Comics: Fantastic Four annual 2, 1964

### "The Final Victory of Dr. Doom"

This is the character's origin story (by Stan Lee, with that classic Jack Kirby art) including his first meeting with Reed Richards at ESU. Things to know about Victor von Doom:

- He is Romani. He was born and raised in a region of Eastern Europe near Transylvania that was prone to internal conflict, and his people were subject to persecution by the local (feudal?) government.

- He was orphaned at a young age; his mother was executed (in some versions she's killed by Mephisto, with whom she made a bargain prior to her death; the backstory leans hard on some unpleasant Romani stereotypes, particularly related to magical/mystical things) and his father is falsely accused of causing the death of the Baron's wife and chased into the mountains by soldiers; he takes Victor with him, they're trapped and nearly freeze to death, Werner--Victor's father--never fully recovers and Victor's response is very true to form: he wants revenge on a world that's taken his parents from him, that's hunted his people and driven both his parents to acts of desperation, he's just had enough. And he's only like, seven at the time.

I think that deep-seated anger provides a lot of the character's motivation, and one reason why live action versions fall flat in his case is that they tend to leave the background out in favor of a whitewashed version--the result really lacks the emotional punch that Doom needs for the level of operatic villainy he tends toward, imo.

Back to the summary: Victor grows up to be kind of a roguish figure, laying traps for the Baron's soldiers with early versions of the robots he later becomes famous for, taking out armored tanks with high-tech "freeze grenades" of his own design, and basically making the first moves in what will eventually become open warfare against the ruling family of Latveria, but first... college.

*I have no idea why Victor wears so much red in his back story but wowee he really wears just a whole lot of red here.*

I love the foreshadowing of Victor's safety gear in that first panel. And presumably, at the same time this college recruiter is paying a visit to Latveria, another is maybe talking to a Mr Richards of California (actually Reed probably had at least one PhD already by then but you get the idea) - they end up on campus at the same time:

Victor isn't particularly friendly, though clearly this moment stuck in his mind, Reed definitely makes an impression on him here despite the repeated claims that he "doesn't care" and "isn't interested."

Also, canon varies in some places recently about their status as actual roommates; usually the assumption is that they only shared rooms for a few days, Reed went on to room more officially with Ben for most of his time at ESU but he never fully gave up on Victor.

Which leads to its own set of problems, unfortunately--when Reed checks in on Victor, just to see how he's getting on in a new environment, he comes across some notes on the desk. This is strong evidence of them having been roommates at least for some amount of time, as he's perfectly comfortable entering Victor's room and looking at his work in a way that I don't think a stranger would do--but regardless, Victor catches him at it and flies into a rage, of course.

What Reed doesn't know is, Von Doom has been building a machine to try and reach his mother's spirit in the afterworld (in Hell, as it turns out) -- the experiment is a partial success, but Reed finds an error in Victor's math and tries to warn him, and Victor doesn't listen. The end result, whether because of that error or not (there's absolutely no way to know) damaged Victor's face and kicked off a lifelong obsessive rivalry between him and Reed.

Or, that's the official story, anyway--personally, I think both his level of obsession and Reed's dedication to salvaging the "good" he sees in Victor both come from a mutual romantic longing they registered in college (which led to them refusing to share space any longer, since neither of them knew how to deal with that at the time) and which has since become more complex and tangled over time.