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Tom Brevoort asked that question a few years back. Here's the piece I did for his website:
The Fantastic Four, Marvel’s first superhero team, was first published in 1970 as a hardbound annual featuring the foursome – Stretcho, the Torch, Crystal, and the Invisible Girl – plus their friend the ever lovin’ blue-eyed Thing (who couldn’t be one of the team because then there’d by five of them, and the clue was he didn’t have a 4 on his outfit; I mean, okay, Sue basically shopped for a house in sub-plots for four issues, but at least she had a 4 on her chest). In this tale they land their bizarre craft in the closed land of Latveria and encounter their most fearsome enemy, the dreaded Doctor Doom!
I was seven. This story blew my mind.
Okay, some of you Americans might think all of this is from Lee and Kirby’s FF #84-87. I’m English, and I’m telling you this is how it really was.
Not only was this the first superhero story I’d ever read apart from Super-Goof, it also featured the coolest villain in the history of cool villains. Victor von Doom ruled a whole country! His own people both loved and feared him! He had a terrible secret in his ruined face, and when he wasn’t villaining he played haunting beautiful music alone in his gothic but high-tech palace! And stunningly he always kept his word, so that even his enemies the FF trusted him when he gave it, and he let the good guys go at the end because they’d helped him.
There was more. This amazing adversary beat the team, took away their powers, and then LEFT THEM TO LIVE IN PEACE in his country! And then, when things went wrong and he had to save Latveria from the sinisterly bald Dr Hauptmann and doombots gone mad, he got them to join him and led them against his own creations.
In watching the Thing gut his way through hordes of powerful baddies against all odds, in seeing the Torch slag doombots that still attacked even though they were in pieces, in watching Reed solve complex scientific problems with nothing but incredibly long fingers, and in seeing Sue, um, worry, I realised then and there what my own future inevitably had to be.
I would grow up to be Doctor Doom.
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