Doom Democracy Discourses — Reviewing ‘One World Under Doom’ #2

The entire world watches as a potential despot threatens the entire world along with any sense of normalcy or freedom. Bands of people rise up against the growing fascism, even as others welcome it with open arms.

No, this isn’t a reference to the sad dangerous state of the real world right now.

It’s the Marvel Universe, where Doctor Doom is the Sorcerer Supreme and is “benevolently” taking over the entire world. He’s declared himself the Emperor of the Earth, while the heroes reckon with a population who is beginning to see the proverbial “light.”

Family discussions, debates, and strange bedfellows lead the way as Ryan North, R.B. Silva, David Curiel, and Travis Lanham provide the second chapter for One World Under Doom.

There are seven more months of this event? Whew, that’s definitely feeling like too much.

On paper, this is an interesting story. In execution it’s also intriguing in some ways, but overall there is something off. A major part of that is that, as the intro pointed to, it feels far too damn close to scary reality right now. At least Doom is promising helpful stuff as he does more fascist stuff. In reality it’s just a brutal stabbing stick with the carrot long abandoned.

Secondly, the slow burn just feels too slow.

As much as I love North’s work with the Fantastic Four, the predictable nature of things here as well as the slowness feels wrong. We know that Ben isn’t “cured forever” and that eventually the heroes will prevail, but we have so much more event to go. What worked for me with Blood Hunt and a few other recent major Marvel events was the brisk nature of them. Watching the heroes work with villains and compromise themselves for most of seven more months already feels exhausting.

Not to mention the fact that Doom is offering actually helpful things while just stealing control of the planet. Just like with some previous events, the heroes are fighting to return the world to the exact status quo it was before Doom. No matter how much that might means people will suffer, be harmed, or even killed by the old ways.

We see some of that with the “debate” that Valeria and Doom have about Democracy and freedoms. One of the major flaws with having any debate or touching of topics of this nature with ongoing cape comics is just that: they are ongoing. This means that they have a specific status quo that tries to mirror the real world as much as possible. There can’t be revolutionary change because the powers that be not only like the status quo (on and off page) but are afraid of ticking off their dwindling aging audience.

So in the end, the heroes we follow will be dooming (word choice intended) everyone because the “heroic” thing to do in these worlds is go back to basics. Ain’t that just a depressing sentiment all around.

Silva and Curiel are knocking it out of the park visually though, and deserve the big gigs like this.

There are few who match the dynamic scale that seems to come innately from Silva’s work, making everything seem grander than it might be, even just simple conversations between two individuals. There is a dense weight to everything along with plentiful details, allowing the world to breathe and feel truly lived in.

I mean, just behold that opening sequence of the Fantastic Four in action.

Perfect paneling choices, along with bold positioning of figures on the pages make those events feel beyond lively. If there is a “cracking the code” with superhero books of a particular nature, Silva burst through that crack and runs hard into the distance. This is why his name keeps getting attached to some of the biggest projects Marvel has to offer.

Being a book with supers and magic, as well as pretty mundane spaces, means a color palette is needed to match that energy. Curiel always manages to meet and surpass such energy requirements, letting some of the more vibrant colors just really dominate in stand out ways. While also sort of bringing them down to Earth with the colors that surround them. A lot of very muted or at least toned down tones befit the more regular spaces or concepts that are also in play here.

Everything has a slight slickness to it. Which works with how rapid things tend to move within the story itself.

Doom is a grandiose figure and his speeches match that. We get a lot of Doom speak here, and all of it plus the rest of the lettering is given the requisite majesty. Lanham works wonders with the lettering to let each bit of emotion really poke through. One moment I can believe the cold steel of Doom’s words and the next I’m fully buying that he truly has favor, love, and respect for Valeria. Each character’s words boosting the same sort of energy as the story moves forward.

Some of it’s colorful, the rest of is more baseline, setting up the differences in character voices, tone, and volume through subtle and less than subtle modifications along the way.

At the end of the day, I do enjoy the character portions of the story. Doom, Valeria, and the Four are all very “in character” with their overall dynamics dictating the story beats. It speaks to how well North knows these characters having written them for years.

In that regard, I think I would have enjoyed this even more as just an arc of the Fantastic Four series proper. Not to this scale of course, but perhaps Doom taking over a major city of the world and putting things into effect.

That might have worked better than trying to push this into a line wide event, one that very few other books (outside of the tagged tie-ins) are mentioning. Those that have do not seem to take a Doom controlled world all that seriously. That’s a mark against how disconnected Marvel as a whole has become at this point in time, where major events of one book mean nothing to any other book.

This is a 2000s era type of Marvel event, without the bandwidth to really have such an event affect every single major series. Instead it’s a mostly fine time that avoids the reality of its eventual landing point.

One World Under Doom #2 is now available from Marvel Comics.