Reed RichardsDoom

When genius scientist Reed Richards loses those closest to him following a failed space flight, he becomes a shell of what he once was. Following the loss, an evil version of himself from another universe, Reed Richards, AKA The Maker, takes advantage. The Maker holds him captive for years, brainwashing him into thinking his name is Doom. 

Reed eventually resists his captor with the help of inventor Howard Stark, is instrumental in sealing him away, and forming a new team of Super Heroes with Stark’s teenage son Tony Stark, AKA Iron Lad.

A Doomed Space Flight

Earth-6160’s Reed Richards is known as the smartest man in the universe. As a young man, while preparing an unapproved space flight to investigate a cosmic storm with his friends Susan Storm, Johnny Storm, and Ben Grimm, something goes wrong. Little does Reed know that his alternate universe counterpart, the Maker, tampered with his calculations so that the Fantastic Four would never exist in this universe. Such interference leads to limited exposure to the rays and the death of Johnny during the flight. Upon their return, Reed, Ben and Susan are publicly disgraced. Reed is arrested, Ben commits suicide, and Susan’s exposure to the cosmic radiation tears her cells apart, leaving her fading away. Reed is subsequently abducted and taken to the Maker’s headquarters in Latveria, a domed building known as the Dome or the City. The Dome is protected by a temporal shield and therefore, time moves differently inside of it. Plus, without constants, Reed is unable to calculate how much time has passed, but anticipates that he is a prisoner for decades. Though Reed uses the time to uncover the Maker’s secrets and ages in the process. 

While Reed is held captive, The Maker tortures Reed and as such, Reed’s face distorts to something unrecognizable, either because of the sheer pain of it or from Reed’s stretching ability that he seems to gain from previous exposure to cosmic radiation. In the Maker’s cruelty, he welds an iron mask to Reed’s face. He also repeatedly tortures Reed into believing his name is Doom, convincing him that his mistakes kill his friends and everything he touches is all doomed. Doom then helps the Maker, whose intelligence is limited due to missing memories, with fixing his broken time machine, the Immortus Engine. The Maker eventually brings inventor Howard Stark into the Dome to help Doom fix it.

During their work together, Reed shares the Maker’s secrets of his origin with Howard. They both understand how dangerous the Maker is so Howard copies the Immortus Engine, creating a second version, a better version. Reed and Howard plan to trap the Maker inside his HQ and their plan succeeds as heroes from the future arrive to destroy the Maker, heroes that include Kang. Howard disables the temporal shield, letting the heroes in, while Doom escapes the Dome but not before setting a trap to close it behind him. While Howard uses his Immortus Engine to disable the Maker, he and the heroes are left behind, trapped with the Maker for a period of two years. Doom immediately tracks down Tony, Howard’s teenage son, giving him the broken Immortus Engine, which Tony had helped Doom repair, secret files from the Dome, and a letter from Howard. When Tony asks after his father, Doom is unsure whether he survives the future colliding with the now. He also informs Tony that temporal kings were being overthrown and multiversal evils being undone inside the HQ. Tony decides to use the Immortus Engine but realizes needs a suit. Doom helps him modify one of Howard’s old suits and the young Stark takes the code name Iron Lad. Together, they embark on a mission to restore heroes to the world to defeat the Maker upon his return when the HQ opens in two years time.

Super-Genius Intelligence

Known as the smartest man in his universe, Reed is a scientific genius with expertise in robotics and time travel technology. He helps fix the Immortus Engine, a time machine, and runs calculations, accounting for all variables before using said technology. His knowledge of robotics allows him to design cybernetic drones that he can remotely access and operate.

Exposure to cosmic radiation during a failed space flight appears to grant Reed the ability to stretch his body, which seems to manifest under the pain of torture. While being tortured, Reed’s face shape shifts into a disfigured form. A hot iron mask that encases his head is then pressed to his face, hiding his distorted visage from himself and the world.

Doom’s suit includes some armor, a hooded cape, and jetpack boots that grant him some flight capability. He also wields two handheld energy blaster weapons.

One’s Own Worst Enemy

Reed’s alternate universe dark doppelgänger, The Maker, is his foremost foe as the madman keeps him locked away, torturing him for decades. As such, Reed suffers through periods of extreme despair, of which he dubs his “Negative Zone.” He spends a lot of time rehashing the deadly outcome of the space flight gone wrong, and becomes ultra-focused on restoring his fallen friends.

The Maker’s Council, a group of Super Villains that rule the world from the shadows and created by the Maker, also poses several problems for the problem-solving genius.

Ultimate Allies

While a captive of the Maker, Doom allies with inventor Howard Stark to repair a broken time machine, the Immortus Engine. He later allies with Howard’s teenage son, Tony, in a plan to restore heroes to their world, co-creating the Ultimates network.

The Ultimates include both Doom and Tony, and also Asgardians Thor and Sif, Super-Soldier Steve Rogers, AKA Captain America, and pest control agents Hank Pym, AKA Giant-Man and Janet Van Dyne, AKA Wasp. Eventually, the roster grows to include other heroes, such as the antique android Jim Hammond, AKA the Human Torch, amnesiac refugee and cosmic powerhouse America Chavez, Lejori Joena Zakaria, AKA She-Hulk, protector of Gamma Island, and the young, scrappy Lakota tribe member Charli Ramsey, AKA Hawkeye. As the team’s roster grows, Doom prefers to spend his time in the Ultimates’ lab where he focuses on other projects, like Project 4 to restore his friends Ben, Susan and Johnny, whom he lost.

Doom is the first to admit he’s not good with people. Out of the group, Doom is closest to Tony though they sometimes butt heads, like whether to use their most valuable asset that allows them to travel through time, the Immortus Engine. Doom also makes it clear that he will come and go as he pleases, on account of having been a prisoner of the Maker, and that includes any expectations that Tony may have of him.

A Broken History

Doom and Tony’s first order of business in their mission to defeat the Maker was to change their world back to what it was supposed to be before the madman systematically erased the world’s heroes from existence. They searched for heroes and started by tracking down Captain America, whom the Maker could not find while he was remaking the world of Earth-6160. Using the files stolen from the Maker’s stronghold and the Immortus Engine, Doom and Tony traveled to the past and retrieved the frozen Captain America from the icy depths. 

They then traveled to Asgard where they liberated the imprisoned and disgraced God of Thunder, Thor, and his warden Sif joined their cause. The only problem they ran into was  the Council’s member Henri Duggary, AKA Captain Britain, when he confronted the budding team, badly injuring Thor but losing an eye to Iron Lad. They retreated to Stark Tower, but it was too late, their jig was up. A targeting alert from near-Earth orbit started to go off, and calculating the options, Doom suggested their only one, to use the time travel device, the Immortus Engine, and Tony agreed. Just before the Council launched an attack on New York City using Stark satellites, destroying Stark Tower and framing Tony and his allies as terrorists, Tony activated the Immortus Engine and the Ultimates traveled into the future six months. 

Once there, Doom and the Ultimates learned that the attack killed thousands of people. They took shelter on an off-the-books Stane/Stark corporate spy satellite, which acted as a space station and the team’s headquarters. Doom suggested they use the Immortus Engine to build their network of heroes six months in the past so that they could have their army immediately. Tony expressed worry over adding more complications that come with time travel, but Doom reassured him that he would carry out the calculations necessary to travel through time. 

In between finding heroes, Tony cracked the Captain America problem, releasing the man who had been trapped for 75 years. For six days, Doom focused on the math of time travel while Tony built super-identities, calculating probabilities of heroism in a person next to many other unique variables. On the seventh day, they sent “origin-boxes” filled with the necessary catalysts and hero-making material to their respective heroes who had their lives stolen from them by the Maker, and sent them six months into the past. Hoping to see Super Heroes teeming the skies, they were sorely disappointed to discover only one or two took, such as the middle-aged Peter Parker, AKA Spider-Man, and the super-strong prisoner with impenetrable skin Carl Lucas “Luke” Cage. Other prospective heroes rejected the “origin-box”, were intercepted, or died as a result of accidental suicide by super-power. Captain America suggested the stick to recruiting heroes directly without time travel and Tony agreed. Doom, however, thought they overreacted and an experiment shouldn’t be abandoned. But he was overruled.

The team then recruited one of Captain America’s old friends, the android known as the Human Torch, adding him to the Ultimates roster. They next recruited Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne, but in the process they were ambushed by Captain Britain and his personal guard, the Black Crusade. Doom and the others defended the powerless Hank and Janet, but they both soon accepted their hero destinies, and adding their newfound powers to the fray, they altogether defeated their attackers.

As the Ultimates continued searching for more heroes and adding them to the roster, Doom secluded himself away in one of the station’s labs. Tony interrupted him, imparting the result of the team’s latest mission and how they could have used his help. Doom apologized and shared that he experiences periods of depression but promised to communicate better in the future. Doom also let Tony know that his work on Project 4 continued, which was testing and retesting lab mice by exposing them to cosmic radiation, which the mice gained powers from, but the mice kept dying. Tony was surprised that Doom hadn’t moved on from it. But Doom’s obsession with righting the wrong that led to the deaths of his friends was sometimes all-consuming. Tony offered to help but Doom refused, seeing his inexperience with cosmic radiation as a problem. When Tony called him stubborn and implied that he let his ego get in the way, Doom retorted with a burn that included Tony’s recent abandonment of the Immortus Engine, calling it an irrational decision. Doom resolved to try things Tony’s way for now while he would continue his tests, stating that the Fantastic Four would return. Tony chose to leave Doom alone for the time being.

When the Ultimates were under attack from one of the Council’s members, Bruce Banner, AKA the Hulk, the signal to their location was cut off. He finally found them through Iron Lad’s visual feed and saw something that forced him to use the Immortus Engine to retrieve them through time, but he was too late and Iron Lad was seemingly dead. Doom placed him in a containment tube, keeping Tony in a comatose state. Meanwhile, She-Hulk demanded from Doom to return her to her people on Gamma Island, but Doom warned her that it was too risky—that Banner would extract their location from her and they would all be dead. Though he offered to tap into the Hulk’s surveillance system so she could view her people remotely, and all they could do was keep moving forward.

Meanwhile, Doom and the Ultimates used the Immortus Engine to locate a destination in time where a temporal event occurred or would soon. The sudden arrival of a time-traveling ship containing the Guardians of the Galaxy from the 61st Century, who revealed that America was once a Guardian herself. Doom, based out of the Ultimates headquarters, was contacted by one of these Guardians who disabled the space station entirely, including their “primitive time machine.” The intruder also recognized Doom, and left him an ominous warning that one of them would be responsible for untold suffering and the deaths of trillions and the other could save everything.

Doom was soon summoned to Tony, who had emerged from his comatose state and was undergoing surgery to save his life by placing the Immortus Engine in his chest. Tony demanded answers regarding the footage of their sounding defeat against the Hulk, footage that showed all the Ultimates dead.