ASTONISHING TALES #2 (1970)
by Roy Thomas & Wally Wood
Splitting the cover vertically works better than horizontally, as they did last time.
Rudolfo and Ramona (the Valeria look alike) are still prisoners of Doctor Doom, but Rudolfo manages to escape with his super-strength.
How? This isn’t the real Rudolfo: it’s a robot!
The parallelism between Rudolfo and Doom is pretty evident, but the robot was actually built by Doom himself for his coronation.
This is a rather minor point of Doom’s origin, but future retellings of his rise to power will incorporate this moment without highlighting that the man placing the crown on Doom’s head was a Rudolfobot.
(doesn’t quite have the same ring as “Doombot”, doesn’t it?)
The robot is destroyed while trying to escape the castle, while the real Rudolfo (who was controlling the robot remotely) meets a new mysterious ally: the self-named Faceless One.
Ominous!
The Faceless One has identified the position of the Doomsman, who has been wreaking havoc on the Latverian border.
And so Rudolfo, the Faceless One and Doomsman form a weird alliance against Dr. Doom.
Meanwhile, Doom is keeping Ramona move freely within the castle for… questionable reasons.
Or so it seems: Doom fully expected Ramona to shoot him in the back (literally!).
But that will have to wait, because the Faceless One has provided some advanced technology to Rudolfo’s rebellion.
Doom vows to destroy the rebellion while striking a pose.
As always, when you want a job to be done properly, you do it yourself with a jetpack.
It’s very weird to see Doom with a jetpack, but it’s growing on me.
Doom takes care of the rebels quite easily, which is something the Faceless One anticipated: he just wanted an opportunity to sneak into the castle and take Ramona hostage.
No idea why, because he ditches her the moment Doom shows up. And he definitely doesn’t need her, since the Faceless One and Doctor Doom are pretty evenly matched.
At least until Doomsman shows up.
And we are already at our cliffhanger: Doom facing both the Faceless One and the android that he created specifically to be unstoppable.
To be continued, obviously.
Doom significance: 1/10
The coronation scene has the tiniest significance and the Faceless One makes his first appereance, but overall it’s not a terribly impactful story.
Silver Age-ness: 1/10
Even on the Marvel scale, this is pretty low. Probably because of the insanely fast pace.
Does it stand the test of time? 5/10
This comic moves FAST; I’ve seen Golden Age stories that are more slow. This hurts the story quite a bit because there’s no time to absorb anything, which is a shame because the three-way chess game between Doom, Rudolfo and the Faceless One is shaping up to be very interesting.
It was a Doombot all along
In a bizarre twist, Doom doesn’t use a robot duplicate… but his adversary does!
Take over the world & Destroy the FF!
Neither: once again the FF are not even mentioned, and Doom is to preoccupied to deal with the rebellion to even think about world domination.
Crazy tech
The Nulli-Screen ™, which seems to be just a fancy name for a force field. Nothing really crazy, except the weird name.