Doom’s 90s intermission, Part 2

Doctor Doom is still dead; last time the intermission covered one of his impostors, but let’s have a look at the couple of robots that took his place.
Spoiler alert: one of these is actually a good story!
…probably not the first one.

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Thunderstrike #13 (1994)
by Roy Thomas (writer), Jean-Marc Lofficier (co-plotter) & Larry Alexander (pencils)
cover by Dante Bastianoni

This issue of Thunderstrike is actually a double feature, sharing a second story and and alternate cover with New York supercops of “Code: Blue”.
The cover artist of the alternate cover goes uncredited in most sources, despite the fact that it’s clearly signed by Dante Bastianoni. We’ll see him again in another story soon.

I’m not covering the Thunderstrike story (by regular team DeFalco & Frenz).
I actually have a soft spot for Erik Masterson as a character… his tenure as the reluctant substitute for Thor is criminally underrated and one of the best things DeFalco has ever written… but his series is terribly dull.

Instead I’ll jump straight into the backup feature, that starts with a severely damaged Doombot reactivating itself in Yancy Street.

Which unfortunately means that the Yancy Street kids from Fantastic Four #361 are back.
Oh goody, not only we have 90s Roy Thomas to deal with, but these Newsboy Legion knockoffs too.

Look, there’s nothing wrong in using the Yancy Street gang to tell a serious story… but their Silver Age shenanigans don’t mesh with actual street gangs. AT ALL.

As if THAT wasn’t jarring enough, just throw a rambling Doombot into the mix!

Like I said, this is a Code Blue story. That’s one of the best ideas to come out of DeFalco’s run on Thor: it’s a special unit of the New York police that deals with supervillains when heroes are not available. I’m surprised nobody has tried to launch this idea as a TV series.

That being said, this story addresses one major problem Code Blue has: why spend millions of dollars in a special unit that does exactly the same job superheroes do for free?

Well… New York has more superheroes than Composite Superman has superpowers, but even they can’t always be available.

I particularly enjoyed the moment when the Mayor’s office calls the Latverian Embassy. What did they expect, that they’d have an off switch for the Doombot?

While I do like the idea of Code Blue, Lt. Stone is the only actual character in the team: everybody else is basically a walking cliché.

Code Blue has access to some serious (and visually ridiculous) firepower… but this is a Doombot.

They do manage to break one of its arms, but obviously the biggest advantage the cops have is that the robot has more than one screw loose.

So far so good, right? Well… if this was written by DeFalco, he might have included the Yancy Street kids in the first scene simply because he wanted to call attention to one of his creations.
But this is a Roy Thomas story, so you better believe they are crucial to the plot.

So the kids help the cops place a bomb beneath the Doombot, bypassing its forcefield and making some SERIOUS damage.

So… should I assume the US Government must know Doom has these things running around and doing basically nothing to stop him? I know he has diplomatic immunity, but come on!!!

This looks like a job for… Random Yancy Street Gang Kid?

And so we end with Lt. Stone making his tirade on how the real heroes are cops instead of superheroes… and the city suing the police for the massive property damage.

So… yeah. Turns out giving an unlimited budget to a special police unit is NOT the answer to anything, who would’ve thought?

I’m positively surprised. I fully expected an old timer like Roy Thomas to go 1,000% into cop propaganda, but this was surprisingly realistic.
Next!

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Nova v2 #11 (1994)
by Chris Marrinan

A team-up between Nova, the Thing, She-Hulk and Ant-Man? What was the decision process, drawing names out of a hat?

Speaking of random teams, we begin with Doctor Doom launching an attack on the FF headquarters together with Dragon Man and Hulk (actually it’s just a Hulk robot).

But, as we saw during the Code Blue story, the Fantastic Four had TECHNICALLY disbanded at this point. But Nova is there to ask for help to the Thing (the only member who stuck around at the headquarters) and She-Hulk who is there for… reasons… and they end up joining the big dumb fight.

All of this was apparently just an excuse for Doom to get his hands on some equipment, and he wastes little time revealing it’s a Doombot.

To make things even MORE confusing, it turns out that the “Shadow Constortium” has re-programmed the Doombot, the robot Hulk AND Dragon Man (who, in case you don’t know, is also a robot). I haven’t read this Nova series so I have no clue who these people are supposed to be.

Ant-Man (the second one, Scott Lang) was a supporting character on Fantastic Four, so he’s also there to help. And he’s shocked to learn that *gasp* both the Hulk and Dragon Man are robots!
I know he’s still inexperience in this field, but Dragon Man has ALWAYS been a robot.

The Shadow Consortium decides it hasn’t sent enough robots to kill Nova, so they send a new one: Armada. Who looks frighteningly close to the Heroes Reborn Iron Man armor.

But Ant-Man uses some good old Bulls##t Science to tech up a solution to deal with all the bots.

Why do I get the feeling none of this would make any sense even if I was familiar with the series?
Next!

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Fantastic Four Unlimited #8 (1994)
written by Tom Brevoort & Mike Kanterovich
pencils by Dante Bastianoni
cover by Claudio Castellini

That is one gorgeous cover, although I can’t help thinking Invisible Woman is in pain not because she’s carrying the dead body of her husband but because it must be VERY cold.

Speaking of her, Susan has spent countless issues of Fantastic Four being the only person on the planet that still believes Reed and Doom are still alive. In order to verify that, she basically made Ant-Man a regular member of the team so that he could look for clues.
And it pays off, because turns out someone may have shrunk Reed and Doom to microscopic size!

(I don’t get the Thing’s joke. Is that a reference to something? An expression I’m not familiar with?)

This is a neat idea: we’re going aaaaaall the way back to Fantastic Four #16 for this one!
After all, Doom has never done anything with the entire planet he conquered back then, so it’s about time we explore that aspect.

The Bastianoni artwork is fine, but whenever Ant-Man is not wearing his helmet I keep confusing him for the Human Torch since they are drawn exactly the same way.And geez, the Fantastic Four having mood swings in the middle of a travel to a microscopic world, I wonder who could possibly be the bad guy of the story.

Still… obviously this pales in comparison to the way Kirby and Byrne showed us Sub-Atomica, sure, but that is one great sequence.

Once the team lands, it’s pretty clear Ant-Man was onto something.

Although… “New Latveria”? You would think even a Doombot would have more imagination.

The Fantastic Four are rescued by the leader of the resistance, another familiar face from Fantastic Four #16: Princess Pearla. She actually has made a bunch of appearances before this one…

…including an issue of Marver Two-In-One where she was the villain, and was actually a team-up between the Thing and Ant-Man.
Scott Lang didn’t become a major player until later, but he made A TON of appearances in the 80s.

The Doombot that re-conquered Sub-Atomica is downright brutal!!!

Throughout the story, the Fantastic Four keep commenting that everyone has bouts of acting out of character. This includes the Human Torch being too reckless, but… is this REALLY out of character for Johnny Storm?

Ant-Man is the only one who seems to be immune to this, so he decides to investigate on his own. I really liked this panel showing his perspective!

Scott, stop pointing out the weakest parts of the story! That is MY job!

Just kidding. Other than the fact that the Fantastic Four “erratic behavior” doesn’t really come across from their actions, this is well-thought and it’s also helped by Pearla’s history.

While he does this thing, the rest of the FF find where Doom is: standing proud before his throne, under the corpse of Reed Richards hanging from the wall.
I think we just had a look into Doom’s fetish.

After two utter failures, it’s nice to finally meet a Doombot that does a convincing Doom impression.

Complete with random super-science, like the Sub-Quantum Energy Pulse™!!!

Doom is easily wiping the floor with the FF, but it turns out that this is just a Doombot remotely controlled by Pearla…

…who in turn is being manipulated by Psycho-Man. Because this is a story set in the microverse and Marvel at this point had lost the rights to the Micronauts, so really it couldn’t be anyone else.

Although I guess it is a little surprising to see him here: he hasn’t faced the Fantastic Four since the AWESOME John Byrne story which ended with Susan officially taking the name Invisible Woman instead of Invisible Girl.

His plan is a little convoluted. Turns out he planted fake readings into the FF’s systems to lure them to Sub-Atomica, so that he could manipulate them into fighting a “psycho-body construct” of Doom.

Ant-Man is too paralyzed by Psycho-Man’s mental manipulation to do much… except going big and smashing his computers.

And with her mind clear, Susan EFFORTLESSLY BLOWS UP DOOM.

So he WAS a robot? Wasn’t he supposed to be a “psycho-body construct”, whatever the heck THAT means? Well, everyone is apparently a robot in this story!

Well the real Psycho-Man is not far behind, but… it’s not a pretty sight. We never actually learned what Invisible Woman did to him in that Byrne story, but it must’ve been brutal!!!

I would feel bad for him, except… you know, it’s Psycho-Man.

Yeah I’ll believe Psycho-Man just blew himself up. Sure.

I swear Susan is the ONLY member of the team that has a working memory.

And so we end with the team going back home, unaware that once they do that they will be written by Tom DeFalco again and therefore will return to act like morons.

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Historical significance: 0/10
Code Blue and Nova are utterly irrelevant. To this date, the Fantastic Four story is the last apperance of Pearla; she’s a bit all over the place as a character, so I’m not entirely sure if anything new can be done with her at this point.

Silver Age-ness

90-ness: BIG GUNS!!!/10

Does it stand the test of time?
Code Blue: 7/10
I can be a very harsh critic for Roy Thomas, but this wasn’t bad! Sure the message is a little on the nose at times, but it’s well balanced by the counter-argument.
Nova: 0/10
Crap. Chris Marrinan does a passable Erik Larsen impression in some of the artwork, but this was a complete waste of pages.
Fantastic Four: 9/10
This was great, why couldn’t Brevoort be the regular writer? He integrates Scott Lang into the team WAY better than DeFalco ever does, he keeps into consideration the entire history of all characters instead of picking which parts he likes, and if characters are morons only when they are being mind controlled! Not a masterpiece by any means, but it could easily be reprinted today.

Number of superheroes who have fought Dr. Doom: 89
While Doom doesn’t appear, by my rules Doombots still count so I’m adding both Nova and the second Ant-Man.

Crazy tech
The Sub-Quantum Energy Pulse™, for when you need to literally throw everything including the kitchen sink at your enemy.