Doctor Doom as The Avatar Of Villainy in Not Brand Ecch

For two years in the late sixties Doctor Doom, Marvel's most popular villain, disappeared almost completely from the company's mainstream continuity and instead became a regular background character in the humour magazine Not Brand Ecch.

This paper will examine Doctor Doom's emergence as a wandering character during this period, free from the constraints of a regular series or creative team of his own, before focussing on his appearances in this peculiar, and under-studied, magazine. It will look at the way that Not Brand Ecch developed from its initial concentration on re-telling Marvel's own stories to its final form as a superhero-tinged copy of 'Mad' Magazine, and show how Doom's constant appearances in the series, at a time when he was almost entirely removed from the rest of the company's output, led to him becoming the main exemplar of super-villainy in a way that would be utilised again and again in Marvel's wider fictional storyworld for decades to come.