Fantastic Four #29: "The Dream Team"

[alliterator]

"That's a fantasy of What if there was one perfect person who could come down and fix everything for us? And that's a dangerous fantasy, that's an anti-democratic fantasy. So in one sense, [One World Under Doom] is a story of a fascist leader trying to take things over, and succeeding in doing that. When you look at fascism as a political system, you have to see that it's sold on that seductive fantasy of Here's a guy who can fix everything. This man alone can do it. Doom sees himself in that way. He's the kind of guy who's like, 'Yes, OK, yes, that is fascism. But when I'm doing it, it's not fascism, it's the actual best guy doing it, so it's fine.'"
- Ryan North


Doom has taken over the world. Life, however, goes on.

Comments

[thanekos]

The most bitterly funny thing about " believes they're the best guy who will fix everything " villains is the real-world fans who will argue for their objective rightness.

(It's a toss-up between those and the " In the real world, I would want Sentinels to protect me from mutants " types.)

[bruinsfan]

Doom's probably actually a great guy to solve things that involve practicalities like food distribution and wealth inequality. It's just when you get into the more intangible aspects of society like having to praise him all the time or else be reported to his robot police for insufficient loyalty that he falls short of the ideal.

[gnarll]

Thing is, Dooms issues with secret police, executions, needing to be praised etc, is objectively going to kill far fewer people than poverty, starvation, lack of health care etc. would.

Some of the issues with a dictatorship go away when the dictator is a comic-book genius focused on actually improving the world. Sort of like Supermans line to Luthor, that he could have saved the world a long time ago if he had cared to.

[lbd_nytetrayn]

This feels... topical. Wish I could share Ben's optimism the way I used to.

When was this published?

And how exactly did Doom take over?

[alliterator]

This was published February 26, 2025. So...last week.

Doom took over in issue one of One World Under Doom, which came out February 12, 2025. We don't exactly know how he did it, but one day, all the world leaders agreed that he would be Emperor of the World.

[zachbeacon]

I know writers who use subtext and they're all cowards

Yeah, F4 and whatever the Moon Knight comic is currently called this month are really fighting for my number one spot these days.

[angelophile]

I approve of this reference.

[cainofdreaming]

I give it two weeks before Doom tires of the bureaucracy. Again.

[badtakegoesbrrr]

Wow, really? So we're just equating poor and homeless people with vampires. You know, the creatures whose entire existence revolves around killing people, sponging off the lifeforce of others, and forcibly converting others into the undead. And no one at Marvel can see how tone-deaf this is? Like, I get it. The idea is that the civilians are looking at this vampire and are like, "Ew, gross, I hope Doom kills all those dirty vamps soon!" But like...their existence is innately bad. And this is who we're comparing to poor people. Not a fan of this conflation.

If more comic book writers read Discworld and understood why Lord Vetinari works as a benevolent tyrant, we might get a book that understands why Fascism is bad. Like, we're supposed to hate Doom because he's a fascist dictator who demands your loyalty OR ELSE. But you know what real fascists DON'T do? Fund education. Stop all wars. Ensure no one (except the vampires I guess) goes hungry. Because Fascism isn't about making things better. It's about a bunch of greedy fuckers taking advantage of paranoia and anger to tear everything down. It's a pigshit puppet and their lackeys dismantling a government in the name of ending overreach when instead they cut social services. It's a gaggle of weird, emotionally fragile losers making shit choices not in service of the greater good but because they're incredibly petty dickweeds who don't understand how the government works.

But whatever. Doom bad, I guess.

[cainofdreaming]

These vampires are just regular people who got forcibly converted by Varnae's vampire uprising. I mean, you wouldn't have staked Spider-Man, would you?

[badtakegoesbrrr]

Yeah, but my point is that vampires, in general, stir up negative associations. They're like leeches or mosquitos. I understand why, in the context of the narrative, we're supposed to feel for these vampires. But I don't think making literal homeless vampires is great messaging since most people will reasonably look at a vampire and think, "Holy shit, a monster, kill it!" Which isn't entirely unreasonable seeing as a bunch of not-homeless, not-innocent vampires invaded and killed/turned a bunch of people.

It feels like a muddled metaphor, is what I'm saying.

[cainofdreaming]

This isn't "in general" situation. There's was a specific in-universe event, which had specific in-universe repercussions. To just sweep those under the rug and not reference them again... Well, that's just lazy. And if people can't figure out the difference of "in general" and a specific situation they're probably the kind that'd equate houseless persons with leeches anyway.

[alliterator]

So your point is that Doom is using a species that, in general, has been hated and feared by people and is stirring up those emotions to manipulate a populace against them, even ones that are NOT bad and haven't engaged in any of the practices that caused them to be hated and feared?

I don't know, seems like a pretty apt metaphor.

[badtakegoesbrrr]

Yeah, I guess you're right. I guess these days I just don't trust comic events to have meaningful subtext. Or to be taken in bad faith. The way you summarized it actually sounds better than I made it out to be. Maybe I'm just slow.

[huntleyhaverstock]

Yeah, I think the text of the comic is very clearly saying, "These vampires are people, too, and it is wrong to arbitrarily hate them simply for being a thing they did not choose to be and cannot simply stop being."

It's a surprisingly great metaphor, I think, for the way the right tries to demonize whole swaths of people for who they are -- for "existing wrong" -- by inventing excuses to pretend that they're instead mad about something these groups are supposedly (but rarely if ever actually) doing.

[thehood]

Though recently Miles Morales was cured of his vampirism and in his story being cured was presented as a bad thing.

[thanekos]

Doom will also make sure the trains run on time.

[aperturedreams]

The vampires are normal people forcibly converted who haven't drank any human blood or attacked anyone. How is their existence innately bad any more than a regular homeless person?

[badtakegoesbrrr]

I mean the existence of vampires is bad, not homeless vampires. My point is that having these vampires BE homeless and downtrodden doesn't feel like great optics to me. Like, yeah, the obvious metaphor is that people see homeless people as leeches and that Doom is allowing this form of social inequality to negatively impact vampires who didn't ask to be turned. And this COULD be examined further within the event...but I don't have much faith in the writers to pull that level of nuance off. At least not outside of a tie-in. And again, VAMPIRES ARE NOT ANALOGOUS TO HOMELESS PEOPLE. Homeless people do not kill people to survive. Vampires...like, that's their whole deal.

[alliterator]

Vampires drink blood to survive, they don't need to kill. There are plenty of examples in fiction of vampires who swear off killing to survive.

Heck, one of the most prominent pieces of vampire media of the 21st century, True Blood, begins with an opening credits sequence that explicitly compares vampires to the LGBTQ+.

[cyberghostface]

I don't entirely disagree but Alan Ball said about the vampires being gay metaphors "Ultimately, if you latch onto that metaphor and become really serious about it, it would make the show was extremely homophobic. Because vampires are dangerous, they kill, they're amoral, a lot of them. I don't think that's what it is. I think that's just a nice little detail in what is hopefully a big popcorn thrill ride."

[cainofdreaming]

In Marvel 616 they don't even need to drink human blood to survive. Hannibal King survived the Montesi Formula because he hadn't done so.

[super_fly]

It just feels like nothing about this concept as presented makes any sense in this universe whatsoever

[thehood]

And as the angry mob pointed out, the heroes have killed vampires before. More recently in Blood Hunt.

And are Vampire Hunters like Blade now bad people? I also don't know how to feel about Reed saying the kids don't need to be cured about vampirism. Miles was cured of his vampirism and his book didn't treat it as a bad thing.

[cainofdreaming]

Blade has been. He was clearly obsessed with killing vampires during parts of his career. But even he has recognized that some vampires are good. He was partners with Hannibal King after all.

[cyberghostface]

Not sure how I feel about Doom being written like this given he himself has been persecuted and marginalized for being an ethnic minority.

https://www.tumblr.com/comicsohwhyohwhy/147259601363/victor-von-doom-isnt-white-hes-romani

[alliterator]

Having an ethnic minority who persecutes other ethnic minorites actually feels pretty topical these days.

[blues32]

Good grief. This is a bit too real for me right now. And too on the nose. Why not spray Doom's armor orange while we're at it?