Remember that 1969 Bullpen Bulletin where Stan’s Soapbox said they’d be only doing done-in-ones from now on? Well, that was all talk.
When we have comics like this one, or the much more serialized Marvel Comics Presents in the 1990s, I’m going to have to cut them up by story. This book is evenly split between Doctor Doom and Ka-Zar stories, but both halves of the book tell multi-episode stories that begin and end in different issues of the series. So this post is about the Doctor Doom half of these issues.
This is the first Marvel story about a villain, and we see on the splash page that he now has his own tag line, “Master of Menace!”
It starts with a pretty damn funny interlude.
We see Neil and Buzz on the moon, finding a man-made orb. They bring it back and open it in front of President Kennedy, and it’s a message from Doctor Doom that he got to the moon first.
This is part of what made 1970s Marvel great. Awesome sequence.
From there, we see Doom create a new robot that he calls “Doomsman” (and also calls “Robot”). Doomsman roots out a fake Valeria, a woman whose appearance was altered by some citizens planning insurrection.
Remember Valeria? His childhood love from Marvel Super Heroes #20? I’ve included her tag in the character tags below if you want to read more about her.
It turns out, the coup d’etat was being assisted by an alien called The Faceless One.
The alien takes control of Doomsman, and Victor Von Doom is forced to shunt his robot into another dimension, along with The Faceless One, and then blow up his own castle–with the revolutionary army still inside.
And thus, he is the winner–but at a great cost.