Will we ever get a proper cinematic Doctor Doom?

 It seems highly unlikely in my lifetime.

At comic-con and Hall H during a Marvel cinematic universe symposium, they made a dramatic reveal of Robert Downey Jr. coming out in a Dr. doom mask and revealing himself to rousing applause. of course, if you were just to cut a loud smelly fart in Hall H you would probably get big applause. Anyway, I found this quite cringe worthy and I will tell you why.

This is clearly a desperation move by Disney to generate some interest for Upcoming avengers movies that are going to be featuring characters from failed films and TV shows of the last few years. They needed to replace the woman beater who is playing Kang in various movies and shows and who was going to be the big bad in the upcoming projects. Personally, I always found Kang to be kind of weak sauce as far as a cinematic villain. Or comic villain. In general Dr. doom sounds like a far more interesting villain, and the reports about the upcoming Fantastic Four film despite Pedro Pascal being wildly miscast as Reed Richards Sounds pretty good.

But besides the Downey desperation move the fact that he already has been the flagship actor playing the flagship character in the more successful phases of the marvel cinematic universe makes this a baffling decision. So what are we going to get? Is he going to be an evil universe version of Tony Stark? or is he going to play Victor Von as essentially a completely different character and the plan is to make him look as different from Tony Stark and sound as different from Tony Stark as they possibly can. Neither of these sound like acceptable things to me.

I was an avid comic book collector from around the age of seven years old when my parents first brought a stack of comics from a swap meet to when I was around 25 years old and had decided that three dollars or more was far too much to pay for what amounted to less than 30 pages of comic book panels. On the face of it a single comic that doesn’t sound that bad but I was a type of person that would go every couple weeks and get a nice stack of about a dozen or more comics. dr. doom was just about my favorite villain. The arrogance and capability. The fact that he was a scientist and also a magician who every year on all hallows Eve did rituals to try to fight demons through a portal to hell to release his mothers gypsy soul from torment. and that time the fantastic four went to Latveria to confront doom and found it all messed up from their previous visits. They had left the place in a state of Apocalypse and the people were looking to Dr. doom as their rightful heir and savior and them as the enemy. This was just amazing stuff that you just can’t find in the comics today.

I remember at some point my mid teens, me and a couple of friends would sit around pretending to be our favorite comic book villains, and arguing about the events of the day. One friend was the red skull doing a German accent. Another one was Ultron doing a robot voice. and I of course, was Dr. doom. 

My only real hope is what I mentioned above the possibility that Robert Downey Jr. will be trying to go through some kind of acting transformation to be a completely different character other than Tony Stark. But that level of thespianism just doesn’t seem to be his bag. He seems to be at his best when he’s all snarky and snippy. But I would like him to prove me wrong.

I don’t collect comics anymore and in all honesty the last year or so I’ve been slowly trying to drizzle them away through eBay. I still have some decent old comic runs that at times seemed quite valuable. But my most valuable comics I had sold off and made thousands of dollars around the time eBay first came around. nowadays, people just aren’t paying as much money for the good stuff. but I still have emotional attachments to a lot of the stuff, and I found the marvel cinematic universe has given me just as many painful moments as it has great joys. And the painful stuff is deadened by the fact that it’s usually characters I never cared much about anyway. The comic versions of Captain Marvel and Modoc and others never mattered much to me. At least, and they’re more modern iterations. 

(spoilers for Deadpool and wolverine below)

But I think there is more pain to come than joys. But this last weekend I saw Deadpool and Wolverine and I found a lot of joy in there. Wesley Snipes Blade and Chris Evans Human torch. The original X-Men films, actors and characters like sabertooth and toad. Those really tickled my nostalgia bone.

I guess I’m just going to have to see. These next avenger movies are years away and aren’t really gonna be filled with characters I care much about. so I’ve mostly checked out emotionally from these films. But Deadpool and Wolverine really ignited the nostalgia in me. So who knows?

Comic Book gaming styles

After posting about my comic book gaming history last week, I got a bit introspective about the three decades of my experience running those sorts of games. Over all that time, my GM style evolved in many ways, reflecting the changes in the comic book industry itself. I thought I would touch on that a bit more.

I grew up with comics. Even by my early teens I had quite a collection. Besides buying the occasional current issue off the racks, my folks would often return from swap meets with a pile of comics to add to my growing stock. These were special treats, because they would more often than not be 10-20 years old, so I was very much in touch with older, pre-Silver Age comics.

I loved the iconic, God-like heroes of DC of course; Batman, Superman, Green Lantern. But I was a Marvel boy tried and true. I could connect at a deeper level with Peter Parker and his personal problems far more than Batman and his Joker-chasing adventures. Homework, girls, and bullies were part of Spider-Man’s life just like mine, and that made him more real to me. So around 1979, when I was fleshing out my comic book world for gaming, Marvel played a huge part.

I decided to set my island nation of New Haven in the Marvel Universe, except 20 years in the future. That gave me something to ground my world with, but the future setting gave me more freedom that Marvel’s modern New York would have. I didn’t really want to use Marvel characters all that much, I just wanted the setting.

Within a year or two, X-Men comics featured the famous “Days of Future Past” storyline, in which mutant-hunting Sentinel robots had rounded-up mutants, killed most of the world’s superheroes, and set-off World War 3. That was perfect for me, as it eliminated most of Marvel’s superhero roster, while leaving enough of it free for me to use in my future Marvel setting. There wasn’t much chance of Spider-Man showing up on the streets of New America City in New Haven, but if a player wanted to have “The Son of Spider-Man” as a character, then no problem. As a matter of fact, a girlfriend of mine in the early 80’s ran the daughter of Wolverine, and low and behold a decade and a half later a daughter of Wolverine showed up in the Marvel universe.

The very first superhero games I ran in the late 70’s, using the Superhero 2044 rules didn’t have any real style. With that system, there wasn’t much more to do than have your powerful hero show up, and lay waste to bank robbers and cause tons of property damage in the process. It was howling mad fun for kids to have men in power armor squash crooks into street pizza, but as we got older we wanted a little bit more than that.

So when I made the transition to Villains and Vigilantes, Silver Age Marvel comics set the tone for the goings on. Angsty heroes and anti-heroes ruled the Marvel landscape of the late 70’s, so our games reflected that. Then in the mid-eighties the X-Men comics were huge, so of course I ran my own campaign of new X-Men in New Haven’s future world. As a matter of fact, the anti-mutant hysteria popular in Marvel for decades entered my game world frequently.

But in the later 80’s two great, ground breaking comics changed the comic book landscape forever. One was The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller gritty new take on the Batman. OK, as a comic geek I know that Miller did not invent this darker Batman. In the 70’s the work of Neil Adams and others had turned Bats from a jokey Adam West dork into a noir detective who had travelled the world after the death of his parents picking up Samurai and Ninja skills. But Miller’s dark future of Gotham City had a profound effect on how I presented destitute parts of New Haven’s metropolis. I began to set more scenarios in the run-down parts of town instead of NH’s gleaming downtown spires. Street criminals became less comic, and more ruthless and dangerous. With the crack epidemic of the 80’s hammering the evening news, more scenarios involving drugs and drug dealers happened in my street-level games. Of course, being a futuristic Sci Fi world, these would more often than not be super-drugs that granted temporary super-powers to junkies.

By the late 80’s, I discovered two more comic properties that changed how I ran games and how I perceived the existence of heroes. First was, of course, The Watchmen. Alan Moore’s take on what the world would be like with real Superheroes had a profound affect on me. Suddenly Supermen were just as subject to darker and malignant human foibles and passions as the rest of us, and were more often than not driven insane by their own hubris and crapulence. This more cynical view of the superhero world was increased in me tenfold when I began reading Marshal Law. Law was a super-powered cop who hunted super-powered gang members, rapists, and killers, and was a total deconstruction of the Superhero myth.

The early to late 90’s was my heyday of superhero gaming (in terms of amount of games and frequency), and many of my players were not only unfamiliar with superhero RPG’s, but with comics themselves. So my own take on superhero deconstruction was greatly received by my players, and often hailed as a unique view on the super-powered world!

With the huge popularity of the Miller-influenced Dark Knight films, and the recent release of a The Watchmen movie, larger audiences have been exposed to the deconstruction of the Superhero myth. But in my games, it was a long-running standard.

It has now been almost 10 years since my last Champions games. With a decent D&D group going strong, I have the occasional hankering to revisit New Haven. But how will it have changed? Have dark heroes continued to violently fight crime in the ally’s and parking lots of the bad side of town? Are super-drugs and violent criminals still a raging problem, or has the possible lack of heroes swinging around the cityscape made a positive difference in New Haven? In my final games around 2000, characters dealt with a world-wide alien invasion that was defeated at tremendous cost. How has New Haven, and the future world, handled all this in the years following? A surge in space exploration? More racism against those who are different or strange? These questions and more will have to be dealt with. But how I go about it, and how my players react to it, will be the real fun. I can’t wait! Just gotta get that pesky D&D campaign over with, then…”It’s clobberin’ time!”

‘Nuff said, true believer.