Editing Marvel Comics (section)

===Doctor Doom===
Archenemy of the Fantastic Four as a whole and Reed Richards in particular, Victor von Doom was born the son of a medical doctor and a Romani woman in Latveria - a small unimportant nation somewhere in the middle of Europe. After the deaths of his parents, which may or may not be of importance to his future character development depending on the story, he traveled to America to learn advanced technological sciences, where he proved himself as a genius. It was here that he met Reed Richards; they were roommates. When one of Doom's experiments blew up, he was expelled from the academy, and he blamed Richards; Reed had previously pointed out that Doom had made a mistake in one of his calculations, Doom had ignored him, and so Doom was convinced that Reed had sabotaged him out of spite.

Which nicely encapsulates Doom's biggest flaw: he is a total raging egomaniac, a man with a god complex so powerful he has literally been able to no-sell some of Marvel's most powerful mind-controllers because he is ''that'' wrapped up in his own arrogance and sense of self-importance.

Returning to Latveria, Doom built himself an intimidating suit of power armor, conquered the nation of his birth, and began plotting to conquer the world, usually using diplomatic immunity to escape the consequences of his failures. The most notable bit of his armor is his mask, said to cover [[Balthasar Gelt|the allegedly horrifying injuries his face suffered from the explosion]]. Some comics confirm that the damage is real, while others say that it's merely a scratch blown out of proportion by his ego. The current story splits the difference; [[Grimdark|the trauma ''was'' superficial but in his haste, Doom put on the mask while it was fresh from the forge, disfiguring himself for real]].

Some of Doom's most notable traits, outside of the whole "power armored egomaniacal self-righteous world conqueror" thing, include:
* He's acknowledged as the world's greatest master of robotics, and has been using robot clones of himself, called "Doombots", to escape actually being captured or punished for years. Marvel writers love to abuse Doombots as a way to handwave away anything they don't like from other Doom stories.
* Doom actually practices [[magitek]], combining sorcerous skills learned from his mother with the technological skills he learned in America. In fact, originally, the idea was that's actually not as great at either science or sorcery as the more big name specialists, but he can fake being better by using the combination to cheat around their stylistic limitations.

Doom is basically the Wolverine of Marvel's villains, or perhaps maybe the Lex Luthor; it started out that Doom was supposed to be just an operatically flamboyant and egomaniacal asshole, but over the years, writers have fallen so in love with him that they've increasingly portrayed him as actually living up to his own hype.