Previous Post Doom has always been my favorite villain. I read in some editorial once about how you have to give the villains wins in order to give them credibility and show them to be real threats to the heroes. They have done that with Doom.

Doom looms above them all as the closest thing to the Platonic ideal of a supervillain that the genre has ever seen.

He has tremendous pride and a firm sense of honor; he hides his face in a mask due to a disfiguring accident in a hubristic experiment; and he hates the leader of the Fantastic Four, the brilliant Reed Richards, because Doom has a bit of an inferiority complex. He’s motivated both by that neurosis and by an almost — almost — altruistic belief that he would rule the world better than anyone else.

That’s it. His gist is both elegant and internally consistent, as well as wholly unique. He isn’t a boilerplate desirer of riches, he isn’t an overcomplicated supernatural being, he isn’t a blindly murderous monster, he isn’t just the resentful rival of a hero. He’s his own thing, and he’s been a perpetual part of the Marvel Comics legendarium for 55 years.

Doom has been ensconced in a bevy of terrific stories over the decades, ones that have demonstrated what makes him work so well as a supervillain. The first and foremost factor is his nobility. I mean that in both a literal and figurative sense: He has a dashing and charismatic regal quality to his personality, but he’s also the actual sovereign of a nation. The latter factor makes him unique in the pantheon of top-tier superhero antagonists, and provides a fascinating twist on the usual archetypes for that canon: He has, in a way, already accomplished his goal of conquering — and, what’s more, he’s quite good at it.

When it comes right down to it, Doom is pretty much the perfect villain. He's a man of undeniably tremendous ability who could easily be the greatest hero of them all if he could get past his own ego and terrible jealousy. He's a man fueled more by his own perceived inadequacies than his abilities and this is what makes him so perfectly evil.

Beyond that, there's all of that ability- his amazing intellect, his powerful magic, and his peerless armor. He's a world leader with a powerful robotic army and he speaks in the third person. He's pretty much everything a villain should be.