The History of Doctor Doom vs. the Fantastic Four

The Baxter Building's Permanent Resident

Full spoiler warning: this essay reveals plot details from six decades of Fantastic Four and Doctor Doom comics, including Secret Wars (1984 and 2015), Unthinkable, Infamous Iron Man, and the mid-credits scene of The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025).

Cover via The Astromech's Doctor Doom comic history.

No other Marvel villain is this hard to surgically remove from one specific family. Take Doctor Octopus out of Spider-Man's life and you still have a functioning hero. Take the Fantastic Four out of Victor von Doom's and there is almost nothing left standing: no scar, no crown, no rivalry, no reason to build the mask in the first place. Sixty-three years and eleven landmark comics deep — The Astromech's full reading order already walked that history issue by issue — the more interesting question isn't what happened between Doom and the Fantastic Four. It's what he actually is to each of them, because it is never the same answer twice.

To Reed Richards, he is an unhealed wound wearing a crown. To Sue Storm, he is a kidnapper who has never once managed to fool her. To Ben Grimm, he is barely worth the effort of real hatred. To Johnny Storm, he is a threat that has, at least once, made surprisingly practical use of him. And to two children who were never supposed to matter to him at all, he is something closer to an actual uncle. This is that family history, member by member — plus the fandom's favourite receipts, and what it all means for a Doctor Doom now walking onto a film set instead of a drawing board.

Reed Richards: The Rivalry That Built Him

Every account of Victor von Doom returns to the same afternoon. At university, a classmate named Reed Richards finds the flaw in Victor's calculations for a machine built to reach the realm of the dead. Victor ignores the correction. The machine explodes, the scar it leaves sends him to Tibet, and the armour that comes back is as much a monument to that single afternoon as it is a weapon. Everything after is variation: Doom steals the Silver Surfer's Power Cosmic in Fantastic Four #57-60 and loses it because Reed spots the one condition his pride overlooked; Books of Doom lets Victor narrate his own origin as though history itself owes him the final cut, except Reed's mere existence keeps disrupting the story Doom wants to tell; Unthinkable ends with Reed carrying a permanent scar of his own, finally matched to Victor's. By Secret Wars (2015), Doom has taken everything Reed ever had — his wife, his children, his place in history — and still cannot build a version of himself that doesn't eventually confess, out loud, that Reed would have done it better.

The Doom verdict: Victor doesn't want Reed dead. He wants Reed's verdict overturned — and sixty years of comics keep declining to overturn it.

Sue Storm: The Queen He Never Earned

Sue is the first person Doom ever uses as leverage — he kidnaps her in Fantastic Four #5 before the team has even learned to trust one another — and the pattern barely changes for decades. What does change is how quickly she reads him. Across the archive, The Astromech's own account of the character notes that Sue is "frequently the person who sees through Doom's theatre fastest," and the two Secret Wars only sharpen the point. On the 2015 Battleworld, Doom makes her his queen outright — Sue Storm Richards becomes Sue Storm von Doom in every way except consent — with Franklin and Valeria raised as their children and Reed edited out of the family's memory entirely. It is the single clearest example in the entire mythology of Victor mistaking appropriation for intimacy: he can rewrite an empire's history, install himself at the head of her family, and still never once ask her.

The Doom verdict: Victor can seize a throne, a planet, even a family. He has never once earned a person's genuine loyalty by asking rather than arranging.

Doctor Doom on a Secret Wars comic cover, armoured and crowned above the battlefield

Ben Grimm: The Rival Who Never Wanted the Rivalry

Ben gets the least personal treatment from Doom and, in a strange way, the most honest. Their first encounter in Fantastic Four #5 briefly mistakes him for Blackbeard — a joke at Ben's expense that sets the tone for decades of Victor treating him as muscle rather than a mind worth engaging. That dismissal is exactly what makes Ben's later arcs land. On the original 1984 Battleworld, freed from the usual rules of his own body, Ben discovers he can change between human and Thing at will — and chooses, for a while, to stay behind rather than go home. On the 2015 Battleworld, Doom hands him one of the regime's most thankless jobs, manning the Shield at the edge of the civilised world, and Ben abandons that post the moment it matters, helping topple the throne rather than guard its border. By Infamous Iron Man, Ben has become Doom's most persistent real-world sceptic — investigating him for S.H.I.E.L.D., refusing to let a few heroic acts erase a lifetime of history. Victor never respects Ben the way he begrudgingly respects Reed. Ben has never needed that respect to keep showing up.

The Doom verdict: Victor mistakes Ben Grimm for the least dangerous member of the family. Ben is the one who keeps outlasting him.

Johnny Storm: Fuel for Somebody Else's Fire

Of the four, Johnny has the thinnest personal history with Doom — mostly a convenient target, rarely a rival worth Victor's full attention. Which is what makes Secret Wars (2015) the strangest chapter in this entire family history. On Doom's patchwork Battleworld, Johnny Storm does not merely serve the regime. He is the regime's sun, literally burning in the sky to give a fabricated civilisation its daylight. It remains one of the most unsettling single images Jonathan Hickman and Esad Ribić produced across the whole event, precisely because it happens to the family member Doom has always taken least seriously. Victor converts the person he thinks matters least into something his entire fake world cannot survive without — and never seems to notice the irony.

The Doom verdict: Victor will turn anyone into infrastructure if the throne needs it — even, maybe especially, the one relative he never bothered to fear.

Franklin and Valeria: The Children Doom Actually Listens To

The one relationship in this entire history that isn't built on rivalry, kidnapping or conquest belongs to Reed and Sue's own children. In FF #1-5, "Tomorrow" (2011), it is Valeria Richards — a child — who recruits a mentally damaged Doom into the Future Foundation, offering to restore his genius in exchange for his help against the Council of Reeds. He accepts, and something rare happens: Doom contributes to a shared project rather than attacking one. Valeria is one of the only people alive who can negotiate with Victor von Doom directly and be taken seriously for it. That unusual regard curdles into something far darker on the 2015 Battleworld, where Doom raises both Franklin and Valeria as his own — a found family built on erasure rather than earned trust. And it is precisely this thread that The Astromech's breakdown of how The Fantastic Four: First Steps sets up Avengers: Doomsday picks back up on screen: five years after Franklin is born wielding reality itself, Robert Downey Jr.'s Doom is shown leaning silently over the boy's bed. With Molecule Man nowhere in this timeline, the implication is hard to miss — Doom may already be auditioning his next battery, and his next child.

The Doom verdict: Victor genuinely listens to exactly two people in the entire Richards family. Both of them are still young enough to believe he might actually change.

Key Fandom Moments: The Relationship in Its Own Shorthand

Longtime readers have their own private canon of Doom-and-FF beats that never quite make the "defining issues" lists but come up in every fan conversation anyway. The Doombot twist tops most of them: Victor's habit of fielding robot decoys is so constant that no on-panel defeat of Doom is ever fully trusted until several issues later — "it was just a Doombot" has become one of the longest-running punchlines in the genre. Right behind it is Latveria's diplomatic immunity, a recurring plot device in which the Fantastic Four, the Avengers and even the United Nations discover that a sitting head of state cannot simply be arrested — Marvel's sharpest running joke about how sovereignty can launder a supervillain. Fans also regularly point to how Reed-exclusive Doom's respect really is: his contempt for Ben reads as almost comic, his attention to Johnny is barely more than an afterthought, which is exactly why Sue "seeing through his theatre fastest" and Valeria earning his genuine trust land as such notable exceptions. Older readers still swap two more particular anecdotes — Doom's supposed refusal to ever cheat at a card table or chessboard, a matter of twisted personal honour, and a much-repeated Christmas Eve truce shared with Reed — though both have become fan lore repeated more often than precisely sourced, worth treating as beloved shorthand for Victor's contradictions rather than a single, citable issue.

One Family, Every Version of Doom

Strip away the crowns, the mysticism and the borrowed Iron Man armour, and every era of Doctor Doom is still arguing with the same four people and their two children. No other Marvel villain carries this much unfinished business with an entire team rather than one hero, which is exactly why The Astromech's chronology of the Avengers saga keeps circling back to this family as the MCU's next real foundation. Robert Downey Jr.'s casting isn't a swerve. It's the culmination of sixty-three years of one villain needing one family more than he has ever needed a throne, a planet or a god's stolen power — and Avengers: Doomsday is simply the moment the rest of the universe finds out.