New Avengers vol3 #33 (2015)
by Jonathan Hickman & Mike Deodato
cover by Gabriele Dell’Otto
The last prologue to Secret Wars is all about Doctor Doom, who gets one of his best covers ever.
We begin with a revelation that brings the entire run of this book into a new perspective.
Remember the Black Swans, the extradimensional cult who were instrumental in the Illuminati understanding the Incursions? The ones who worship Rabum Alal, a mysterious godlike figure who built the world-destroying weapons the Illuminati have been using?
That godlike being, the center of the Black Swan religion… is Doctor Doom himself.
That’s right: ALL THIS TIME, Doctor Doom was the one behind the entire reason the Illuminati knew about the Incursions AND the one to provide them the means to slow them down.
There’s being two steps ahead of your rivals, and there’s traveling back in time to build an extradimensional religion that worships you AND helps you being two steps ahead of your rivals.
This issue is will explain HOW, and it’ also about to drop a massive retcon regarding Molecule Man.
To do this, Molecule Man brings Doom to witness his origin story in a new light.
Molecule Man has gone fully pseudo-mystical, but he’s not entirely wrong when he says he’s not human. He’s currently watching the origin of a copy of himself in another universe, and they seem to share the same consciousness.
Only for one Molecule Man to kill and absorb the other. It looks like nonsense now, but it’ll make sense in a moment.
Well, it will make comic book sense anyway.
First, he brings Doctor Doom to the Library Of Worlds, an extradimensional place that the Beyonders use to observe the entire universe…
…because he wants Doom to stop the Beyonders from destroying the entire multiverse.
Although he’s exaggerating a bit: the Beyonder didn’t destroy a universe in the original Secret Wars, just one galaxy.
And Molecule Man knows what he’s talking about, because we finally learn why the Beyonders created him in the first place.
That’s big news, but not exactly a retcon. But we do get a massive one, with the revelation that while most Marvel characters have different versions in alternate realities, including Doctor Doom…
…Molecule Man is always exactly the same in every universe, and they share the same mind.
Which surprisingly MIGHT be legit, because Molecule Man doesn’t get a ton of appearances in What Ifs (for reference, the Marvel Fandom wiki lists less than 20 Molecule Man variants, which isn’t a lot by Marvel standards, especially since nearly all of them are 1 panel cameos).
We barely knew anything about those variants, which typically aren’t particularly visually distinctive from the original… so this one MIGHT track.
The reason why Molecule Man is so important to the Beyonders is that whenever he dies, his own universe dies as well.
Which means that if Cyclops hadn’t stopped him, Wolverine would have destroyed the universe in 1985.
Even if the chain reaction of Molecule Man deaths has already triggered the Incursions, it will still take him 25 years before he destroys the multiverse.
Which might sound like a lot of time, but considering he’s going to take out an infinite number of realities, that’s not bad!
Well, it’s EXTREMELY BAD if you live in a universe, but you know what I mean.
This is such an enormous task that even Doctor Doom needs help saving the multiverse.
So he finds religion.
Sounds legit.
When DOCTOR DOOM tells you that you’re being too ambitious, maybe you’ve gone too far.
But Doom agrees: he’s sent by Molecule Man into EVERY SINGLE UNIVERSE.
In fact Doom spends the next five years (!!!) killing Molecule Men.
Considering it’s a thousand, he’s averaging a little more than a murder every other day.
After 8 years, Doom finds a way to accelerate things by getting a disciple.
That’s what Molecule Man meant by “starting a religion”, and why Doom created the Black Swans in the first place.
Eventually even the Beyonders noticed their plan wasn’t working.
And that concludes the MASSIVE infodump that Doctor Doom has been giving to Doctor Strange the whole time.
The Black Swan we’ve been following, however, isn’t a worshipper of Doom anymore.
That’s because she stumbled on Doom’s OTHER secret plan: use time travel to destroy the Beyonders.
Doctor Doom has figured out the way to do that, because while they’re INCREDIBLY high in the Marvel cosmogony, the Beyonders to have a weakness: they can’t time travel.
Which is hilarious if you know your Marvel history, but I’ll discuss that at the end.
In the meantime, Doctor Strange is worried about Doom’s ultimate plan but he agrees to help because… well what else is he going to do?
This leads Doctor Doom to an audience with the Beyonders. Who, I remind you, are a race of beings so absurdly powerful that they managed to kill every single cosmic being in the multiverse.
So it’s understandable they don’t have a high opinion of Doom.
Who is, of course, stubborn to the end.
And we end the story with Doctor Doom, Doctor Strange and Molecule Man about to face the Beyonders directly.
We don’t learn yet how this ends for Doom, since he vanishes in a blank panel.
While it doesn’t warrant a full review, a brief tangent on the story set immediately afterwards, Avengers v5 #55.
Which sees Thanos and his Cabal strike an alliance with the Ultimate Universe, mostly thanks to Samuel L. Jackson Nick Fury and most importantly The Maker.
Who is really Evil Reed Richards from the Ultimate Universe, and whose path will cross Doctor Doom later.
Doom significance: 10/10
Essential for the next Secret Wars and for a couple of storylines after that.
Silver Age-ness: 2/10
Way too cerebral. But there is a bit of Silver Age in using most of the issue to provide a colossal infodump. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing if you write it well.
Does it stand the test of time?
If you’ve read this series: 9/10
If you haven’t: 7/10
It’s hard for me to highlight how impactful this is if you’ve followed all previous 32 issues (unless I review all of them, which is not happening). The revelations of this story put EVERYTHING that happened before in a new perspective, one that is ABUNDANTLY clear was carefully planned from the beginning. At least considering the sheer amount of callbacks.
Not a perfect cap to the series, because it has a couple of flows: going out chronological order with the backstory doesn’t help what is already a rather complex storyline. Plus, while it’s obviously a treat for me, I have to imagine that having the final issue hype Doctor Doom while barely mentioning the Avengers can’t resonate with everybody. Especially since Doom wasn’t a major player for most of this series.
I also appreciate this as a Molecule Man fan, giving him the kind of cosmic significance he lost after Secret Wars II. His ramblings when he loses his mind can a bit grating, though.
However, if you’re only reading this issue for Doctor Doom or in preparation for Secret Wars, it’s not very satisfactory as a standalone story since it basically REQUIRES knowledge of a lot of stuff.
From a technical standpoint it recaps everything you truly need, but if you haven’t read the events Doom is describing it falls flat.
It was a Doombot all along
The story makes it abundantly clear that the Beyonders are not all-knowing, but they definitely would have noticed a Doombot.
Crazy tech
Because of the Rabum Alal retcon, we know Doom has mass-produced antimatter weapons that can destroy planets in one shot.
Supervillains created by Dr. Doom: 22
Doom is retroactively the one who created Black Swan, and since she ended up working with Thanos I’d say she qualifies. Technically he created A LOT of those, but I’m counting only the one we’ve been following.
Universes destroyed by Dr. Doom: at least a thousand
And that’s only if we count the ones he destroyed PERSONALLY. Adding the ones destroyed by the Black Swans? Anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions, conservatively.
Alright, I promised a hilarious aspect that only becomes apparent if you know Marvel history.
See, the only reason Doctor Doom has even the slightest chance of defeating the Beyonders is the fact that they still see time linearly.
While it’s revealed here for the Beyonders, it had already been established for the Beyonder waaaaay back in Fantastic Four #288.
That’s step one for my point.Step
two is that Doom learned the above because the Beyonder wanted revenge for having stolen his power in Secret Wars #10.
Something Doom was able to do only because Klaw had attuned itself with Galactus’s ship…
…which, in turn, Klaw had been able to do only because of Dazzler.
Which means that if Doctor Doom is able to save the multiverse from the Beyonders… it’s THANKS TO DAZZLER.
But it gets EVEN MORE hilarious if you consider the only reason Dazzler absorbed Klaw’s energies in the first place… is that she was dumb enough to free him.
Finding stuff like this gives me life.
That final revelation there at the end convinces me that you have planned out everything covered on this site in advance as meticulously as Jonathan Hickman might. Why else would you have tortured yourself with a Dazzler retrospective if not to be able to make that connection?
If this site proves one thing, it’s that my tolerance for bad comics is really high.
If it proves two things, is that I’m also insane.
In your review of Dr. Doom and the Masters of Evil, you said it was “the most unnecessarily complicated Doctor Doom plan EVER.” Do you still think so, now that we have this one? I guess you could argue that the complications in this plan were necessary.
I think that plan still wins. The Beyonders plan has an enormous scope and it lasts several years from Doom’s point of view, but it doesn’t have a lot of individual steps and only one might have been skipped (had Doom created the Black Swans from the start, he wouldn’t have needed to personally kill Molecule Men for years).
The MOE plan, on the other hand, has a lot more steps and a few of them were kind of unnecessary.