Diamond Summit '09: Doomwar by Marvel.com
The battle begins this February in DOOMWAR, a five-issue limited series by writer Jonathan Maberry uniting the Marvel super heroes against a common and deadly foe: the egomaniacal dictator Doctor Doom.
"They go after him in a major way; not just personally, but going after all of his operations, which we'll find out is a much bigger thing than we've ever seen before," explains Maberry. "It's kind of a 'we've had enough,' line-in-the-sand sort of thing. It's going to involve some key players and a whole lot of action."
The first sounds of battle ring out when Storm, stalwart former leader of the X-Men and bride of the Black Panther, stands trial in Wakanda with a death sentence looming. With their friend's life on the line, members of the X-Men set into motion events that reveal Doom's influence and lead to the current and former Black Panthers, the Fantastic Four and more joining together to save Storm and bring down the Latverian's empire once and for all.
Every hero involved in the coming conflict desires vengeance on Doom for various reasons, including his former Cabal compatriots Emma Frost and Namor, now both members in good standing of the X-Men. Storm's husband, T'Challa, feels a particularly ferocious passion for eliminating Doom after the malevolent monarch's recent attack led to the hero losing not only his title as Black Panther but also his kingship.
"T'Challa wants some payback," says Maberry, "but in order to get that he's going to have to bring in a couple of random elements-some x-factors."
Although Maberry wants to keep a few of these wild cards a secret, the writer admits to two characters that play very important roles in the heroes' war strategy: the six-clawed Canuck, Wolverine and the epitome of unpredictability, the Merc with a Mouth, Deadpool.
"From a strategic point of view, if you're going to put together a team that is going up against tremendous odds, you're going to want somebody who is going to be able to take a lot of injury and keep on fighting," says Maberry. "That's Wolverine. He's the person you want at your back in any fight. As far as Deadpool goes, I mentioned that what needs to tip the scales in this type of match is a chaos factor. You throw him into the mix and literally, anything can happen."
And as Maberry points out, what's the point of waging war against Doom without including the heroes who have foiled his every scheme since the character's first appearance, the Fantastic Four? A longtime fan of Marvel's First Family, Maberry says the members of that team all play key roles throughout the series. Arguably the only person smarter than Doctor Doom, Reed Richards' expertise provides an equalizing factor against Doom's advanced technological defenses. With the Storm siblings, Maberry says that while the Human Torch goes on the offensive, his sister, the Invisible Woman, acts more covertly and that "she's going to play into a couple of big reveals." As for the Thing, when it comes to this battle, it's clobberin' time.
"I've always loved when the Thing gets into the middle of a big brawl," admits Maberry. "There [are] a lot of jaws he can punch, a lot of things he can tear apart. I want to let him rip through this."
The fallout from this limited series looks to drastically change the landscape of the Marvel Universe, both on a political scale and on an emotional one. Maberry says the last issue contains quite a bit of shock value and a few last surprises:
"There is something else that is going to happen at the end of the series that is going to affect quite a few characters across the board. Echoes of this will be showing off in Marvel Comics for a while."
Beating The Drums of Marvel's WAR Against DOOM by Newsarama.com
There’s Doom, and then there’s everyone else.
That’s the view from inside the mind of Doom, but it can also be said looking from the outside in at Marvel’s top echelon of villains. Besides the fact that he has appeared more times than any other villain in Marvel. Doom has stood toe-to-toe with not only the Fantastic Four, but Mephisto, Silver Surfer and Galactus... and best of all, he is Stan Lee’s favorite villain. But although he’s the favorite in one of the principal creator’s of the Marvel U, he’s far from it from the heroic inhabitants of that universe.
And in the upcoming Marvel miniseries Doomwar just announced at today’s Baltimore Retailer Summit, the Marvel U is out to get Doom. Long-time adversaries the Fantistic Four join the X-men, Deadpool, and the Wakandans T’Challa, Storm and the new Black Panther to take on Latveria’s supreme ruler. Although this has been a long time coming, recent events such as his involvement in the Cabal as well as the ravaging of Black Panther have put him at the top of a growing assemblage of heroes’ list.
Crafting the five-issue Doomwar series is writer Jonathan Maberry and artists Will Conrad and Ken Lashley. Maberry is the current scribe of the Black Panther series, and this fresh-faced newcomer to comics is a weathered veteran of the written word with multiple awards (including a Bram Stoker) for his fiction books including Ghost Road Blues and Patient Zero. Between all that, he’s an 8th degree black belt in Shinowara-ryu Jujutsu and is a member of two separate Martial Arts Halls of Fame.
I think that’s a first for a comic writer.
Newsarama talked with the writer about this 2010 miniseries, and what Doom is up against – and what the heroes are after.
Newsarama: Jonathan, what is Doomwar about?
Jonathan Maberry: Doomwar is a major Marvel event where a number of Marvel heroes band together to wage an all-out war against Doctor Doom. The X-Men, Fantastic Four, Deadpool, T’Challa (the former Black Panther) and his wife, Storm; and the current Black Panther. It’s a helluva line-up.
And...they’re not just going to war against Doom, they’re squaring off against his entire network, which includes various villains (human, meta-human and ‘other’) who work behind the scenes to provide Doom with money, materials and muscle. I mean, let’s face it –Doom runs an entire country. You don’t do that alone. And at any given time he’s got a lot of operations going, so there has to be a massive support system and considering who the boss is, that system won’t be made up of nice guys.
Doom has is –and always will be-- a major power player and he’s launched attacks –overt and covert-on several fronts. In the process he’s hurt a lot of people in the Marvel Universe. Everyone has a personal stake in want Doom taken off the board.
So...the time has come for some serious payback.
Nrama: What is the final straw that forces such a large-scale attack on Doom?
Maberry: Capturing Storm and arranging for her to be executed is a start. Also, he tried to murder T’Challa and did murder two of T’Challa’s bodyguards. He’s also destabilized a couple of nations. But the real kicker is that he’s discovered that a certain element found in only one place on earth will increase his powers by an order of magnitude. He obtains some of it and it allows him to create a new generation of Doombots and other weapons that are substantially more dangerous than anything he’s thrown at our heroes before.
If he succeeds in getting enough of it, he will quite simply become the most dangerous person on earth, and possibly in this plane of existence. It would be like him becoming a living Cosmic Cube or the embodiment of the Infinity Gauntlet
Nrama: With his name in the title, let’s talk Victor Von Doom. How do you see him as a character?
Maberry: I’ve always thought that Doom was Marvel’s most fascinating and dangerous villain. I used to write Doctor Doom stories when I was a kid, imagining plots and counterplots going on all the time, and that’s how I still see him. If he’s defeated by, say the FF or Thor or someone, then all that means is that one of his many wheels within wheels goes off the rail; but he always has a hundred other things spinning.
He’s a super genius, a sorcerer, and the head of state. I’m going to show some behind the scenes stuff, so we can see why he’s able to manage so many threats and plots all at the same time. He has a whole lot of very smart, very devious, and very dangerous people working for him.
Doom has done so much harm for so long that he’s created an army of enemies. At the same time he’s amassed quite an army of his own, and the collision will send shockwaves throughout the Marvel Universe. He also has awesome technology that blends machinery with sorcery. I’m going to explore that in Doomwar. We’ll see some very nasty new toys from the Doom arsenal.
Nrama: Coming up against him in this are the X-Men, the Fantastic Four and Deadpool; it seems like an unlikely team-up, so how do they come together?
Maberry: The FF don’t need much urging to sign on, considering the amount of history they have with Doom. More than anyone else on earth, they grasp the scope of Doom’s power and understand his potential. Reed Richards will go to great lengths to stop him. We also get to see a more devious side of Reed and Sue than we’ve seen before.
The X-Men are brought into it initially because Storm is a prisoner of Doom and is scheduled for public execution. Her team-mates are part of a search and rescue operation that warps into a search and destroy. Plus, one of the X-Men’s most feared villains gets an upgrade to become far more deadly. The X-Men have a real stake in making sure this threat is never unleashed on the world.
As for Deadpool, well...depending on which of his personalities you ask, he’s either in it for the money, or in it for the chicks.
Or both.
Probably both.
He gets hired by T’Challa and the Black Panther to come in and lead a special wet-works team, doing some things that the more moral and mainstream heroes would not do.
It’s also important to understand that Doctor Doom is a master strategist; but strategy is based largely on knowing the nature and specifics of your resources. How the hell do you strategize with a wildcard like Deadpool? He’s Chaos Theory in red tights.