What happened to Victor Van Damme?

When the experiment went awry in The Fantastic, junior scientists Reed Richards, Sue Storm and Johnny Storm, plus Reed's pal Benjamin Grimm, were transported to various locations around the world, where they developed strange, new powers. But the remaining boy genius, Victor, wasn't found -- 'til now.

Unlike the original FF series, where Doctor Doom's armor is just that, the Ultimate series takes its cue from the recent film and ties Doom's powers to the very same accident that created the heroic quartet. In other words, he doesn't wear armor, he grows it. His skin becomes metal that looks like armor and can do nifty tricks like hurl barbed bits of steel in any direction.

The new story also removes Doom from his former roots as the Latverian monarch but, in an unfortunate (read: corny) twist, decides to link his ancestry instead to the far-famed Vlad Tepes Dracula, evil prince of Wallechia and, of course, the inspiration for Bram Stoker's most notorious evil undead. However, lacking a kingdom, he seeks servants among disaffected scatterlings from the streets of Copenhagen. And he sits in a tent, wrapped in a tattered green cloak, building poisonous insect robots to send after Reed and his friends.

I'm enjoying this series, believe me, and I think writers have taken the four main characters in interesting new directions that I'm eager to see developed. In this particular arc, however, I feel writer Warren Ellis -- who takes over from series creator Brian Michael Bendis -- stumbled a bit with Doom, making one of mainstream Marvel's most powerful villains somehow ... less in the Ultimate line.

Still, I plan to press on and see where this all goes. Hopefully, no one else will show up who's related to a famous movie monster.

by Tom Knapp
Rambles.NET
22 April 2006