When you read articles and books on writing -- particularly on writing heroic fiction -- you frequently see the advice that one musn't write one-dimensional villains. If the villain is simply bad and that's it, he's dull. The conventional wisdom goes that your villains have to bring a little something more to the table -- usually Sympathy, Motivation, or Panache. Sympathy -- you have to show that the villain is a real human being (or other sentient species) too, and feels pain, and maybe even from his point of view isn't really a villain at all. Motivation -- (often closely linked to Sympathy) you have to show that the villain has relatable, primal, human reasons for doing what he does, motivations you can at least kind of understand even if you couldn't agree with them. And finally, the Hannibal Lecter exception: Panache -- even if the character isn't really sympathetic at all, nor does he really have relatable human motivations, at the very least you can make him a good villain by giving him a good, compelling style.
So how about Dr. Doom?
Dr. Doom is one of the "all-time great" villains, and unlike most conventional wisdom WRT mainstream Marvel and DC superhero comes (henceforth "superhero comics"), I actually agree with this one. But is Doom really all that great, and does he "fit" the SMP paradigm?
Honestly, how sympathetic is Dr. Doom, really? Okay, his mom got dragged to Hell by Mephisto. That's a bummer, I'll grant you, but that doesn't generate a whole lot of sympathy from me. First of all, there's the whole "play with fire and you get burned" aspect to occult magic. Second, Doom could probably have saved his mom a long time ago if he poured all of his time and energy and resources into rescuing her instead of stalking Reed Richards.
The closest anyone's ever come to giving Doom a note of real sympathy, that I recall, was when Doom took in that Kristoff kid -- but there are two problems there, as well. First, it was during Byrne's run on the FF, and the Marc Singer Corollary applies (if you go back and re-read a Byrne FF story now, there's a better-than-50% chance that it's nowhere near as good as you remember, or that Byrne is just riffing an earlier Stan Lee story anyway), and second, it turns out he has a plan for the kids brain patterns to be overwritten with his own if anything happens to him. That kinda ratchets down the ol' sympathy factor. I should also note that Byrne's attempts to generate sympathy by showing that he was a kindly dictator (??) always came of as fairly silly to me, even back when I was fully enamored of Byrne's work.
So Doom doesn't strike me as a villain with a whole of sympathetic potential. How about motivation? Not to pick on Mr. Byrne (who has written and drawn a lot of material that I still like a great deal), but in the X-Men Companion II, Byrne states his belief that Dr. Doom is way more noble a figure than Magneto, because Magneto is simply using a rationalization to justify his rotten deeds, whereas Doom has hereditary monarchy to back up his claims to power (seriously -- now, Byrne does point out, in no uncertain terms, that Doom's a complete "rotter," but still...). Maybe it's because I'm an American, but to me, proactively defending your ethnic/culture group/species is a *way* better justification, motivation, and source of sympathy than some claim to who-gives-a-rat's-ass monarchy. In terms of flimsiness, that's up there with "I had a dream in which a magic frog with the face of Harry Truman told me to take over Latveria." Then of course you have the jealous of Reed Richards thing and Doom blaming Reed for his own arrogant mistakes. Yeah. So Doom pretty much strikes out on both sympathy and motivation in my opinion.
So how about panache? Well, "panache" implies a level of sophistication I would hate to suggest, but style...yeah, I like Doom's style. He's a direct, simple, grandstanding hotdog of a villain, given to overly-complex, pseudoscientific schemes and long-winded diatribes. He likes to blow things up. He uses robots -- lots of robots. He has a convoluted backstory that includes lots of magic and psuedoscience and gypsies! He's really kind of irritating. I love the guy.
But do I love the guy because his style really makes for a great villain, or is there a nostalgia factor at play? Do the attributes I attribute to Doom make for a good villain, or just a good superhero comic book villain? Could you get away with "classic Doom" in a modern action movie or TV series? Or is there some other key to understanding why Dr. Doom is a great villain (besides longevity) that I'm missing?
His arrogance is so absolute that we love to find that fatal flaw in the plan with the heroes. It is good fun to watch his carefully laid house of cards come tumbling down time after time. He is my favorite villain, it could watch him curse Richards and fate all day long.
Why do we like Dr. Doom? Because he is wild, like the TEE-gra.
He is also an archetypal blowhard with the occassional moment of true menace. He is always willing to create and implement an evil plan and fight toe-to-toe with any hero. In short, he's got game. What's not to like?
I don't think a villain's motivation has to be sympathetic, just understandable--and Doom's motivations are so primal, so keyed up, that they're hard to miss. "Hate Richards," like "Hate Superman," will never be sympathetic but there's something pure about it that takes the character up to that next level of fist-shaking supervillainy.
Come to think of it, one of the reasons Byrne's revision of Lex Luthor didn't work--and I will never, ever stop discovering reasons why it didn't work--was that he kept the same simplistic motivation but removed both the cause and the scale, grafting it into a character of much more modest ambitions and means. It's not an especially plausible motivation when you place it in the context of the scaled-down actions of the Fat Kingpin Luthor; that simple motivation really only works with the outsized theatrics of Doom or the Silver Age Luthor. A "realistic" Luthor who wears business suits but still hasn't progressed beyond "Hate Superman"--and who only acts on that motivation while hiding behind one proxy or another--throws away all the fun parts of the character (the panache, in your terms) and keeps the least convincing.
And needless to say, there's absolutely no sympathy for the business suit Luthor who's pissy because Superman arrested him once, whereas the childhood pal gone bad because of a twist of fate carries at least a little pathos.
It may be partly because of the armor, partly because of the attitude, but whatever the reason, Doom has the panache. In the hands of a lesser writer, of course he can be boring, but that's true of every character.
By the way, I also feel the portrayal of any villain can be strengthened by having that villain stroke a kitty.
(P.S. Marc's absolutely right about Luthor.)
Fellow Curmudgeon Matt Rossi attempted to post the following comments but was unable to:
1 - Doom DID free his mother from Hell in the classic "Triumph and Torment."
2 - Doom is NOT hereditary monarch of Latveria. He's the son of a gypsy witch and a folk remedy doctor who lost his mother to her own occult studies and his father to an early death after the man failed to save the sick wife of the Duke. He took over Latveria to free it from the rule of petty tyrants who could care less about the people: in Doom's Latveria, the tyranny is absolute and impartial and the people love him.
3 - Doom is one of the few villains in comics to have taken over the world by means of mind control and then deliberately allowed himself to lose said control because he found the conquest more exciting than actual rule. (See 'Emperor Doom') - in the course of that selfsame world conquest, Doom even deliberately allowed himself to be exposed to the pheremonal mind control power of the Purple Man and resisted it through sheer force of will.
4 - Doom *learned* how to switch his mind for another's. And he's only used it *twice*. He's built a suit of battle armor that can actually *learn how to cast spells* by watching the world's best sorcerers, a time machine, a device that can capture and impart the power cosmic... Doom even managed to overwhelm *Galactus* once as a stepping stone to overwhelming the Beyonder. In other words, Doom is probably smarter than Reed Richards: he's just too insanely arrogant to understand that if he is, it's not by much.
Patrick: Indeed, he is wild like the TEE-gra! Heh.
Marc: I agree completely (especially about Luthor -- can that be The Other Marc Singer Corollary?).
Thanks, Matt! Responding to what you wrote:
1. I kinda figured that Doom probably had saved his mom by this point (if for no other reason than the "everything gets done or undone eventually" mantra of the last ten years of superhero comics), but did not know the particulars. When exactly did this happen, and in what series? (Hey, sounds like a stupid question, but one cannot assume at this point that a pivotal Doom story would have happened in the FF anymore.)
2. I knew that Doom kicked the former tyrants out of town, and knew who his father was, but coulda sworn that Doom had some hereditary right from the past. Oh well.
So, kicking the former tyrannical rulers out of Dodge: generates some sympathy. Becoming a more effective tyrant: not so much. (As for the people loving him...that never worked for me, but the only stories I read where that was in play seemed to present the case solely to give the Fantastic Four a minor faux-conflict. OTOH, one could argue that Doom's exit strategy was better than a certain American administration's...)
3. I can't argue with Emperor Doom, of course, since it supposed to have happened in continuity, even though to me it has always felt out of continuity since no other Marvel comics at the time (that I am aware of -- for what that's worth) acknowledged it (and it seemed like a little bit of a Michelenie lovefest for Doom). But yeah, that's really all beside the point. Doom is one bad mutha -- I agree.
4. NOW YOU'RE TALKIN'! That's my boy Doom there!
Trying to respond to your responses:
1 - It happened in the Doctor Strange/Doctor Doom graphic novel 'Triumph and Torrment' which is a pretty solid read.
2 - Doom's overthrow of Latveria isn't meant to make him seem sympathetic. Indeed, Doom is not a sympathetic figure: he's brilliant, arrrogant, cruel, vicious and sadistic. He kills people casually, he blows up his own robots if they fail to act sufficiently 'Doom-like' (as in the case of one of his Doombots making the assumption that Doom *might need someone*) and he deliberately makes sweeping, grandiose plans that will cause the deaths of a great many innocent people just because it might suit a whim (such as when he trapped the entire population of latveria under a transparent dome to help him kill the Avengers, who he only wanted to kill to make Reed Richards nervous... yes, Doom tried to kill Captain America, Hawkeye, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch *just to make his old college roommate uncomfortable.*) Doom is a vicious tyrant, a grand madman, but he's neither sympathetic nor petty.
3 - Doom is pleased you understand.
4 - My favorite Doom appearance to date is when he restores Reed Richard's powers just because he wants to kill the man at his best. Doom's sense of honor is twisted and allows him to be cruel, vindictive and vicious, but it also means that Doom will never just shoot you in the head when he can instead seal you in a chamber with seventeen precisely calibrated laser-drones that use the sound of a human's heartbeat to direct their deadly energies.
I think that while those are good general rules for villains, I also think that there's room for some exceptions in any given environment. Darkseid is one of them - Darkseid imitations pretty much never work, but the original has this great combination of look, attitude, and epic action. Likewise with Dr. Doom. He works because that costume goes with those schemes and that dialogue and everything else.
Actually, now that I think about it, I wonder if "epic megalomaniac" is a villain archetype that works in visual media particularly well.
Yeah, there's nothing remotely sympathetic about Darkseid, is there? Although he does have that weird bracing honesty about what he is and what he does, a nice contrast with both his toadying henchmen and his occasionally naive opponents.
Also: I have Corollaries now? Cool.
The thing is, the cursed Richards proved early on that he's "smarter" than Doom, at least in terms of comic book smarts. Remember the early annual where Reed pulls out a gun with a handle and Dalek-like contact disk on a stick on both ends and he and Victor battle by thinking into the gun? Result was that Reed won and was able to dominate enough that he made Victor think he had won, so that Victor just left to go back to Latveria.
Peter David once wrote an article saying that the really great villains were the ones who got away with it. Doom qualifies on that score -- he had that whole diplomatic immunity thing going for him.
I'd go for the primalness of the character that makes Doom cool. There's something incredibly pure about his obsession with Reed, and his twisted worldview that makes him believe he is an aristocrat and burdened with his own version of noblesse oblige. His insanity is so palpable that it actually transcends it; it's not that he is unable to distinguish right from wrong (the legal definition of insanity) — it's that he imposes his own moral and honor code upon the world around it.
Since it's not entirely possible to read precisely what that honor code is, bound up as it is with his own obsessions and whims, that makes (or should make him) unpredictable a degree, and his power is such that unpredictability even to that degree makes him extremely dangerous. And perhaps the most dangerous thing about him is that his obsession with Richards is probably the only thing that keeps him from realizing how powerful he really is. If Reed was taken out of the picture permanently, what would Doom do if he directed his ire on the world at large?
Understand that, and you can write a cool Doom. Treat him like a cookie-cutter villain, or try to insert some nuance to his madness, and you dilute the primal nature of it, and he becomes ordinary.
Doom is the ultimate Faustian figure in the Marvel Universe - reaching for the next step no matter the cost.
Going back to the Secret Wars, this is the villain who refuses to play the Beyonder's game - even though it will give him all he desires - because it insults his self-dignity to be in a petrie dish for the Beyonder. It's a viewpoint none of the other villains can understand. Unlike them, Doom is not base. This makes him a fascinating character.
If it were not for a few overwhelming character flaws, arrogance being the big one, Doom could obstensibly be a hero.
One of the crucial aspects of Doom, to me, is his self imposed exile in the Himalayas and his subsequent mastery of black magic. This enforces the idea that Doom is not after material gain, but has "higher" goals.
In your town, for one night and one night only, Marc Singer and the Corrollaries!
I didn't mean to overstate the Sympathy. "Sympathy" may be a poor word choice -- yeah, you can have truly sympathetic villains, and that can be very effective in the right context, but it also has a touchy-feely connotation to it that may be throwing people off. Another way to look at it as some element of masic humanity that a reader or audience member can respond to. If they thought about it, said reader could think, "I know people who are really like that."
Of course, not every villain needs to be Sympathetic, have relatable Motivation, or have Panache. But I do think he needs to have at least one of those. I think we all agree that Doom has his own particular panache...in spades.
Here's a question I posed earlier though: Could Doom's particular brand of madness-driven style work outside of superhero comics? I think you could probably sell such a character in a fantasy novel, maybe a space opera sci-fi novel. I don't know if you could pull it off in a movie or TV series, though.
I also think it's interesting that, as I re-read y'all's comments, the variety of subtly (and not-so-subtly) different takes on Doom that have been expressed here. On the one hand, a great character is great in part because he can support a broad range of interpretation by different people. On the other hand, I also think a big chunk of this, in Doom's case, comes from having been handled by so many different writers putting their own spins on the guy.
That's okay though, since it sort of reinforces the intense madness of the character. I mean, we all seem to agree that Doom has "his own code of honor" -- but if you reviewed the entire corpus of Doom stories, I'm pretty sure that code of honor makes no sense and can't be codified because he contradicts it as often as not. But who cares, because he has tremendous game, tremendous style, and he's brinin' it.
My final thought here is kind of an aside, but I also find it interesting that we all love a villain character who continually does things you find on the "If I was an Evil Overlord..." list. I'm sure we're partially giving him a free pass because Dr. Doom is roots, but also because it's just so...*him,* and his (often inexplicable) madness is part of that style we seem to love so much.
One of my favorite Doom moments (although, I admit I unfortunately have not read a lot of Fantastic Four) is in Secret Wars. He is assembling a machine or something, and describing aloud his actions. Klaw asks him something like, "Why are you talking so much? Are you taping this?" Doom replies, "Of course! Every utterance of Doom must be recorded for posterity!" Now THAT'S panache!