The Culture

[ Mood: Happy ]

The next few books that I will be reading have been borrowed from the local library. This one is a collection of a six part mini-series of the same name. I was looking forward to it as it was written by Ed Brubaker who wrote an excellent Daredevil collection that I read recently. This is a retelling of the origin story of Doctor Doom and probably suffers a little bit because of that as it must limit the creativity of the storytelling to a certain degree.

I am familiar with Doctor Doom’s origin story from the Fantastic Four annual #2 as reprinted in the book Bring on the Bad Guys. The Brubaker story stays remarkably close to the plot of the original Stan Lee and Jack Kirby story – the 10 or 12 page story being retold in the first four chapters of the book. Brubaker expands the story, in part, by making more of Doom’s mother’s life as a sorceress. He uses this to give Doom more of an interest in magic and how it can be combined with technology and expands on his quest to breach the nether worlds and rescue his mother. The last two chapters give an account of how Doom returns to Latveria and takes control of the country.

This was an entertaining read as I am not a big fan of the Fantastic Four, and hadn’t read many of their comics, so the story was fresh to me – it has probably been 30 years since I read the original story before today. I don’t know if it would appeal to long term fans of the Fantastic Four as much – I know that I sometimes get fed up of endless retellings of the origins of characters that I am familiar with. It wasn’t as good as the Brubaker Daredevil stories that I have read so was a slight disappointment to me.