Dr Doom: The Transmedia Supervillain

Doctor Doom first appeared in Fantastic Four #5 (1962) and quickly became a favourite not just with fans but also with his creators, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. He gained a sympathetic origin story, complex motivations, and an importance in Marvel's transmedia universe that would see him appearing in movies, cartoon series, video games, trading cards, toy ranges and even hip hop tracks, as well as maintaining a constant presence in comics for over fifty years. Despite this popularity, however, Doom has very rarely headlined a series of his own.
This paper will show how Doctor Doom's position as a wandering character within the storyworlds of Marvel allowed him to develop as a prototype of the modern transmedia character, unshackled from a single creative team or linear narrative. It will focus particularly on the work of Henry Jenkins, Paolo Bertetti and Jan-Noel Thon to analyse the transmedia evolution of Doom, leading to a final discussion of both series of Secret Wars (1984 and 2015) as metaphors for the development of transmedia storytelling, and Doom's role in each series as the super-villain who fights to save the storytelling status quo.

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