Cold War Latveria: US views of Eastern Europe in Marvel Comics

Since its creation by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in Fantastic Four Annual #2 (1964), Doctor Doom's homeland of Latveria has gone through many changes. Its initial portrayal as a 'storybook kingdom' evolved throughout the Cold War as a metaphor for American attitudes towards Eastern Europe, becoming variously a warning against the return of Nazism, a satire on Communist regimes, and eventually a complex examination of US foreign policy towards dictators.

This paper draws upon the work of Jason Dittmer around national superheroes and 'popular geopolitics', examining storylines from 1964, 1970, 1978 and 1982 to show how a fictional country created by second generation European immigrants came to act as a mirror of US attitudes towards Eastern Europe and its own place in the global community.