thing that you couldn't do. I'm going to go back in time and fix this. And he goes back in time, everything he does, even if he saves Valeria from this problem, he makes it worse for himself. His private nation of Latveria embraces democracy, for example. And it starts to drive him a little bit crazy because he's like, how could it be that every intervention I make, I go further and further back in time, but what I do, the universe is not as good as it was when Reed did it. This is tearing him apart. And the conclusion he reached, which is the conclusion I reached, was that the timeline is

already the best it could be under Reed and Doom cannot improve on it. And that idea is so antithetical to Doom's ego and Doom's belief that at the end the story, spoilers, he goes back in time and prevents himself from ever undergoing it. So that version of Doom ceases to exist because he cannot live with this humility that he's given himself. I must travel back to the start of this journey, prevent myself from undertaking it, thereby denying this malignancy its chance to infect me in the first place. It is a great sacrifice, my own existence pruned.

But it ensures an even greater good, an ever greater doom. This has been a big year for Imaginary Worlds. We got a new logo, we celebrated our 10th anniversary, and we began a new Patreon show. So a lot's changed. And if you have an e-commerce business that's growing, I'm sure you can relate. And if you're looking for better efficiency

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to ShipStation today. Go to ShipStation.com and use the code IMAGINARY to sign up for your free 60-day trial. That's ShipStation.com code IMAGINARY. imaginary. Mark Wade wanted to make a different statement with Dr. Doom. First of all, he questions the assumption that Dr. Doom believes his own hype. Mark had this epiphany in the early 2000s when he was working for a company called CrossGen Comics. The guy who ran the place was an arrogant guy, very full of himself, very a lot of used car energy salesman

energy to him. And he would, every once in a while, when he got agitated or especially irritated or just kind of lost his train of thought, would suddenly talk like this. Just for a second, he would snap back. And I asked him once, we were friendly enough, I was able to ask him, I said, what's going on? He said, he said, I had a cleft palate when I was a kid. And we did a lot of work on it. And I went through years and years of speech therapy to lose that, you know, that effect. And that reminded me that here was a guy who appeared confident and appeared completely together. But that was a little overblown because deep down inside him

somewhere, there was still the little kid who had the speech difficulty, that it would surface every once in a while as a reminder. All this to say that it changed my perspective on Victor Von Doom. It changed my perspective in the sense that to me, Victor Von Doom is not someone who believes to the very atomic level of his being that he deserves to be the ruler of the world if these idiots would just get out of his way and listen to him. I think deep down on a molecular level at a place that doom would never ever acknowledge is somebody who believes that the only way to prove his worth and to prove he is above all is for him to be able to rule the world. A few years later, Mark was writing the Fantastic Four for Marvel. His editor suggested that he needed to remind the audience how evil Doom is.

The character had been around for a long time. Younger readers might take for granted the fact that he's supposed to be one of their biggest villains. And Mark thought, challenge accepted. So the challenge was, okay, as if Dr. Doom were a brand new character you've never heard of before, what would you need to say about the character? What would you need to do with the character to really illustrate and underscore to a new reader these the levels of evil that a man like this will stoop to.

Remember, Doom is a master of science and sorcery, but a lot of writers tend to lean towards technology. I mean, he's got the metal suit, like Iron Man. So Mark decided that maybe Doom thought that was a mistake. He can't out-science Reed Richards, but the Fantastic Four would be defenseless against magic. So Doom makes a deal with demons to gain new powers of sorcery,

but it comes with a price. He tracks down his childhood sweetheart and uses magic to strip the skin off her body until it covers his armor. What's left of her collapses into a pile on the ground. It just in the moment seemed like the absolute, grisliest thing you could possibly do in that story that I had never seen before. When I was young I made a fateful choice. I chose science over sorcery, and I wanted to choose again. Thus I made a pact.

But as is too often true of demons, there was a barter involved. I had to sacrifice something of indescribable value, something irreplaceable, something only you could give me. Farewell, my love. I will miss you more than anyone will ever imagine. There was a backlash. And to this day, fans are still debating whether that was too dark and nasty for Doom's character. But Mark disagrees.

When he starts a new series, he likes to go back to the original comics to see how the characters were portrayed. If you go back and look at the first, the really first quintessential Dr. Doom story, it's that fantastic war 57 through 60, it's Dr. Doom steals the Silver Surfer's powers. Yes, he pontificates, he tells us all the time, he is noble, he is great, he is, you know, his word can be honored, he is an honorable man. And there's nothing in that story that he does that is remotely honorable, that is remotely noble.

It isn't just straight up trickery and evil. I think Doom says this about himself a lot, but he is the very definition of an unreliable narrator. You know, it reminds me a little bit too of, it was sort of midway through the run of Sopranos, David Chase was on Fresh Air, and he was talking about a shift he made with Tony Soprano, where he said,

not enough viewers understood that Tony's evil, that too many of them were finding him everyone's adorable mobster next door, and he started making Tony much more morally compromised in his choices, and much more sort of beyond redemption on purpose, because he's like, I want to send a message to my viewers. I don't know if you feel the same way

about when Doom is portrayed too noble, too regal. Yes, totally. Because again, that familiarity breeds, not to bring you contempt, that just breeds, you know, acceptance. That you just, Doom is such a part of the Marvel universe It not only brings content, it just breeds acceptance. Doom is such a part of the Marvel universe and Doom is such a character who's been not overexposed, but certainly has as much springtime as most any other Marvel character

that the people who hate him love to hate him. The readers, the Tenastic War readers, the Dr. Doom fans, they're not worshipping his evil. They just so like the characterization of that character, that they've fallen in love with that character. So it's the same thing. Every once in a while, you really have to remind these people who have sort of grown so accustomed to Doom that they look at him as a benign evil, that he is nothing remotely resembling or benign. Another interesting aspect of Doom is that he creates all these Doombots, which are android

duplicates of himself. I think the Doombots are right out of a dictator's playbook. Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Putin, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong-il, and other dictators have all allegedly used body doubles and lookalikes. The Doombots have also been convenient for writers who don't like the way a previous writer depicted the character.

There have been several instances where a new writer takes over, who didn't like what the previous writer did, and they have Dr. Doom declare, that version of him was a Doombot. He is the real Dr. Doom. Until the next writer comes along and decides, that version of Doom sucked, that was a Doombot, this is the real Dr. Doom.

I think on a meta level, that manufactured confusion is right out of a dictator's playbook, to blur people's understanding of reality with propaganda. It allows an authoritarian to be unaccountable for their actions. Yes, he was very ahead of the fake news curve, wasn't he? Yes. It is that third-person self-glorification that is, as you say, right out of the dictator's playbook. But what about the people of Latveria? Do they have any agency?

Sometimes they're portrayed as living in fear, and sometimes they're portrayed as Dr. Doom's loyal subjects. Ryan North is more interested in that version of Latveria. For me it comes down to complexity again, where I feel like if Doom is lording over a country of people who are suffering and hate him, that feels like the place where you'd start. That's the obvious version. If Doom has a country where at least a large percentage think he's great, that's interesting. Why do they think that? What has he done for them? Is it sincere? Has it been manipulated in some way?

What does doom propaganda look like? Is it reasonable? Or is it almost a parody what propaganda should be? All these questions, to me, are very interesting. So I like a Latveria that has a large proportion of it that celebrates doom. In fact, I think that my favorite idea of Latveria is that it's a country that's so enraptured by doom and so enthralled by doom, it doesn't exist without him.

If Dr. Doom disappears, I don't think Latveria continues as a going concern. It is doom and doom is Latveria. I think if you're a Latverian, there's peace. You never have to worry about going to war. Never have to worry about the price of eggs. You don't have to worry about putting your kid in school. You don't have to worry about gun violence.

You don't have to worry about much of anything because doom is very, very protective of his people. Is it because he loves them? He will say that. I would argue that it is more along the lines of, if I can keep them safe, it is evidence that I have the power that I say I do. It reminds me of the old saying

that at least Mussolini made the trains run on time. But in reality, Mussolini didn't make the trains run on time. It was a lie, repeated over and over again until people believed it. This is the second episode I've done this year where I've been grappling with the question of why some people want to be ruled by authoritarians. I'm so baffled as to how they can be drawn towards these leaders and at the same time convince themselves that they're not embracing authoritarianism. Mark wonders that as well. He's not writing any storylines with Dr. Doom now, but... I would be writing that a lot differently in 2024 than I would have in 2004.

I asked Brian Michael Bendis if writing about Doom gave him any insights. If I had a really strong answer to your question, I probably wouldn't need to write as much. So does this bother you too, or is this sort of the kind of idea that you have? I just don't really understand it, and it fascinates me. And there's such a long history of the same story being told over and over and over again, and the same kind of person selling the same kind of fear to hold on to the same kind of power over and over and over again.

And those of us who don't fall for it, watch and go, why really again? It's just been going on for centuries. And so it is, you can't deny, part of the human condition on some level. I do not fully understand it, or I would be free to write other things. I know that I'm not gonna find answers in comics,

fantasy shows, or sci-fi movies. I'm just gonna find more people asking the same questions. But if Dr. Doom is a means to play out these thought experiments, then I suspect he will continue his reign for years to come. Or to quote Dr. Doom, all hail Doom. That is it for this week. Special thanks to Mark Hibbett, Ryan North, Brian Michael Bendis, Mark Wade, and Luke Daniels into the readings. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman.

We have a new show called Between Imaginary Worlds. It's a more casual chat show that's only available to listeners who pledge on Patreon. Last week I talked with Helen Zaltzman, host of the podcast The Illusionist, and her husband, Martin Oswick. We talked about a bunch of topics, including the 1932 futurist novel, Cold Comfort Farm. So did you have a moment where you first read Cold Comfort Farm and you're like,

did anyone notice that this was science fiction? No, I didn't, I was completely ignorant. I think I missed all this detail, or I just thought, oh, maybe in the 30s, people did travel by little plane, or they did have video phone, even though I didn't have a video phone, because I first read it in the 90s.

I'm not a good literary analyst, as it turns out, even though I have an English degree. Embarrassing. Between Imaginary Worlds comes included with the ad-free version of the show that you can get on Patreon. You can also buy an ad free subscription on Apple podcasts. If you donate to the show on Patreon at different levels, you also get free imaginary world stickers, a mug, a t shirt, and a link to a Dropbox account, which has a full length interviews of every guest in every episode. Full

length version of my interview with Brian Michael Bendez, we had an interesting discussion on what he thinks are the top four villains in Marvel comics. You can subscribe to the show's newsletter at ImaginaryWorldsPodcast.org.