Doctor Doom doesn’t technically appear in the ending of Acts of Vengeance, but I might as well cover how it all ends. Stay tuned for what’s going to follow in the Doom retrospective.
Avengers West Coast #55 (1990)
by John Byrne
I have to say, “Let there be an ending!” is an hilarious title for a crossover.
The mystery of the “minion” who has been pulling the strings of the Prime Movers gets resolved right away by Thor. Considering he dropped a “Midgard” last time, it’s not like it could be anyone else.
Interestingly, if it wasn’t for this sudden deduction by Thor, the rest of the Avengers would’ve thought that Doom was behind the entire event.
At this point Wizard has been captured (revealing himself to being the weakest member of the Prime Movers, to the surprise of nobody) and is being kept by the Avengers… for about five minutes.
It’s easy to dismiss Wizard when he’s around the likes of Doctor Doom, but he’s smart enough to build a teleportation device that fits in his fingernail!!!
Speaking of Doom, here’s his not-really-him cameo of the day:
I really like the idea that Doom might have been the real one on some occasions and a Doombot on others.
Once Wizard reveals that he came here directly from the Avengers headquarters, however, the “lackey” is NOT pleased.
This could’ve been a FANTASTIC reveal if they didn’t spoil it at the beginning of the story!!!
The reactions are pretty spot-on. Kingpin wastes no time getting the Hel out of there, while Red Skull is completely baffled.
Sadly we don’t see the villains fight. After dealing with the many, many, many subplots going around in the series, when we’re back Loki has already imprisoned everybody.
I expected at the very least the Mandarin to put up a decent fight.
So of course Thor shows up, bringing both Avengers teams with him.
We also discover WHERE exactly Loki was carrying out the Prime Movers meetings: the same dimension where he was exiled at the very beginning of the first Avengers story.
With Loki focusing on the Avengers, the other villains waste no time whatsoever to flee.
Remember this moment, it’ll come up shortly.
Also: Red Skull looks very weird with ears.
The whole idea behind Acts of Vengeance was villains swapping heroes. So the fact that we are ending on a Thor versus Loki fight is very underwhelming.
If the idea was that Loki was assembling his own warped version of the Avengers, the entire crossover did a crappy job showing it.
Avengers Annual #19 (1990)
by Mark Gruenwald & Vince Mielcarek
The ending of Acts of Vengeance did such a bad job wrapping things up… there’s actually more time dedicated to subplots than to the ending itself… some things had to be clarified in this epilogue, which also serves as a general recap of the entire event.
Of course Gruenwald takes the opportunity to do some cross-continuity. Cap was busy out of the country in another adventure (Gruenwald was also writing that series at the time), while Thor was… he was being a bit of a tool.
I do like Cap acknowledging they dropped the ball on this one. If the villains had even slightly smaller egos they could’ve made some real damage.
After recapping every single tie-in of the entire event (!!!!), Cap acknowledges that Doom likely made the switch to a Doombot at some unspecified moment, since Loki would likely have spotted a robot.
This time we do see the villains attempting to fight Loki. Note Cap’s snark at their expense.
Turns out that only the Mandarin (and earlier Kingpin) managed to escape.
That’s because Wizard gets arrested AGAIN, and Red Skull turns out to have been a Skullbot!!!
Really, the whole reason I’m covering this epilogue is Wizard’s reaction to the revelation. That’s just great writing.
And so we end with Captain America giving a summary of what the villains actually managed to gain from the entire event… and it’s not great for their reputation.
A nice way to summarize the entire event and fix some of the bugs, while inside a plot device that makes perfect sense and drives forward the team’s development… man do I miss Gruenwald.
I’m not giving any scores this time: not only Doom doesn’t appear, but I’m not even reviewing the majority of the first story since it’s more focused on the subplots.
And that’s all for the 80s. Before we tackle the 90s, however, we’ll take a detour into the Doctor Doom appearances in the “What If…?” series, as well as similar “imaginary tales”.