Right, the first thing to say is that Doom is a very good all-round villain in the Fantastic Four comics. He looks pretty good, hes got a faintly campy, English sort of evil sensibility, and hes got a winning habit of talking about himself in the third person. All great supervillains have to do this at some point or another; its the evil equivalent of an Equity card. In comic form, he's great: super-intelligent, super-cruel and super-diplomatically immune thanks to his status as king of Latveria, he's forever evading capture by having his orders carried out by endless Doombots - robotic clones of himself who take the heat for his crimes. He's basically an incredibly arrogant, scientifically gifted troll. However, when he got transferred to the screen in the 2005 film adaptation, he becomes a personal rival to Mister Fantastic rather than an intergalactic misanthrope and wind-up merchant. He becomes selfish rather than arrogant, and bombastically, outwardly furious instead of malevolent and internally disgusted with his appearance under his armour, as is suggested in the comics. Then, he ended up dying in the lamest way possible. The supernova bit is fairly cool, but the fact that he ends up getting done in by thermal shock after Mr Fantastic lays down what is presumably meant to be some ice-cold trash talk: Time for your lesson, Vic. Chem 101: what happens when you supercool hot metal?" And so Victor von Doom becomes the subject of an experiment by the kind of tragically funky teacher who thinks hes his pupils mate rather than a horrendously uncool 45-year-old who drinks home-brew and still talks about the time he bumped into Phil Collins at an Alfa Romeo track day. Doom gets schooled by a suited-up version of Fred Dineage from How 2. Thats pretty embarrassing.
