In Drawing Crazy Patterns, I spotlight at least five scenes/moments from within comic book stories that fit under a specific theme (basically, stuff that happens frequently in comics). Note that these lists are inherently not exhaustive. They are a list of five examples (occasionally I'll be nice and toss in a sixth). So no instance is "missing" if it is not listed. It's just one of the five examples that I chose.

Today, I look at times that Doctor Doom's villainous plots have involved him getting married!

The first story on the list should seem familiar to regular CSBG readers, as I literally just featured it in another column just yesterday! Naturally, it was that column that inspired me to feature this topic for its own column, as I realized that this sort of thing happened to Doom with some frequency.

In any event, in Fantastic Four #155 (by Len Wein, Rich Buckler and Joe Sinnott), the issue opens up with Silver Surfer attacking his longtime friends, the Fantastic Four! With readers undoubtedly asking themselves, "What's up with that?", the creative team goes to a series of flashbacks to reveal the reasoning behind the Surfer's seemingly evil actions.

As it turns out, during one of his periodic attempts to break through the barrier that Galactus had placed on the Earth to keep the Silver Surfer from ever flying through space again, the Surfer fell down to Earth and happened to land in Latveria. Once there, he notices a sign on a wall that celebrates the new queen of Latveria, a woman who looks suspiciously like Silver Surfer's old girlfriend, Shalla-Bal, from his home planet of Zenn-La!

He investigates and he is not happy with what he discovers...

Of course, Doctor Doom reveals that he will return Shalla-Bal's memories to her if the Silver Surfer agrees to take down the Fantastic Four for Doctor Doom. This, then, is why the Surfer attacked his friends...

In the end, Shalla-Bal turns out to be a peasant girl who just LOOKS like Shalla-Bal and the marriage is annulled (but there is a further twist that you can read in the aforementioned link to the story from yesterday).

A tricky example of this trope is "The Return of Doctor Doom" storyline from Chris Claremont and Salvador Larroca's run on Fantastic Four. You see, when that volume of Fantastic Four launched, it was after the short period where the superheroes of Earth were stuck on a Counter-Earth (courtesy of Franklin Richards' tremendous powers saving them from certain death from Onslaught, so he recreated all of the heroes who sacrificed themselves against Onslaught on this other Earth). Doom, though, was seemingly left behind when the heroes returned to the real Earth.

Well, as it turned out, Doom essentially conquered that other Earth in the absence of the heroes and he cut a deal with a number of other villainous warlords from that Earth. He then returned to Earth and the Fantastic Four were able to defeat him, but in the process, Reed Richards was somehow trapped in Doom's armor (while the real Doom was sent back to the Counter-Earth naked).

Everyone could only assume that Reed was gone and Doom remained, since Reed was stuck in the armor and thus couldn't prove otherwise (and obviously, any explanation he could give people to claim that he was really Reed Richards was some trick that Doom had pulled in the past himself). Thus, in Fantastic Four #27 (by Claremont, Larroca and Art Thibert) in an attempt to curtail the remaining three warlords, Reed decided that they had to pretend to be Doom to keep them under his control and to do so, he had to pretend to be aligning them with the Fantastic Four by having "Doom" (himself) marry the Invisible Woman!

The trick, of course, is that Doom's armor was taking control of Reed's mind and, in effect, making him evil, so this still counts as a Doom villainous plot even though Doom was technically not involved! In fact, the real Doom was brought back from the Counter-Earth by the Invisible Woman to regain his own armor (helping himself but also helping save Reed in the process).

During the event miniseries, Avengers: Children's Crusade (by Allan Heinberg, Jimmy Cheung and Mark Morales), the Young Avengers went to go look for the Scarlet Witch, the spiritual mother to Wiccan and Speed of the team. They found her in Latveria, but they were shocked to learn that she had amnesia and, well, was marrying Doctor Doom!

As it turns out, this was all a plot by Doom to get her to marry him and agree to give her reality-altering powers to Doom...

He was ultimately defeated by the Young Avengers and the Doom/Scarlet Witch relationship ended (once her memories were returned, it was only a matter of time).

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In Avenging Spider-Man #8 (by Ty Templeton, Dan Slott, Matthew Clark and Sean Parsons), Silver Sable's apparent death during "Ends of the Earth" led to Spider-Man reminiscing about a recent case he worked with Sable, where Doctor Doom was set to marry a member of royalty from Sable's home country due to a prophecy that this woman would marry and give birth to a future Sorcerer Supreme of Earth. To keep her from Doom, Silver Sable and Doctor Strange planned to enlist Spider-Man, who this princess had a huge crush on, to marry her instead...

In the end, she ended up marrying her childhood friend, one of her servants, to prevent her from marrying Doom (once she was married, the prophecy was useless to Doom)...

Finally, another tricky one was Secret Wars. With the Multiverse collapsing around itself, Doctor Doom ended up saving the Multiverse itself by getting the Molecule Man to lend his universe-altering powers to Doom, who saved the remaining parts of the Multiverse by merging them together into one truly bizarre world called Battleworld, where Doom would be considered god. As part of his godhood, Doom altered reality so that the seemingly deceased Reed Richards (who seemed to have died during the collapse of the Multiverse) would be replaced in Richards' family by Doom himself, so Susan Richards would become Doom's wife and Reed and Sue's children would treat Doom as their father...

In the end, when Reed showed up alive, Doom had to admit that he couldn't properly save the Multiverse and that Reed was the only person who could properly use Molecule Man's powers to fix the shattered Multiverse.

So, this is a bit of a stretch, but, hey, I think it's close enough to count!

If anyone has an idea for a future Drawing Crazy Patterns, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!