Doctor Doom: The Fragmented Supervillain

This paper will demonstrate how a unified catalogue of transmedia character components can be used to chart the fragmentation of a fictional character over time and media, taking Doctor Doom as an example.

The unified catalogue of transmedia character components was developed as part of a PhD thesis on early transmedia characters, and draws upon the works of Pearson and Uricchio, Klastrup and Tosca, Marie-Laurie Ryan, Paolo Bertetti, Jan-Noel Thon and Matthew Freeman, as well as other conceptualisations from the fields of psychology and film studies. From these sources it identifies thirteen separate components, or dimensions, of fictional characters, which can be placed into four groupings related to the character themselves, their world, their behaviour within that world, and the authors responsible for the creation of their stories.

Examining characters using these dimensions provides a practical method for analysing fictional characters and providing empirical evidence of how they change over different texts, time periods, media or nationalities. This will be demonstrated by analysing a selection of appearances by Doctor Doom in different media - including comics, cartoons, games and movies - from his first appearance in Fantastic Four #5 in 1963 up to the present day.