User:ModlordD/Sandbox2

Sources that will be helpful for this project:

List of sources to be used for the Doctor Doom Wikipedia article.

Dr. Doom’s Philosophy of Time:

“People who contemplate the nature of time on conceptual grounds are philosophers. Although not usually counted as philosophers, the writers, artists and editors of Marvel Comics are nevertheless philosophers in the operative sense. In the pages of their comics, Marvel creators explore, investigate and hypothesize the realities and properties of time – including eternalism, presentism, the growing block view of time, branching time, and timelines as alternative universes (created or found). Unlike traditional philosophers, however, Marvel creators are not always explicit about the implications of their illustrated thought experiments. Instead, we are in their place. We trace conceptual contemplations about the nature of time in Marvel’s first two decades by focusing on stories involving Dr. Doom’s time machine, the plot device that established the trope of time travel in Marvel continuity. Doing so illuminates just how sophisticated Marvel’s stories are, philosophically. We begin in the early 1960s when Marvel introduced Doom’s machine, consider a series of subsequent stories involving the device, and conclude with the philosophical time-travel challenges facing the rebooted All-New, All-Different Marvel of 2015 and beyond. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 18 March 2016; Accepted 3 December 2016 KEYWORDS Marvel Comics; philosophy; time; Dr. Doom People who contemplate the nature of time on conceptual grounds are philosophers. The medievals called Aristotle ‘The Philosopher,’ because (inter alia) he argued on such grounds that, while the past and present are fixed, the future is open. Isaac Newton contemplated the nature of time when he argued that it is an absolute feature of reality, a conceptual presupposition of his physical theory. Newton counted himself as a philosopher, even if today he is remembered as a scientist. And Albert Einstein contemplated the nature of time when he gave conceptual arguments that time is relative to the observer – arguments meant to undergird his general theory of relativity. Einstein has for that reason been called a ‘philosopher-scientist.’ 1 Then there are those who contemplate the nature of time on conceptual grounds whom no one regards as a philosopher at all. Although not usually grouped with Aristotle, Newton or Einstein, the writers, artists and editors of Marvel Comics are nevertheless philosophers in the operative sense. In the pages of their comics, Marvel creators explore, investigate and hypothesise the realities and properties of time – including eternalism, presentism, the growing block view of time, branching time, CONTACT Chris Gavaler gavalerc@wlu.edu JOURNAL OF GRAPHIC NOVELS AND COMICS, 2017 VOL. 8, NO. 4, 321–340 https://doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2016.1270220 © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group and timelines as alternative universes (created or found). Unlike Aristotle, Newton and Einstein, however, Marvel creators are not always explicit about the implications of their illustrated thought experiments. Instead, we are in their place. We trace their conceptual contemplations about the nature of time by focusing on stories involving Dr. Doom’s time machine, the plot device that established the trope of time travel in Marvel continuity. Doing so illuminates just how sophisticated Marvel’s stories are, philosophically. We begin in the early 1960s when Marvel introduced Doom’s machine, consider a series of subsequent stories involving the device, and conclude with the philosophical time-travel challenges facing the rebooted All-New, All-Different Marvel of 2015 and beyond. Eternal time Stan Lee and Jack Kirby introduced time travel to Marvel in 1962. ‘I have successfully developed the most incredible invention of the age,’ declares Dr. Doom in Fantastic Four #5 (Lee and Kirby 2008, 8), ‘an actual time travel device!’ (8).2 Doom holds Sue Storm hostage to force the other members of the Fantastic Four to use his machine: ‘I want you to go centuries into the past and obtain the legendary treasure of Blackbeard for me!’ They obey, and once transported to Blackbeard’s time and location (presumably early 1700s, West Indies) the three disguise themselves in period dress, including hat, eyepatch, and fake beard for Ben Grimm, the Thing. After the Thing proves himself in battle, the pirates declare him their captain. Pirates: ‘Hooray for the mighty bearded one! Hooray for Blackbeard!’ Johnny Storm: ‘Blackbeard? But they’re talking about the Thing?’ Reed Richards: ‘Good Lord! I see it now! The Thing is Blackbeard! He came back to the past to find … himself!’ (16) Ben: ‘I’m the guy who started the legend of Blackbeard! The kids will read about me in school some day!’ (17) What should we make, philosophically, of this adventure? There are two broad philosophical views on the nature of time, both established well before Marvel published Lee and Kirby’s time-travel story.3 The first is called ‘presentism’. Only the present exists. While the past did exist, and the future will exist, neither exists now. Travelling to the past or future doesn’t involve going to a ready-made spot. There is no spot, at least not until the time traveller gets there – effectively making that spot her present.4 This has implications for the mutability of time. If neither the past nor future itself exists, then facts about the past and present do not exist either. They too would be susceptible to the time traveller’s arrival. Presentism is therefore usually understood as permitting past and future facts to be changed via time travel. Since neither those times, nor facts, are already made, the time traveller can affect them when – as moments of her present time – they come into being. Presentism is not the view that Lee and Kirby have in mind when describing the Fantastic Four’s journey to the past. Instead they are presupposing the second broad philosophical view. That view, sharing certain similarities with Einstein’s, is called ‘eternalism’. All moments in time exist, past and future as much as present. In fact, for the eternalist, past, present and future do not have distinct natures. They are all 322 C. GAVALER AND N. GOLDBERG metaphysically on par – simply earlier than, simultaneously with, or later than the speaker’s own (arbitrary) time. Different points in time are in fact analogous to different points in space. We can travel to Beijing if we are currently in Boston, because Beijing exists in space as much as Boston does. Likewise we can travel to the eighteenth century if we are currently in the twentieth, because the eighteenth exists in time as much as the twentieth does. Travelling to the past or future does involve going to a ready-made spot – a spot that exists regardless of who goes there. While presentism is usually understood as permitting past and future time to be changed by a time traveller – at least when the time traveller travels there, effectively making them her present – the philosopher David Lewis, in a seminal 1976 article on time travel,5 relies on eternalism to conclude that past, present and future are fixed. Because all times exist, so do all facts about those times. None can be changed. In Ben Grimm’s present of 1962, Blackbeard’s history is already set. But it is always (i.e. ‘eternally’) already set, just as much as Ben Grimm’s history is also. Ben always is Blackbeard. He always travels from his day to Blackbeard’s heyday. Ben no more becomes Blackbeard at the moment that he travels from 1962 to the 1700s than Beijing becomes Beijing at the moment that a Bostonian sets foot there. Had Ben not travelled back in time, no Blackbeard legend would exist. But, since Ben does (eternally) travel back in time, the Blackbeard legend does (eternally) exist. According to Lee and Kirby, Blackbeard is not the English pirate Edward Teach but the time-travelling Ben Grimm. The eternally fixed nature of the past, however, also applies to historical events outside Marvel invention. Writer Bill Mantlo used Doom’s machine in a 1976 sequence of Marvel Team-Up adventures. When Spider-Man travels to 1692, he defeats the supervillain Dark Rider but fails to save the lives of the Salem citizens accused of witchcraft. A caption explains that ‘Salem hung its witches … on 19 August, 1692’ (#44, Mantlo 1976a, 31). Spider-Man consoles himself afterwards: ‘There wasn’t anything you could’ve done to keep those people from being hanged – history’s written them off long ago!’ (#45, Mantlo 1976b, 1). A year after creating the Blackbeard adventure, Lee and Kirby themselves depicted the Fantastic Four’s using Doom’s device to travel to ancient Egypt where they encounter a time traveller from their future. The pharaoh Rama-Tut secretly originates from the year ‘3000 … one thousand years further in the future than your own century!’ (#19, Lee and Kirby 2008, 10).6 The Fantastic Four unknowingly inspired him: ‘It was while watching ancient films, presented by our historical society, that I learned of the Fantastic Four! How I envied your dramatic careers!’ (10). Consequently, he reconstructed Dr. Doom’s time machine inside a Sphinx, established his headquarters in ancient Egypt, and become ‘a time looter’ (10). None of this speaks for or against presentism or eternalism. In time-travel stories, people move between points on a timeline whether or not those points are always there. For eternalism, they are always there, while, for presentism, they come to be there when the time traveller arrives. What happens next, however, signals that Lee and Kirby are again siding with eternalism. For, once defeated, Rama-Tut escapes, leaving behind his empty Sphynx, which will ‘mystify mankind for centuries to come! And, when I leave, the memory of my reign shall fade into oblivion … as though I had never existed!’ (20). His prophecy fulfils the observation Reed makes at the Museum of Natural History before the adventure: ‘There are a few years of ancient Egyptian history completely unaccounted for by historians, as though those years just didn’t exist!’ (4). JOURNAL OF GRAPHIC NOVELS AND COMICS 323 Rama-Tut always is inspired in 3000 by the Fantastic Four in the 1960s to travel to ancient Egypt. The Fantastic Four always defeat Rama-Tut, and Rama-Tut’s empty Sphynx always mystifies humanity for centuries to come. There do remain those ‘few years’ of history unaccounted for – the ones in which all the time travelling occurs – but they would be the years in which all the time travelling always occurs.7 Changing times In 1968, six years after Stan Lee and Jack Kirby introduced Doom’s time-travel device, writer Roy Thomas sent the Avengers to Doom’s castle to use his machine. The characters travel to the Second World War to learn whether Captain America’s former sidekick, Bucky, died in a plane explosion as Captain America has believed: ‘How can I be sure? I saw only a single, searing blast! If I survived it … couldn’t he have too?’ (Avengers #56, Thomas 1968, 5).8 Thomas might seem to be working with the same eternalist view of time as Lee and Kirby, and later Mantlo. Captain America insists that ‘we’re only here to observe!’ because ‘I know we can’t change fate’ (8). All points in time and facts about them are set. But then Captain America says something that suggests that Thomas regards the philosophy of time behind Doom’s device as presentist. Why can the Avengers not change fate? Captain America continues: ‘… it’d be dangerous to try’ (12). The prohibition against changing the past isn’t metaphysical – it’s not because the nature of time is eternal – but prudential. Doing so might lead to bad results. Indeed, the Avengers do witness Bucky leaping atop the booby-trapped plane just before it explodes: ‘It had to end this way … there was no other way! We couldn’t be allowed to affect history … to play the role of gods!’ (18). But those exclamations have prudential rather than metaphysical force. It isn’t that the Avengers couldn’t play the role of gods, but that they couldn’t be allowed to play it. That would be unwise. Admittedly the characters do more than observe. Although they do not save Bucky from the Nazi supervillain Baron Zemo’s bomb, their intervention does delay Zemo from launching the plane with the unconscious Bucky and Captain America strapped to it. That gives the time-travelling Captain time to free his past self and sidekick. Those two in turn pursue the launching plane, resulting in Bucky’s death as predicted. On closer inspection, however, the Avengers don’t actually change a thing. Like the Fantastic Four, they travel to a previous point in their own timeline. Yet Marvel continuity seems committed to the Fantastic Four always travelling to that point. They always are part of the past and as a result don’t change it. Although the Avengers apparently believe that their timeline is mutable and so express a presentist view, their intervention is ultimately the same as the Fantastic Four’s. It causes the past events to occur just as Captain America remembers them, since he was unconscious when his future self freed him and so has no memory of his own intervention. The Avengers’ being in the past is integral to the way that the past always plays out. Contrary to appearances, Thomas – like Lee, Kirby and Mantlo – relies on eternalism when using Doom’s time machine as a plot device. The characters themselves, however, seem to think in presentist terms. At least, during their adventures they tend to assume that they can change the past. This 324 C. GAVALER AND N. GOLDBERG conflicting attitude expands in Marvel’s 1970s’ stories. In 1974, Steve Gerber employed Doom’s device to send the Thing and Captain America to the future to meet the Guardians of the Galaxy in Two-in-One #4–5 (Gerber 1974). Mantlo next used the device for Spider-Man in Team-Up #41–46 in 1976, which, as already discussed, supports eternalism. Yet, when Gerber reintroduced the Guardians of the Galaxy in The Defenders the following year, he depicted a competing philosophy according to which time is not eternal. Shortly after the future events depicted in the 1974 issues, Major Vance Astro, ‘1,000-year-old survivor of our own century,’ travels with his fellow Guardians, ‘freedom-fighters from the alien-occupied Earth of 3015 A.D.,’ to the twentieth century to recover ‘historical records’ that will aid their fight against the alien invaders (Gerber 2006, Defenders #26, Giant-Size Defenders #5).9 Although Gerber gives no explanation for how the team time travels, their time period was established via Doom’s time machine, so we include it in our analysis. Gerber’s ‘history lesson’ of the future, as told by Major Astro, brings Astro’s pre-adolescent past self to tears, asking whether ‘all that stuff … it could happen here, too – couldn’t it?’ The Major consoles him: ‘It could, Vance…. Yes, but it doesn’t have to. It’s difficult to explain … but no world’s future is predestined. Only the past is absolute.’ Dr. Strange concurs that the Major’s story is ‘just one possible destiny,’ ‘paradoxical though it may seem.’ Here, Gerber seems to be doing something new. The Major’s explanation, with which Dr. Strange agrees, voices a hybrid philosophy of time. While presentism maintains that only the present exists, and eternalism maintains that all times exist, what is sometimes called the ‘growing block view’ maintains that both the past and the present exist while the future does not.10 The growing block view might have been Aristotle’s own understanding of time. As Aristotle thought that it was neither true nor false that there will be a sea battle tomorrow11 – ‘paradoxical though it may seem’ – Dr. Strange presumably thinks the same regarding whether there will be an alien invasion in his future. Because the future is open, the facts are not yet in. They are partly Vance’s to write. Not wanting Vance’s writing of it to be influenced by what he saw of what was, from his perspective, one merely possible future, Dr. Strange erases the young Vance’s memory: ‘The boy will remember nothing of what you told him. My spell saw to that.’ Vance will then be unencumbered when, 13 years later, he rockets into space on ‘a thousand-year journey to the stars’ to create his own destiny. Mid-1970s’ Marvel writers, however, do not consistently portray time as a growing block. Sometimes their philosophy of time appears presentist. While Dr. Strange’s actions do show that only the future does not exist, and so its facts are up for grabs, the same might be true of that past also. Although Mantlo’s 1976 Spider-Man believes that ‘history’s written’ (Marvel Team-Up #45, Mantlo 1976b, 1), according to a Fantastic Four story scripted by Thomas the same year, what has happened in the past can be rewritten. After a cylinder of the super-metal vibranium is accidentally transported by Doom’s machine to 1942 Germany, Reed explains: ‘Time is a delicate quantity, Johnny – and one we know little about as yet. Who knows what disturbances might be caused in the relative time-stream?’ (Fantastic Four Annual #11, Thomas 1976a, 8). The arrival of Nazi soldiers from 1946 London reveals that the displaced vibranium could in fact ‘re-write history, so that the Axis won the war’ (11).12 JOURNAL OF GRAPHIC NOVELS AND COMICS 325 For an eternalist, neither past, present nor future can be ‘re-written’. In fact, for the eternalist, the distinction between those time periods is metaphysically moot: all time exists on equal par, and all facts about them are equally set. By allowing the future and the past to be altered – and presumably by allowing those in the present to be masters of their own fate as well – Thomas appears to have abandoned both the original eternalist position and the growing block view to embrace presentism tout court. Branching time But appearances can be misleading. Thomas’ 1976 time-travel story may not reflect presentism at all. When Doom’s machine shows German buzz-bombs ‘making a direct hit on London’ in 1942, Ben and Reed debate the implications: Ben: ‘We all know the buzz-bombs didn’t start hittin’ England till June of ’44 – and the V-2 rockets even later!’ (16). Reed: ‘That’s what happened in our memory, Ben…. But there may be other timecontinuums of which we’ve previously known nothing – continuums in which Nazi scientists somehow licked the problem of long-range missiles at a farearlier date! Such a thing might have changed the course of the war in one continuum … and might eventually affect all of them!’ (16–17) Ben: ‘If we don’t change what’s happened back on this other time-path … it’s just possible that the American we come back to ain’t gonna be celebratin’ any bicentennial!’ (17) Instead of rewriting the past, the characters in that 1976 Fantastic Four story went to an alternative past. Continuing the same adventure, the Fantastic Four travel to 1942, where they teamup with Captain America, Sub-Mariner, and the other members of the Invaders to defeat Baron Zemo, who had acquired the vibranium to make rockets. Afterwards, Ben wonders, ‘how come Subby an’ the rest don’t remember us from ’42 when we met a few years back?’ (46). "Reed: ‘You forget, Ben – this was a different time continuum – one which came into existence because of that vibranium sample which got sent back into time. It’s a continuum which, thank Heaven, will now be forever separate from our own’ (46). Here Thomas is embracing what might be called a ‘branching theory of time.’ When the vibranium went back in time, it created an offshoot, or branch, of the original timeline (or continuum). That branch is not the Fantastic Four’s home timeline, which we might now understand as simply another branch. As Reed observes, that the vibranium branch is not the Fantastic Four’s is all for the good.13 In fact, things are more complicated than even Reed expresses. There are now three distinct time branches. There is the first branch, the Fantastic Four’s home, which they remember. There is the second branch, which came into existence when the vibranium was sent back in time, in which Baron Zemo hopes to help Germany win the Second World War. And there is a third branch, which comes into existence when the Fantastic Four go back in time and defeat Baron Zemo, preventing the German victory. The Fantastic Four appear to believe that they can ‘change what’s happened’ on the second 326 C. GAVALER AND N. GOLDBERG branch, but according to the story’s internal logic, if the time-travelling vibranium caused time to branch, then the time-travelling Fantastic Four would have done so too. The branching theory of time is a view about the shape of time. While nonbranching time treats time as linear, branching time treats it as having tributaries or branches – and where branches can themselves have branches. Branching time is not a view about the reality of time or its parts. It is not a view about whether past, present or future exists. So Marvel writers can embrace presentism and a branching theory of time simultaneously. It might be that the only existing time for the Fantastic Four is their present time (even when that present from our perspective would be the past), branching or otherwise. Or it might be that all times – and now we have to specify in their branch – (eternally) exist for them, but that time travel causes a new branch to shoot out from their own. From the description of the Fantastic Four’s adventures with Baron Zemo, we can tell only the shape of time. It branches. Its reality – and so the presupposition of presentism, the growing block view, or eternalism – is unclear. In 1979, writer-artist John Byrne clarified the reality of time as it relates to Doom’s device when he depicted Ben’s travelling to his own past to try to cure himself from being the Thing. Reed explains that ‘this latest formula of mine would have cured you as you were years ago’, but not now because ‘your basic appearance has been constantly changing’ and ‘your body is becoming “comfortable” as the Thing’ (Marvel Two-in-One #50, Byrne 1979, 2). Ben decides: ‘If this woulda worked on me in the past, I’ll give it me in the past! Courtesy of Doc Doom’s time machine’ (3). After setting ‘the dial for a couple of months after our joyride in Reed’s rocket’ that exposed him to cosmic rays and turned him to the Thing, Ben succeeds in giving his former self the formula (3). But when he returns to his present he is ‘still the Thing!’ (31). Reed explains: ‘Your past is immutable, Ben. You are what you are! Any change you make in the past results in another reality – a new one caused by your presence’ (31). For Byrne, then, time does branch, though its time in each branch is immutable. Moreover, Byrne is likely motivated to maintain its immutability for narrative as well as financial reasons. Had Ben succeeded in changing his own history, then the Thing would no longer exist as an ongoing character, which might have cost Marvel readership and ultimately revenue. Regardless, although Ben thinks that he is changing the past, he is merely in a different past. Unlike Thomas’ Fantastic Four’s time-travel adventure to the Second World War, Byrne’s is not presentist. But it need not be eternalist either. Both eternalism and the growing block view treat the past as immutable. They differ regarding the future. Byrne says nothing about the future, but later writers do. Although it is not always clear whether they accept Byrne’s view of the unchangeability of the past, sometimes they do. Captain America prevents what Gerber’s Astro termed ‘the Bionic Wars of the 1990’s’, which produced the super-soldier Deathlok, who travelled to Marvel’s central time branch via Doom’s device in Two-in-One #26 in 1977 and was then reprised by writer J.M. DeMatteis in Captain America #286 in 1983. Captain America: ‘This future of yours … from what he told me, it’s a living hell! How did it happen? How did it happen in so short a time?’ … Deathlok: ‘Mister, every blasted super hero on Earth – up and vanished back in ‘83. It was all downhill from there!’ (#287, DeMatties 1983, 18) JOURNAL OF GRAPHIC NOVELS AND COMICS 327 Perhaps again for readership and revenue interests, DeMatteis altered the events previously established in Rich Buckler’s 1974 Deathlok series to continue their current titles. When Captain America prevents all of his fellow heroes from vanishing as they did in Deathlok’s timeline, Captain America’s and Deathlok’s times diverge, so that Deathlok’s world was not the future of Captain America’s world. Captain America’s future did not yet exist. So DeMatteis combines branching time with a growing block view, not eternalism. Past and present but not future are eternal. And there can exist more than one branch of each. Creating time So far we have considered a version of the branching theory of time according to which branches come into existence. Time travel creates offshoots of previously existing branches. And that seems to describe the shape of time that Marvel employed overall. Marvel premiered its series What If? in 1977, using the character of the omniscient Watcher to narrate realities that come into existence at points of divergence. As scripted by Roy Thomas, the Watcher explains that any moment can produce a range of divergences: Consider if you will, a speeding car – a hapless pedestrian frozen in surprise – and a startled on-looker. The instantaneous decision made by the on-looker, made virtually without conscious thought, will affect not only his life, but those of others. He might, for instance, stand helplessly, fearfully by, to see the man struck by the careening vehicle. Or, his adrenalin pumping, he might leap the rescue – only to see both of them struck and maimed, and perhaps killed. Or, leaping one split second sooner, he might carry both of them to safety – saving the driver from consequences of his own carelessness. Nor are these more than three paths out of countless millions upon millions. (Thomas 2004, 13) The Watcher’s street-crossing example is a variation on a thought experiment proposed by William James in his 1884 essay ‘The Dilemma of Determinism’. Discussing his ‘choice of which way to walk home after the lecture’, James writes: [I]magine that I first walk through Divinity Avenue, and then imagine that the powers governing the universe annihilate 10 minutes of time with all that it contained, and set me back at the door of this hall just as I was before the choice was made. Imagine then that, everything else being the same, I now make a different choice and traverse Oxford Street. You, as passive spectators, look on and see the two alternate universes – one of them with me walking through Divinity Avenue in it, the other with the same me walking through Oxford Street. (James 1979, 18)14 It is no coincidence that James’s thought experiment, which matches our analysis of branching time, speaks of ‘alternate universes’. A branch is like a universe set unto itself. Branching time brings with it space and objects also.15 Nevertheless, James’s thought experiment can be understood in two different ways. The first is that James’s choice creates the branch. It causes the branch to be, which matches the branching theory of time to which Marvel writers at this point subscribe. The Fantastic Four create a new branch when they battle Zemo, just as Captain America creates one when he prevents superheroes from vanishing as they do in Deathlok’s branch. The second way to understand James’s thought experiment is that his choice finds the branch. The branch already is. Instead of being created by the 328 C. GAVALER AND N. GOLDBERG arrival of Doom’s time device at a diverging moment, the branch already exists and the device merely discovers it. And that does not match Marvel’s mid-1970s’ branching theory of time at all. So there turns out to be three relevant notions of Doom-related time. There is the reality of time: are past, present or future real? There is the shape of time: is it linear or branching? And now there is the reality of the branches: do denizens of one branch cause another to come to be, or do all branches always exist? We can think of the third notion, concerning the reality of the branches, as the question of presentism, the growing block view, or eternalism applied not to points on the timeline but to time branches or lines themselves. Does only the present branch exist, and when people from that branch move to another does that new branch come into existence? If the new branch comes into existence but their previous branch ceases to exist, then this is like presentism for branches. Only the branch that we are now on exists. This appears to be Reed’s assumption about the branch in which Germany wins the Second World War: it vanishes once the Fantastic Four remove the vibranium. However, this presentist view does not match the pattern for other branches, which do continue to exist – notably the 1942 world from which they retrieve the vibranium. If the new branch comes into existence and the previous branch continues to exist, then this is like either a growing block view or eternalism for branches. It is like a growing block view if only branches that we are or were on exist. It is like eternalism if all branches exist, independent of whether we are, were, or will be on them. When Captain America prevents superheroes from vanishing in 1983, the timetravelling Deathlok and his superhero-less branch does in fact continue to exist. Indeed, as we see next, Marvel’s decided view is that all branches – all universes – exist. The reality of time branches is eternalist. Branches are not created when characters move between them. They are found. Finding time Although Reed’s explanation that Ben created a new universe by attempting to cure his past self contradicts branch eternalism, John Byrne reinterprets time in light of this eternalism. When Byrne revisited his 1979 Thing story in 1983, Reed reconsiders his earlier conclusions: ‘I think my original assessment may have been erroneous. I now believe that you did not create that reality’ (Marvel Two-in-One #100, Byrne 1983, 3). That reality, or time branch or alternate universe, is always there. Reed deduces this by studying the footage recorded by Doom’s device and sees a copy of what should be the New York Daily Bugle but is instead the New Amsterdam Daily Bugle. He concludes: ‘the basic data would seem to support that this was an already existing alternate universe’ (4). Where eternalism likens different points in time to different points in space, Byrne’s revised philosophy allows Ben to travel to New Amsterdam from New York because New Amsterdam exists in space as much as New York. It just exists in space on a different time branch – and ultimately in a different universe. The same revised insight retcons, or retroactively establishes continuity with, other previous adventures. Instead of travelling to their Second World War past, the Fantastic Four travelled to an alternative universe, which was there for them to find. But is JOURNAL OF GRAPHIC NOVELS AND COMICS 329 travelling to alternative universes travelling in time? Byrne gets at that point through Ben: ‘Are you sayin’ our time machine ain’t a time machine at all?’ (4) Reed: ‘… it would appear that any attempt to travel back into one’s own past actives some kind of temporal safety-valve. Thus, the traveler is actually shunted sideways, into a universe almost identical to his own.’ (4) Although the dialogue may look simple, the philosophy of time that it expresses is anything but. Let us apply the threefold discussion from above to it. On the question of the reality of time, Reed might be a growing block theorist or eternalist. The former maintains that only past and present exist and are immutable; the latter, that past, present and future all have those properties. Or Reed might be a presentist instead. If so, then his discussion of the temporal ‘safety-vale’ makes a prudential not a metaphysical point. As Captain America says that travelling to the past must be limited to observation, because changing fate is ‘dangerous,’ so Reed would mean that Doom’s machine prevents time travel to the past for our own protection. On the question of the shape of time, Reed is affirming a branching view. Time has different tributaries. And, since each is accompanied by space and objects, they may be thought of as alternative universes. Byrne has rejected Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s view that time is linear. Finally, on the question of the reality of the branches, Reed’s discussion above already makes clear that branches are there to be found. Reed endorses either eternalism or the growing block view about branches. Using Doom’s machine to travel to the past must cause the machine to shunt the traveller sideways into an already existing universe, one ‘almost identical to his own’ (4). Because, with Byrne’s storyline, Marvel continuity is generally retconned into being eternalist in its pre-branching discussions of a single timeline, it makes sense to suppose that it is also eternalist about branches. That suggests reinterpreting other time travel adventures accordingly. If, as Reed clarifies, Doom’s device when used to travel to the past instead travels to alternative universes, then there is a sense in which Spider-Man could have saved the Salem witches and the Avengers could have saved Bucky. But that sense is attenuated. We still have to understand the witches’ and Bucky’s own pasts as immutable. All that Spider-Man and the Avengers could have done was save some other witches and Bucky, those existing in some other universe. The Thing would have created the Blackbeard legend in another universe as well. Moreover, that suggests that the Blackbeard legend of his own universe is based on a different Thing visiting from a different universe. Similarly, the time-looting Rama-Tut would have travelled from a different universe after being inspired by the historical films of a different Fantastic Four, meeting our Fantastic Four in the past of a yet different universe still.16 Marvel continuity appears to be eternalist about its future branches too. Ben uses Doom’s device to return to the universe he had believed he had created by curing his past self and determines that it is indeed a different universe – one without Silver Surfer, which resulted in its partial destruction by Galactus. To return there, Ben sets Doom’s device ‘fer the same amount of power I used last time’ and ‘fer yesterday’s date’, which, according to the dial, is ‘March 23, 1983’ (6). When Ben originally travelled there, he set the dial to a few months before his transformation, so c. 1961. Since it was 330 C. GAVALER AND N. GOLDBERG 1979 in his own universe, he thought he was travelling backwards 18 years. Instead he moved laterally to a universe with a present of 1961. When he returns, four years have passed in his reality, but 22 in the other. Regardless, nowhere in the story is it mentioned that Ben’s travelling causes either these times within the alternate universe or the alternate universe itself to come to be. The presumption is that Marvel reality is now eternalist about time and time branches both. Time travel? Suppose that Byrne’s philosophy did establish Marvel’s general view. While this makes sense of the philosophy behind Doom’s time machine, there is something strange in describing Doom’s device as allowing time travel. Travelling between time branches differs from travelling within a time branch. This is especially vivid if we understand branches as universes. Universe travel certainly does not seem to be the same thing as time travel. Do Byrne and those who adopt his view believe in time travel, to the past or at all? Byrne has even Ben ponder: ‘Course if Reed’s right about this doo-hickey not bein’ a time machine, that kinda raises a whole lot more questions than it answers…. I wonder if we’ve ever really travelled in time? Heck, maybe I never became Blackbeard, or fought in World War II, or…. Boy, this is real confusin’!’ (6). It is easy to sympathise with Ben – not only about the philosophy being confusing but also, and we take this to be his deeper point, that no one is really talking about time travel. Ben himself never goes into the past, at least not his. He goes to an alternative universe. And, although that alternative universe has a point in time like his past, it is not in fact his. Ben might argue that universe travelling versus time travelling is a distinction without a difference. Ben’s past, some other past – they are close enough. He recognises the people in the alternative universe, and his readers do the same. Both allow for the same adventures. So, as far as the narrative goes, they are the same. Unfortunately, for Byrne and Ben, they simply are not. Within the narrative, Ben himself expresses the concern that all this talk of time ‘travel’ is, strictly speaking, false. Recall the Fantastic Four’s Second World War adventure, when Baron Zemo uses vibranium accidentally transported into the past to help Germany defeat the Allies. In Byrne’s view, the Fantastic Four do not actually travel back in time. They instead travel to an alternative universe. But then, when Germany does initially win the war, it is not the Fantastic Four’s own Germany that wins. It is the Germany in the alternative universe. Back in their universe, Germany remains defeated. Further, when the Fantastic Four defeat Zemo by travelling back in time themselves, they do not defeat their Zemo either. The Zemo who is native to their branch does not exist in the branch to which the vibranium is transported. That transportation either causes a new branch to form or, depending upon interpretation, the vibranium appears in an eternally existing branch; either way, the branch has its own Zemo. Worse still, when the Fantastic Four themselves go after the vibranium, they either cause that branch itself to branch or they too land in an entirely different branch; either way, that branch has yet another Zemo. So the Fantastic Four defeat a Zemo twice removed from their own. When Ben says: ‘Boy, this is real confusin’!’ he is right. In the Fantastic Four’s original branch, Zemo has no vibranium and Germany loses. In the branch in JOURNAL OF GRAPHIC NOVELS AND COMICS 331 which only vibranium is transported into the past, Zemo has the vibranium and Germany wins. Finally, in the branch in which the Fantastic Four are also transported, Zemo has the vibranium but Germany loses.17 Only the first Zemo and Germany, however, are the Fantastic Four’s. The second set exists one universe over. And the third set exists two universes over. Yet it seems that our main concern should be with the Fantastic Four’s original universe. That is the universe in which most of the stories take place. And in that universe the Nazis always lose. The Fantastic Four’s intercession in a universe twice removed seems less relevant. Now readers might want the Nazis to lose in other universes too. Unfortunately, though, the Nazis win in the universe once removed from the Fantastic Four’s – the one in which the vibranium appears but the Fantastic Four do not. Marvel’s own internal logic guarantees that. The Nazis do lose in the universe twice removed – the one in which the Fantastic Four battle the twice-removed Zemo – just as they do in the Fantastic Four’s native universe. But it is unclear what all this means. Do we score the end result the Allies/Fantastic Four 2, Nazi Germany 1, keeping track of the number of universes in which each is victorious? Worse, this is before factoring in the Thing’s next adventure in Marvel Two-in-One #19–20 in which Roy Thomas, still writing in 1976 and so prior to Byrne’s 1983 revision of time travel, appeals to Doom’s device again, allowing Ben to retrieve the other half of the missing vibranium and prevent a different Germany victory, triggering more branching (Thomas 1976b).18 Worse still, if we are eternalists about branches, then there is an infinity of universes in which the Allies/Fantastic Four win and an infinity in which Nazi Germany does. The score would then be tied: infinity–infinity. For reasons like these, David Lewis prefers not to countenance branching time at all. Echoing Ben’s confusion, he would observe that we do not want to know what happens to some other Germany, let alone some other other Germany, or, since Lewis would presumably apply his eternalism to branches, an infinity of Germanies. And yet this is the philosophy of time that Byrne and, by implication, Thomas introduced in the late 1970s and early 1980s: a branching multiverse of similar, independent, yet mutually accessible universes. It is unclear, however, whether other Marvel writers adopted this understanding of time travel. When David Michelinie depicts Doom’s time device, referred to now as his ‘time cube’, in 1981, his narrator and characters refer ambiguously to ‘the past’ (Iron Man #149, Michelinie and Layton 1981a). The omniscient narrator declares: ‘Time is not a glamorous dimension. It is a thick, sticky world peopled by possibilities, by maybes, by could-have-beens. It is an angry, uncertain place’ (Iron Man #150, Michelinie and Layton 1981b, 1). This could align with either the branching theory of reality, with travellers facing the uncertainties of infinite alternative universes (created or found), or presentism, with the same universe’s past and future in constant flux. Thus, when, in their 1981 joint adventure, Doom and Iron Man travelled to ancient Camelot, it is uncertain whether this is the Camelot of a parallel universe or their own timeline. In 1989, Michelinie sends them to Camelot again, but now of 2093. Because the reincarnated King Arthur recalls their past encounter, this presumably involves the same timeline as the one in which their earlier adventure takes place – unless this is a parallel Arthur unknowingly recalling a Doom and Iron Man of a parallel universe as branching theory would suggest. 332 C. GAVALER AND N. GOLDBERG Michelinie’s adventure does seem to reject eternalism. While Iron Man battles his apparent descendant, Doom faces his apparent future cyborg self. 1989 Doom: ‘How can this be? That we could both exist in the same place at the same time’? 2093 Doom: ‘Scientific theory is just that. Theory. Obviously whoever devised this one has never traveled through time.’ (Iron Man #150, Michelinie and Layton 1989, 40) When Doom kills his future self, an outcome his future self anticipates because ‘I did the same a century ago,’ Doom rejects eternalism: ‘The future is fluid. It can be changed. And by all the power in my soul, I swear I’ll not become – that’ (43). That presupposes either presentism or the growing block view of time, which suggests that there is only one timeline involved. It is unclear, however, whether Doom’s vow or understanding of time is accurate, because Merlin – duplicating Doctor Strange’s earlier intervention with Major Astro’s younger self – erases Doom’s and Iron Man’s memories before returning them to 1989. So the reality and shape of time, as well as the reality of any branches, remain unclear. Likewise, after Doom is presumed dead in 1997, writer John Francis Moore sends X-Force to Doom’s castle to destroy the time device. Because of the explosion, they are ‘hit by waves of temporal energy’ and ‘hurled back in time’ with the entire castle to 1941. Because, however, the castle already exists then, X-Force and the 1997 castle ‘do not exist in temporal synchronicity with this era’ (X-Force #64, Moore 1997). Because synchronicity requires that two things be aligned, temporal synchronicity suggests at least two timelines. Moreover, when X-Force’s Dimitri attempts to prevent his grandfather’s death by the group of Nazis he is working with, he gets caught in a paradox: Siryn: ‘Seems to me they didn’t succeed, or we’d not be talkin’ t’ye now.’ Dimitri: ‘I don’t believe in predestination. If we can travel in time, then history can be changed. The only question is will it be changed by us or the Germans?’ Siryn: ‘Maybe the German’s attempt on the Baron’s life didn’t succeed because we were here to intervene.’ This appears to be the case, because X-Force does save him before returning to their own time. Although Dimitri’s view is presentist – we can change the past because its facts and existence are not set – Siryn’s observation suggests that there was not really any change at all. Maybe Dimitri always prevented the German’s attempt on the Baron’s life. That presupposes either eternalism or, because only the reality of the past is in question, the growing block view. There is similar ambiguity concerning the shape of time and the reality of its branches if any. Did Dimtri save his grandfather of his own timeline or one of another timeline, and if the latter, did that timeline come into existence at the moment of their arrival or did it exist prior? The episode gives little basis for judgement. Later stories offer little more. In 2008, writer Brian Michael Bendis depicts Doom travelling repeatedly to ancient Camelot to continue his alliance and affair with Morgan Le Faye, whom he first encountered in the 1981 Iron Man #150. JOURNAL OF GRAPHIC NOVELS AND COMICS 333 Le Faye: ‘When next we meet … I want you to bring me something. From the future time.’ […] Doom: ‘If I brought you something you could keep … its very existence could cause a chain reaction in the timestream. By no fault of your own it could disrupt the natural order of things as they are now and how they are meant to be.’ Le Faye: ‘But you coming back in time to be with me does not?’ Doom: ‘We’re alone. It’s contained.’ Le Faye: ‘So it’s okay when it suits your purpose.’ […] Doom: ‘I could reappear yesterday and turn this conversation another way.’ (Mighty Avengers #9, Bendis 2008a) Because Doom maintains that the past is mutable, their dialogue implies presentism. It also suggests that Doom has used his device to travel to her time period on multiple occasions – unless, as Reed Richards understood in Two-in-One #50, the device actually created a new universe with each use. Alternatively, according to Reed Richards in Twoin-One #100, Doom may have travelled to a pre-existing universe instead, which, like Ben Grimm’s two visits to the universe in which he cured another Ben Grimm of being the Thing, he has returned to, and so to the same Morgan Le Fay, on each occasion. Regardless, Doom appears to believe that he is travelling within his own timeline, which he can alter. Iron Man later expresses the same belief when he, Doom and Sentry are transported to New York of only a few years earlier: you know anything you do in this time period will severely damage the space-time continuum […] So let’s not do or say anything to anyone that could alter the course of human history. […] we have to get out of here before we’re discovered … or before we accidentally do any damage or interact with anything or anybody that could ‘butterfly effect’ what happens to the future as we know it. (Mighty Avengers #10, Bendis 2008b) If the timeline may be altered – and in fact is altered, even if largely unnoticed – then the reality of time is presentist. Although it is less clear whether or not time branches, Iron Man’s speaking of ‘the course of human history’ and ‘the future as we know it’ suggests that there is only one timeline. His worry seems to be not that the future will branch but that the future will change. And yet, until 2015, Marvel continuity included a vast branching multiverse of parallel universes. Marvel.wikia.com lists over 1400, with number designations peaking with Earth-931113. Although numbering was instituted in the 1980s, prior universes were retroactively designated. The world in which the Thing cured a younger version of himself – introduced in 1979 and revisited in 1983 – is Earth-7940. Lee and Kirby’s original future world – the AD 3000 birth place of Rama-Tut – became Earth-6311. So collectively Marvel creators did accept branching time. They therefore seem to employ two philosophies simultaneously. Characters could travel within their own timeline and also to alternative universes. Only in the former, however, would there be genuine time travel. The stories of Michelinie, Moore and Bendis depict time travel within characters’ own malleable timeline, returning to a kind of presentism that Thomas introduced in 1968, while other stories depict a multiverse of alternative universes – although no longer ones branching from points of divergence as Thomas introduced in his 1970s’ stories. When Byrne revised Doom’s time-travelling device into an alternative universetravelling device, he effectively ended Thomas’ branching reality. Because the device no 334 C. GAVALER AND N. GOLDBERG longer created branches but instead travelled to pre-existing worlds, points of divergence no longer mattered. Alternative universes were not created but existed independently, whether encountered by outside travellers or not. The Ultimate universe of Earth-1610, introduced by Bendis in 2000 and which expanded to four series, was never a branch of Marvel’s primary universe, Earth-616. Because time in Earth-616 is presentist, presumably time across the multiverse is presentist too. All-new all-different time What philosophy of time powers Dr. Doom’s time machine? While Lee and Kirby and later Mantlo are eternalists, Thomas introduces presentism in 1968, but actually maintains eternalism, until adopting the growing block theory with Gerber and later DeMatteis. Thomas also introduces branching time, which Byrne of 1981 combines with either the growing black theory or eternalism. While Thomas believes that time branches at points of divergence, including those points created by time travellers, Byrne of 1983 believes that all branches exist eternally. Finally, Michelinie, Moore and Bendis reject both branching time and eternalism in favour of a multiverse of presentism. While writers continued to use Doom’s device, some of Marvel’s most canonical time-travel stories do not employ it all. Uncanny X-Men writer Chris Claremont’s ‘Days of Future Past’ depicts a future version of Kitty Pryde’s travelling to 1980 via mind transfer into her past body. The ramifications of the events are complex, possibly indicating a presentist or growing block philosophy in which the future can be changed – unless, as later writers who revisited that particular dystopic future established through retconning, it can’t. The scope of this essay prevents an exhaustive analysis of this and other Marvel timetravel tales. However, we wish to conclude in Marvel’s present, which is again changing. For the 2015 mini-series Secret Wars, Marvel destroyed its multiverse of alternative universes and with it all its time branches. Even Earth-1610 and Earth-616, its original continuity introduced in 1961 with Fantastic Four #1 (or arguably Timely’s Marvel Comics #1 in 1939), were replaced with a new universe.19 Rather than starting over, however, Marvel’s 2015 continuity largely recreates the former Earth-616 with elements incorporated from former parallel Earths, while eliminating the multiverse entirely. Given the complexities and ambiguities in the nature of time in its half century of previous stories, Marvel writers could take years and even decades of new storytelling to establish how exactly time now works. But how time should work is a philosophical question that we can ask ourselves. Whether or not stories involve Doom’s device, Marvel writers might follow Lewis and reject branching time by taking the shape of time to be linear. And this does appear to be the philosophy of time that Marvel has adopted overall as it reintroduces its characters in the rebooted, single-universe continuity of All-New, All-Different Marvel. Writers might also revisit the reality of time: presentist, growing block view, or eternalist. Consider these in reverse order. Like the original 1960s’ Marvel, All-New, All-Different Marvel writers could again opt for eternalism, making all points in time exist and all facts about time set, so that neither past, present nor future can be changed. Lewis has independent grounds for opting for eternalism, as do Marvel’s writers who JOURNAL OF GRAPHIC NOVELS AND COMICS 335 wish to prevent the growth of a branching multiverse of the kind Marvel just rebooted out of narrative existence. Because nothing about any time could be changed, most of its former time-travel stories could be repeated as long as Marvel continuity maintained eternalism. Ben might still go into the past and find himself, but only if Ben always goes into the past and finds himself. This allows Ben to travel to Blackbeard’s time to discover that he is Blackbeard, but not to the past of his own memory if his own memory does not already include an interaction with his future self trying to administer a Thing-curing formula. While philosophically solid, eternalism is not how the Marvel universe unfolded after Lee and Kirby’s initial stories. There are also two reasons that it should not be the reality of time that Marvel writers adopt moving forward. First, a universe in which everything that a time traveller does is already fixed is not particularly interesting. Second, eternalism presents barriers to new writers who would have to conform to all events established by their predecessors. Should Marvel writers adopt the growing block view instead? As a hybrid of eternalism and presentism, this theory inherits problems from each of these others. Momentarily we consider problems with presentism, but we can already appreciate that the growing block view prevents changes in the past just as presentism does. SpiderMan’s, the Avengers’, and the Fantastic Four’s time-travel adventures would remain futile, because not only can they not change the past. Their attempts to do so are the past. Besides being uninteresting, this presents barriers to writers too. Admittedly, for the growing block theorist, unlike for the eternalist, time travellers can change the future. But changing the future is not where the narrative action is. The future is (currently) unknown to us, so writers need not change it to explore new and interesting ideas. They can simply describe how they think the future will turn out. That is why so many time-travel stories involve the past and time travellers changing it (or being warned against doing so). The growing block view also complicates stories about time-travellers from the future, such as Rama-Tut, Major Vance Astro, and Deathlok. Although we question this momentarily, we have been arguing that future travellers would exist once ‘the future’ becomes ‘the present’. With the flow of time, AD 3000 eventually will become the present. But then travellers would be unable to change anything in their past once they did travel to it. Time travel from the future would ultimately be as uninteresting and creatively inhibiting as time travel to the past. Maybe Marvel writers should adopt presentism. Unfortunately two worries with presentism stand out. The first is unique to presentism, while the second is shared with the growing block view. First, presentism is vulnerable to certain well-known paradoxes. Nothing would prevent Ben from setting the dial of Dr. Doom’s machine a couple of months before his transformation and stopping himself from ever becoming the Thing. But, if he did that, then Ben from the present would never have used Doom’s machine at all. And this would mean that he would never have prevented himself from becoming the Thing in the first place. So Ben would seem to become the Thing if he does not, and not to become the Thing if he does. Second, we have been assuming all along that all views on the reality of time are consistent with the possibility of time travel. We have said that in time-travel stories people can move between points in time whether or not those points are always there. For eternalism, they are always there. For presentism, they come to be there when the 336 C. GAVALER AND N. GOLDBERG time traveller arrives. And for the growing block view, past points are always there, while future points come to be there when the time traveller arrives. Yet there is reason to think that only eternalism is actually consistent with the possibility of time travel. It is impossible to travel to or from a time that does not exist. As we said above, we can travel to Beijing if we are currently in Boston, because Beijing exists in space as much as Boston does. But we cannot travel to Beijing if we are currently in Boston, if Beijing does not exist. There would be no place to travel to. Likewise, we cannot travel from Boston to Beijing, if Boston does not exist. There would be no place to travel from. It would seem that according to presentism, therefore, Ben can no more travel to the past than Rama-Tut can travel from the future. Neither of those exist either.20 We have been sidestepping this worry by assuming that the destination and departure points would be there when the time traveller arrives. So, for presentism, travelling to or from the past or future is permissible because the past or future eventually becomes the time traveller’s present. For the growing block view, travelling to or from the future is permissible for the same reason. Sidestepping a worry is not, however, responding to it. And it is unclear whether any response would succeed. For presentism and the growing block view, there is no future (to focus on this). There is no place to travel to or from. Saying that the place will be there, while admitting that it is not there, means that it does not exist. We can no more travel to or from the future, in this view, than we can travel to or from Beijing if it does not exist. Presentism and the growing block view can respond, as we have been assuming, that from the time traveller’s perspective the past or future becomes the time traveller’s present. We can travel to Beijing provided that Beijing will be there by the time we arrive, regardless of whether it is there now. Yet this too has problems. Arguing that, because Rama-Tut’s birthplace on Earth in the year AD 3000 will exist, we should treat it as if it does exist at some future time, apparently faces a dilemma. Either it is questionbegging, since it treats something from the future as if it exists, when this is the very point in doubt, or it simply assumes that it does exist, which rejects presentism and the growing block view in favour of eternalism outright. And we know where that leaves things. Mercifully, whether Marvel writers are in fact caught in this dilemma is for our purposes beside the point. Philosophers do contemplate the nature of time on conceptual grounds, and, if Marvel comics are any indication, there are no shortages of those. Perhaps in future comics Marvel writers will script different adventures that revise, reintroduce or reject these philosophical views, whether they concern Dr. Doom’s time machine or not. What matters is not the correctness of Marvel’s views so much as their fecundity. Lee, Kirby, Thomas, Gerber, Mantlo, Byrne, DeMatteis, Michelinie, Moore and Bendis are only a small sample of Marvel’s philosophers, with a new universe of writers – including Al Ewing, Jeff Lemire, Gerry Dugan, Kelly Sue DeConnick and G. Willow Wilson – continuing to contemplate time. Some already appear to have abandoned branching time, with Marvel characters now travelling within a single timeline. According to Ultimates writer Al Ewing, Dr. Doom’s time technology is once again at fault. Ultimates team-member Blue Marvel explains: JOURNAL OF GRAPHIC NOVELS AND COMICS 337 We have people living together – long-term – with their own past selves. We have visitors from this future regularly attempting to alter their past. We have historical figures exploring our time and taking knowledge back with them. Occasionally, present-day people become historical figures. Even after the so-called ‘Age of Ultron’ incident – when time nearly shattered under this strain – we continue to abuse it. It can’t go on. Of course much of this can be laid at the feet of Victor Von Doom – his quasi-mystical ‘Doomlock’ being what allows these travelers to cross their own timelines. (Quoted in Johnston) The Doomlock was introduced by Peter David in X-Factor #46 (September 2009), but Ewing employs it in the All-New, All-Different universe to explain the latest philosophy of time. But what philosophy is that exactly – presentist, growing block, eternalist? Only time will tell. Notes 1. For an example of the medievals calling Aristotle ‘The Philosopher,’ see Timothy McDermott (1993). On Newton calling himself a philosopher and his impact on what we now consider philosophy, see I. Bernard Cohen and George Smith (2002) – where Smith is himself a philosopher. And on others calling Einstein a ‘scientist-philosopher,’ see Paul Arthur Schilpp (1998). 2. Issues 1–20 are anthologised in Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 1. 3. The two views trace to J.M.E. McTaggart (1908). McTaggart’s A-theory and B-theory are the basis for presentism and eternalism, respectively, explained below. 4. Below we question the assumption behind this claim. 5. David Lewis (1976). 6. Later stories give the time-travelling supervillain an especially complex and diverging history with multiple versions of himself appearing from his own and alternative timelines. He and his counterparts have been called ‘Nathaniel Richards’, ‘Scarlet Centurion’, ‘Kang the Conqueror’, ‘Immortus’ and ‘Iron Lad’. 7. The makers of the 1978 Superman: The Movie presented a contrasting philosophy of time when Superman travels to his recent past to save the life of Lois Lane after she is killed in a nuclear bomb-triggered earthquake. Although Superman’s father warns him not to alter the course of human history, the change produces no negative consequences. 8. Marvel later retconned, or retroactively established continuity with, this moment to reveal in Ed Brubaker’s 2005 ‘Out of Time’ Captain America story arc that Bucky did survive and became the Winter Soldier. 9. The issues are anthologised in the unpaginated Essential Defenders Vol. 2. 10. The growing block view traces to C.D. Broad (1923). Eternalism is sometimes called the ‘block’ view, because it imagines time as a single, undifferentiated, extant unit. 11. See Aristotle (1961). 12. Lewis’s ‘The Paradoxes of Time Travel’ was published the same month as Mantlo scripted Spider-Man’s adventure in 1692 Salem and two months before Thomas scripted the Fantastic Four’s travel to 1942, eliminating the possibility of direct influence. Lewis instead references Robert A. Heinlein’s ‘By His Bootstraps’ (Astounding Science Fiction, October 1941) and ‘ – All You Zombies –‘” (Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1959); Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955); and H. G. Wells’, The Time Machine, An Invention (London: Heinemann, 1895). 13. While philosophers usually take different branches to be isolated from one another, Reed suggests otherwise. Although time-travelling vibranium prevented the main Marvel continuity branch from becoming the one in which Germany wins, Reed’s relief that this alternative branch ‘thank Heaven, will now be forever separate’ might imply that the creation of one branch nevertheless causally effects another. Indeed, as we saw above, 338 C. GAVALER AND N. GOLDBERG Reed goes so far as to say that changes in one continuum ‘might eventually affect all of them!’ Nonetheless, because nothing like this is actually depicted in the comic, we do not pursue the possibility. 14. William James (1979). 15. In the seventeenth century, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz called these alternative universes ‘possible worlds’, and contemporary philosophers do the same. The chief proponent of the view that possible worlds are as real as the actual world is David Lewis, while the chief proponent of the view that they are merely heuristic devices permitting us to understand things about the actual world is Saul Kripke. 16. DC Comics established a similar multiverse in the late 1950s, when it moved the events of its Golden Age comics of the 1940s from its new characters’ past to another world, newly dubbed ‘Earth-2’. 17. Nor does Roy Thomas have Reed address an additional paradox. While the 1976 Fantastic Four and the 1942 Invaders are battling Baron Zemo in 1942, Captain America knocks a vat of Adhesive X onto Zemo, permanently affixing Zemo’s mask to his face – fulfilling a Second World War historical event retroactively established in Avengers #6 (published in 1963). Had the Fantastic Four of 1976 not travelled to 1942, Captain America would not have faced Zemo at that moment and his mask would not have been affixed. And had the vibranium not been transported to 1942 first, the Fantastic Four would not have travelled there at all. How then was Zemo’s mask affixed in the Fantastic Four’s own branch in which no vibranium from 1976 ever appeared in 1942? This appears to be both a time loop (possible only in unbranching eternal time) and a point of divergence creating a new world in branching time. 18. Regarding the year 1942, Ben tells Reed: ‘Countin’ the stretch we did together when we wuz kids – I been there three times’ (#20, 31). 19. DC Comics accomplished the same in 1986 when it destroyed its own unwieldy multiverse to introduce a new, merged Earth after the limited series Crisis on Infinite Earths. DC has rebooted its universe several times since, including a return of all pre-Crisis universes after the 2015 limited series Convergence. 20. Because philosophers, like comic book writers, focus on time travel to the past, the first part of the objection is known as the ‘no-destination objection’ (see, for example, William Grey (1999), although there should also be a ‘no-departure objection’ correlate. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. References Aristotle. 1961. “On Interpretation 9.” In Aristotle’s Categories and De Interpretatione, Clarendon Aristotle Series, edited by J. L. Ackrill. New York, NY: Oxford UP. Bendis, B. M. 2008a. The Mighty Avengers #9. Marvel.April. Bendis, B. M. 2008b. The Mighty Avengers #10. Marvel.May. Broad, C. D. 1923. Scientific Thought. New York, NY: Harcourt. Byrne, J. 1979.“Remembrance of Things Past!” Marvel Two-in-One #50. Marvel.April Byrne, J. 1983. “Aftermath!” Marvel Two-In-One #100. Marvel.June. Cohen, I. B., and G. Smith, ed. 2002. Cambridge Companion to Newton. New York, NY: Cambridge UP. DeMatteis, J. M. 1983. “Future Shock!” Captain America #287. Marvel.November. Gerber, S. 2006. Essential Defenders. Vol. 2. New York, NY: Marvel. Grey, W. 1999. “Troubles with Time Travel.” Philosophy 74: 55–70. doi:10.1017/ S0031819199001047. JOURNAL OF GRAPHIC NOVELS AND COMICS 339 James, W. 1979. “The Decline of Determinism.” In 1884. the Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Lee, S., and J. Kirby. 2008. “Essential Fantastic Four.” Vol. 1. New York, NY: Marvel. Lewis, D. 1976. “The Paradoxes of Time Travel.” American Philosophical Quarterly 13 (April): 145–152. Mantlo, B. 1976a. “Death in the Year before Yesterday!” Marvel Team-Up #44. Marvel.April. Mantlo, B. 1976b. “Future-Shock!” Marvel Team-Up #45. Marvel May. McDermott, T. 1993. Aquinas Selected Writings. New York, NY: Oxford UP. McTaggart, J. E. 1908. “The Unreality of Time.” Mind XVII: 457–474. doi:10.1093/mind/ XVII.4.457. Michelinie, D., and B. Layton. 1989. Iron Man #250. Marvel.December. Michelinie, D., B. Layton. 1981a. Iron Man #149. Marvel.August. Michelinie, D., B. Layton. 1981b. Iron Man #150. Marvel.September. Moore, J. F., 1997. X-Force #64. Marvel.March. Schilpp, P. A., ed. 1998. “Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist.” In Library of Living Philosophers. 3rd ed. Vol. 7. Chicago, IL: Open Court. Thomas, R. 1968. “Death Be Not Proud!” The Avengers #56. Marvel. September. Thomas, R.1976a. “And – Then – The Invaders!” Fantastic Four Annual #11. Marvel. Thomas, R. 1976b. “Showdown at Sea!” Marvel Two-in-One #20. Marvel October. . Thomas, R. 2004. “What if Spider-Man Had Joined the Fantastic Four?” 1977.” In What If? Classic. Vol. 1. New York, NY: Marvel. 340 C. GAVALER AND N. GOLDBERG”

Data and Doctor Doom: PDF

Doom's Law: Spaces of Sovereignty in Marvel's Secret Wars:

“Neal Curtis, ‘Doom’s Law: Spaces of Sovereignty in Marvel’s Secret Wars’ (2017) 7(1): 9 The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship, DOI: https:// doi.org/10.16995/cg.90 THE COMICS GRID Journal of comics scholarship RESEARCH Doom’s Law: Spaces of Sovereignty in Marvel’s Secret Wars Neal Curtis University of Auckland, NZ n.curtis@auckland.ac.nz Sovereignty is both the foundation and source of law and the determination of the territory to which the law applies. In this latter sense, sovereignty and the law it supports are an explicitly spatial phenomenon, as can be seen in the meanings of the Greek word nomos, which aside from the law can also refer to a division that marks out a specific territory. This article posits that the Marvel crossover event entitled Secret Wars (2015, 2016) encapsulates the ways in which superhero comics might help us to understand the spatiality of sovereignty. It also considers how resistance to Doom’s law was focused on the transgression of borders and the creation of alternative spatial arrangements. Keywords: Agamben; graphic justice; law; political theory; Schmitt Introduction: When the World Goes Rogue Fifteen years of a ‘War on Terror’ have been an especially fruitful time for studying superhero comics. The exceptional politics of the Bush Doctrine encouraged numerous scholars to return to important questions about the relationship between law and violence, and the nature of a state of emergency that are central to both the superhero mythos and an understanding of sovereign power. At a time when states themselves became rogue or took on the role of the vigilante—at least from the perspective of established International Law—scholars naturally gravitated towards thinking about what the exceptional status of the superhero might tell us. Good examples are Jason Bainbridge’s study of how superheroes reveal ‘the gaps or lacunae in law’s operation’ (2007: 461), or as Todd McGowan puts it ‘law’s inadequacy’ (2009: np). Also important are Cassandra Sharp’s discussion of the ‘retributive desire’ inherent in the ‘penal populism’ (2012: 356) of superhero comics (something that 2 Curtis: Doom’s Law became very evident in the early days of the War on Terror), and Thomas Giddens’s analysis of the link between superheroes and natural law, in particular how Batman represents something ‘beyond the limited resources of an imperfect system’ (2015: 783). In these and other studies (Bainbridge, 2015; Curtis, 2016), the exceptional status of the superhero has also been used to talk about more generalizable problems within our conception of sovereignty. Here, the seemingly opposed concepts of law and violence bleed into one another, introducing a certain instability or Derridean ‘undecidability’ (Bainbridge 2015: 461) into a concept supposed to be the epitome of decisive thought and action (Schmitt, 1996, 2005). Elsewhere the effects of the exercise of law’s violence have been shown to produce another example of that undecidability in the form of the pharmakon that is both cure and poison (Brooker, 2012; Curtis, 2012). In superhero comics this is something most regularly seen in the dangerous and unwanted side effects of superhero powers, where their pursuit of order often generates more chaos. In this article, however, I want to address the specifically spatial arrangement of this instability. In Giddens’s work noted above he addresses the way in which the superhero might be thought of as ‘a counter-sovereign stepping outside official avenues’ (783) in order to protect the innocent, but I’m interested in the way that sovereignty and the sovereign use of violence is rather a complex knot in which inside and outside become indistinguishable. There is no outside for a sovereign or counter-sovereign to step into because the very concept of sovereignty dissolves the border between them in the very act of maintaining it. The philosopher most attuned to this topology of sovereignty is Giorgio Agamben, and I will argue that the Marvel event entitled Secret Wars (2015, 2016)—designed to reform and reboot the Marvel Universe, recalling the Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars limited series published between May 1984 and April 1985—is a perfect vehicle for thinking through this problem. The premise of the story is that giant cosmic entities called The Beyonders want to destroy the universe, but Dr. Doom manages to preserve fragments of it and collect them together to form a planet called Battleworld of which he is now both the creator Curtis: Doom’s Law 3 god and the ruling sovereign. As sovereign he oversees a collection of jurisdictional territories in which he keeps the peace through the use of appointed barons. The threat of disorder both from within the collection of governable territories and the ungovernable badlands beyond the wall known as The Shield means Battleworld is in a permanent state of emergency supposedly warranting Dr. Doom’s “benign” tyranny. Much like the sovereign Leviathan that Thomas Hobbes argues is necessary to hold the commonwealth together, Doom has ‘the use of so much power and strength […] that by terror thereof he is enabled to conform the wills of […] all to peace at home and mutual aid against their enemies abroad’ (1994: 109). In what follows I will use Secret Wars to explore the relationship between space and sovereignty, both in the way the rule of law is distributed across Battleworld, but also in the way resistance to that law takes on specifically spatial features. This story, I will argue, enables us to get to the heart of a very complex concept in which law and violence, rule and exception, protection and banishment, inclusion and exclusion, inside and outside, are all intimately entwined. By doing this, the event spoke a profound truth about the dark nature of sovereignty, but by making Dr. Doom the sovereign of Battleworld the event also performed a decisive ideological function by suggesting that the dark heart of sovereignty only emerges with a super-villain in charge. It thereby wrongly suggests that once the good guys wrest back control the politics of the exception is truly the exception to the normal order of things. The Space of Sovereignty When sovereignty is thought in terms of space and borders it is usually as a geopolitical analysis pertaining to national identity or international relations. With regard to superhero comics, there are excellent examples of this (Dittmer, 2012), but here sovereignty will be thought in philosophical terms. This will be done by considering three related issues: the law’s primary role in the distribution and partitioning of space; the declaration of a state of emergency; and the sovereign ban, or the relationship between law and banishment. In all of these it will also be necessary to bear in mind the relationship between law and violence that has defined sovereignty from Bodin to Weber. All of these issues create a constellation of sovereign order and arrangement that need to be thought together. 4 Curtis: Doom’s Law In The Nomos of the Earth Carl Schmitt begins his analysis of the word nomos, normally translated as law or rule, by stating its original meaning in Greek was ‘the first measure of all subsequent measures’ (2003: 67), and therefore pertains to ‘primeval division and distribution’ (67). This also introduces the normative order of the law precisely because the nomos represents how the world ought to be divided and arranged as opposed to how it is, but Schmitt reminds us to not reduce nomos to this normative understanding. Derived from the Greek word nemein meaning to divide, Schmitt argues ‘nomos is the immediate form in which the political and social order of a people becomes visible’ (70). Thought in terms of sovereignty, then, it is ‘a constitutive act of spatial ordering’ (71). The centrality of ordering, dividing and arranging to the nomos is also evident from the fact that another meaning of the word in Greek is a wall or hedge. Nomos is therefore the division, partition, distribution and allotment of space. The law as we understand it then becomes both the representation and preservation of that primary partitioning. It is therefore no surprise that on Battleworld Doom’s ‘first law’ is that no border or boundary can be crossed without special permission. In fact, the only place people from different regions can meet and mix is a building in New Attilan called the Quiet Room. The nomos is also something of a conceptual division that separates and connects the sacred from the profane, for example. It is not just a matter of property, but also what is proper or appropriate in a given space. Regulation of behaviour and language is therefore another way of maintaining spatial divisions, and here we can immediately see how what is excluded by the sovereign division is essential to the definition of what is included. For Robert Cover, the nomos also functions through another form of distribution, namely the stories that circulate giving legitimacy to the law as it is set out. The law for him is something we ‘inhabit’ (1992: 95). He writes: ‘understood in the context of the narratives that give it meaning, law becomes not merely a system of rules to be observed, but a world in which we live’ (96). The management of language and narrative, especially in the form of stories is therefore an important aspect of sovereignty. This is most evident in Secret Wars where Dr. Strange—Doom’s sheriff on Battleworld—is in charge of religious observance across the territories, while his daughter, Valeria—Reed Richards daughter in the normal Curtis: Doom’s Law 5 universe—is in charge of science. Thus, the two principle narrative realms are managed to maintain the worship of God Doom. We are introduced to this narrative division on Battleword in issue 2 of Secret Wars. While (virtually) everything on the planet is as Doom wills, an important part of the story is that two craft managed to survive the end of the multiverse and arrived on Battleworld carrying heroes and villains with memories of the time before Doom. When one of the craft is discovered and its existence is brought to Valeria’s attention at The Foundation, home to Battleworld’s science division, it threatens what she calls an ‘ideological breach’ (np) or what Dr. Strange refers to as ‘schism’. He then immediately enacts a sovereign order to ‘seal off the site’, telling Valeria: ‘I am invoking … quarantine’ (Hickman and Ribic 2016: np). In quarantine, the site or location of the craft is immediately walled off, so to speak. A border is placed around it marking it as heretical and hostile to the law. While this is not explicitly visualized it is formally created by the following page being one of the most impressive images of The Shield that we see (Figure 1). To understand the importance of this act of quarantine in relation to sovereignty and the creation of a sites of exception, we need to look at a couple of related issues in Schmitt’s work. The first is the distinction between friend and enemy that Schmitt argues is essential to the conception of the political. Unlike morality, economics or aesthetics the ultimate criteria for politics is the threat posed by ‘the other, the stranger […who] is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien’ (1996: 27). The difficulty Schmitt himself has maintaining this distinction, as well as any criticisms of it cannot be explored here, but it is introduced to set up Schmitt’s major contribution to sovereignty that occurs at a time when a sovereign state is threatened by alien forces abroad or at home. The true test of sovereignty is the ability (power and legitimacy) to announce a state of emergency. A state of emergency is understood to be an exceptional situation in the sense that the law that usually applies is suspended. An example of this would be the implementation of martial law, which is the suspension of the civil and legal rights and protections that citizens normally enjoy. For Schmitt, the sovereign is the person ‘who decides on the exception’ (2005: 5), or the person with the power or right to 6 Curtis: Doom’s Law suspend the law in the face of exceptional circumstances. This also takes on a spatial dimension, not because friend and enemy, partisan and agitator are located in a field of conflict, but because the state of exception destabilizes the spatial arrangement and separation of law and violence. To work through this we need to return to the condition that the establishment of law is said to overcome. This is the violent state of nature where Hobbes believes ‘every man is enemy to every man’ (1994: 76). In Hobbes’s lawful commonwealth, the violence of the state of nature is not so much overcome as monopolized by the sovereign. As Agamben argues, it ‘survives in the person of the sovereign’ (Agamben 1998: 35) to be used against a future threat to the security the sovereign guarantees. Here, I would take a rather different position from Giddens who argues that the superhero as counter-sovereign ‘moves beyond the limits of the sovereign state, back into a state of nature’ (2015: 773) to argue this supposed outside is actually an internalised component of sovereign legitimacy. Given that violence and disorder are always potentially imminent in both Hobbes and Schmitt, the state of nature, Figure 1: Secret Wars #2, Jonathan Hickman, Esad Ribic, Ive Svorcina and Chris Eliopoulos. © Marvel Worldwide, Inc., 2015. Curtis: Doom’s Law 7 according to Agamben, remains ‘continually operative in the civil state’ (1998: 109). This gives justification to regular displays of sovereign strength or force. In this regard, Agamben can argue that ‘exteriority [understood as the state of nature…] is truly the innermost center of the political system’ (36). The potential for violence and the consequent logic of the state of exception that legitimizes the use of violence is the first instance of sovereignty’s curious spatial arrangement. The state of nature and the state of exception are nothing but two sides of a single topological process in which what was presupposed as external (the state of nature) now reappears, as in a Möbius strip or a Leyden jar, in the inside (as state of exception), and the sovereign power is this very impossibility of distinguishing between outside and inside, nature and exception, physis and nomos. (Agamben: 1998: 37) This curious topological feature is encapsulated in two important elements of Battleworld’s security and law enforcement: The Shield and the Thor Corps. As noted, The Shield is the architectural symbol of Doom’s sovereignty. It is a giant wall that traverses the lower southern hemisphere of Battleworld. It is the physical expression of Doom’s law and is key to the arrangement of his kingdom. It serves to protect the relatively orderly regions in the north from three ungovernable regions in the south: Deadlands, Perfection and New Xandar. We are asked to believe, by Doom himself, that although he is God there remain certain parts of Battleworld that even he can’t control, and yet it becomes clear these regions have an important ideological or propaganda function in that only Doom can supposedly protect the north from this existential threat, thereby legitimating his tyranny. As he notes in issue 1 of Inhumans: Attilan Rising, without the exercise of his strength ‘the weak become meat for the beasts beyond The Shield’ (Soule and Timms 2016: np). Doom’s rule is thus sanctioned in part by his role as creator but also as protector, where the permanent state of emergency in relation to the threat from the south justifies Battleworld’s exceptional politics and Doom’s use of violence to 8 Curtis: Doom’s Law maintain order. In this sense the external threat posed by the ungovernable regions becomes an important internal component in Doom’s tyranny. As Black Bolt asks in issue 4 of that story: ‘What purpose do those beasts serve in Doom’s perfect machine?’ (np). The answer is simple; the beasts and the monsters, the anarchy and existential threat legitimate the division and maintenance of the world according to Doom’s will. The threat from south of The Shield that becomes an integral part of Doom’s rule is indicative of the intimacy between law and violence in our conception and practice of sovereignty—even if that intimacy is disavowed in our politics. In Battleworld this relationship is suggested by the fact that Doomstadt, the capital and legislative centre of Battleworld has Doomgaard, the home of the Thor Corps, as its neighbour. We can understand this through Agamben’s claim that the police have become ‘the place where the proximity and the almost constitutive exchange between violence and right that characterizes the figure of the sovereign is shown more nakedly and clearly than anywhere else’ (2000: 104). For Agamben, the focus on ‘“public order” and “security” on which the police have to decide on a case-by-case basis defines an area of indistinction between violence and right exactly symmetrical to that of sovereignty’ (104). In a state of exception in which the order maintained by the police is given priority over whatever protections citizens may have in normal conditions, any adversary automatically becomes a criminal (106). This intimacy, Agamben argues, has an ‘intangible sacredness’ (105) displayed in various ceremonies and public pageants. On Battleworld it is shown in issue 2 of Secret Wars by Castle Doom being built inside Yggdrasil, the World Tree, home of Thor and the Norse gods in the regular Marvel universe. Here, not only has a man taken the place of the gods, the gods have become the tyrant’s police, and their home has become his castle. The violence of sovereignty has two other spatial components crucial to Agamben’s analysis, and which are also central to Secret Wars. The first is the sovereign ban, which includes banishment and exile, while the second is the related figure of the camp, an area in which the exceptional nature of sovereign power can be brought to bear without any legal hindrance. Banishment has long been the prerogative of Curtis: Doom’s Law 9 sovereigns who had the capacity to exile those who threatened them and in many cases confiscate their property. The ban is therefore related to the exception in that it is a moment in which the law and its normal protections are withdrawn from the person banished. This manifestation of exceptional politics does not mean the law no longer applies, as Bainbridge argues (2007: 461), rather the law is performed precisely in and through this withdrawal. Again, what appears to be outside the law is very much internal to it. While banishment meant removal from the protections of the court or the city— sometimes with a price placed on one’s head—it often meant removal to a place of imprisonment and torture. In Agamben’s study, he brings these together under the figure of the homo sacer, a being defined by ‘the unpunishability of his killing and the ban on his sacrifice’ (73). In other words, the homo sacer is that special category of being—and I say being because it is no longer a legal person—who can be killed without the killer facing any responsibility or reprisal, and without the killing taking on the social significance of a sacrifice. In this sense the homo sacer is nothing. Stripped of the form of life given by political association (bios), such a being is reduced to the insignificance and worthlessness of ‘bare life’ (zoē). The political importance of the ban for Agamben can be seen in his claim that it is more foundational than the contract Hobbes argues marks the foundation of the commonwealth. Adapting Schmitt’s primary distinction between friend and enemy he argues the sovereign ban is the ‘originary exclusion’ (83) that creates ‘the first properly political space’ (83), and is ‘the originary juridico-political relation’ (109). The ban marks out who does and does not belong and therefore who is protected and who is not. In Secret Wars the ban features in this primary way. While it is Doom that creates and holds together Battleworld this order is made possible by his banishment of two former enemies. In the regular Marvel universe, Doctor Doom’s most noted antagonists are the Fantastic Four who included Reed and Sue Richards, Johnny Storm and Ben Grimm. As the leader of the team Reed Richards was an especially significant adversary, it is therefore interesting that he is completely excluded from Doom’s World, only appearing by accident in the two groups that saved themselves from the destruction. 10 Curtis: Doom’s Law The other members were included in his arrangement of Battleworld, but two of them only existed under the condition of the sovereign ban. In issue 3 we learn how Johnny Storm, the flying, pyrotechnic superhero was banished to the sky where he existed as Battleworld’s sun, shedding light on the orderly clearing Doom had made amongst the multiversal chaos. Then, in issue 6, we discover that Benn Grimm, the stone-based behemoth also suffered an originary exclusion by being made to exist as The Shield. Bren Grimm wasn’t exiled beyond it like other heroes that incurred the wrath of Doom. Grimm was The Shield. Indeed, the first time we see Grimm in this situation is when his face appears on the wall of one of The Shield’s holding cells where Doom has Thanos imprisoned (Figure 2), thereby further developing this close Figure 2: Secret Wars #6, Jonathan Hickman, Esad Ribic, Ive Svorcina and Chris Eliopoulos. © Marvel Worldwide, Inc., 2015. Curtis: Doom’s Law 11 link between the wall and the law. As the principle sign of Doom’s law, the creation of The Shield in and as an act of banishment is thus a wonderful personification of sovereign power. What is more, with Reed Richards absent and Johnny Storm and Ben Grimm banished, Doom, in the style of the patriarchal despot (despotēs in Greek means head of the household) was also able to “confiscate” Reed’s family, taking Sue Richards as his wife and her children as his own. However, if exile removes a person from their place in the community, the camp is a specific localization of the sovereign ban. In such places people are abandoned. They lose the protection of sovereign command (ban). It is therefore the place where the state of exception physically manifests itself. For Agamben, ‘The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule. In it, the state of exception, […] acquires a permanent spatial arrangement’ (2000: 39). Battleworld is such a space. Although different regions are shown to contain camps—such as the ‘biolabs’ in Age of Apocalypse, or the ‘sanitation stations’ in Hail Hydra—it is in fact the entire planet that has become the camp. In political conditions determined by the state of exception, Agamben argues the sovereign ban becomes the new ‘nomos of the planet’ (45). The Thor Corps who subject any dissenters to executive and often extreme violence across Battleworld are evidence of Doom’s new, exceptional nomos. As are the numerous heroes, such as America Chavez and Abigail Brand, who are exiled to The Shield to continuously battle the invading hoards from the south, or are exiled beyond The Shield to face certain death, like Greer Nelson or Hank Pym in Age of Ultron vs Marvel Zombies. In fact, just as we saw with this ungovernable region that is essential to the authoritarian governance of Battleworld—its exclusion is an integral part of Doom’s perceived legitimacy and power—the inhabitants of the south are themselves marked by this contradictory mix of exteriority and interiority; belonging to two categories at once. The zombies are, of course, living and dead, while the Ultron robots are both animate and inanimate. Just like homo sacer who is a ‘living dead man’ (Agamben 1998: 131), and belongs by being excluded, these monsters epitomize the curious topology of sovereignty where inside and outside are clearly marked and yet indistinct. 12 Curtis: Doom’s Law The politics of the exception that defines sovereignty therefore undoes the stable division between law and violence, order and chaos, becoming a threshold or passage through which one can cross over into the other. In the many Battleworld stories, one in particular draws out the implications of this with especially disturbing effect. In 1602: Witch Hunter Angela, the eponymous hero hunts and kills entities known as Witchbreed (the early 17th century term for mutants) that threaten the security and stability of the realm. In this mode she operates in the sovereign role that Schmitt likens to the biblical figure of the restrainer (katechon in Greek), a manifestation of exceptional politics that holds back the manifestation of evil and the apocalypse it threatens (2003: 59). Interestingly, the last of the Witchbreed Angela kills just happens to be King James. Already, then, in the opening scene of issue 1 we have a complex relationship between power and subjection, friend and enemy, inside and outside where the supposed foundation of the law, the King, is also an agent of its dissolution. With the Witchbreed no longer a peril, Angela turns her attention to a new enemy, the Faustians who have gained powers through deals with the “devil” and as such present a threat to the established order. In doing so, Angela and her fellow hunter/lover, Lady Serah, attract the wrath of the Faerie Queen—the real power behind the Faustians—who declares that when Angela kills three more Faustians she will kill Serah. Aside from the invocation of evil that the Faerie Queen represents, her threat is also presented in explicitly spatial terms. In issue 2 we are told that the borders of the Realm of Faerie ‘drift like smoke, and open and close as they please’ (Bennett, Gillen and Hans 2016: np). The Realm of Faerie is therefore the enemy because it is an ontological threat to the principle of order itself, a theme that is visually explored in Stephanie Hans’s choice of page layouts (Figure 3). The Realm of Faerie, then, is either the antithesis of the clear, stable boundaries marked out by sovereignty or it reveals a disturbing truth about the indeterminacy of those divisions. The Faerie Queen is also the opposite of the Hobbesian corporation or commonwealth, instead of unifying she multiplies and spreads by colonising bodies of the Faustians with whom she deals and uses them to ‘claim lands’ (np). Curtis: Doom’s Law 13 Having hunted and killed two more Faustians, they track down the third, a young woman going by the name of Anna Marie, at Castle Caldecot. Angela tries to save Anna Marie from the realm of the Faerie Queen, but fails and is forced to kill again. As promised the Faerie Queen immediately takes the life of Serah. In issue 4, unable to deal with the loss, Angela decides she cannot live without her lover and finds a way into the realm of the Faerie Queen by using faerie magic. Once inside she confronts and kills the Faerie Queen in order that she might assume her position and return Serah back to life. Through this, what was the restrainer has become the manifestation of the very menace she sought to end, and the problem with the politics of the exception that defines sovereignty lies in this very dangerous dynamic. As has already been noted, the exception makes interiority and exteriority indistinct, situating sovereign power both inside the law (as foundation and guarantee) and outside the law (as suspension and violence). In other words, the exception renders the law always already extra-legal. The sovereign is therefore also the rogue, which makes it especially interesting that Angela’s passage from one world to the next begins with her killing Anne Marie who is the member of the X-Men known as Rogue in the regular Marvel universe. Figure 3: 1602: Witch Hunter Angela #2, Margueritte Bennett, Stephanie Hans. © Marvel Worldwide, Inc. 2015. 14 Curtis: Doom’s Law The extra-legality of sovereignty, or the idea that the sovereign is always already something of an outlaw plays an important part in Jacques Derrida’s analysis of sovereignty where he argues this being-outside-the-law means ‘the beast, criminal and sovereign have a troubling resemblance: they call on each other […]; there is between sovereign, criminal and beast a sort of obscure and fascinating complicity, or even a worrying mutual attraction’ (2009: 17). For Agamben, too, the sovereign politics of the exception that suspends the law in the name of security has a similar logic whereby the ‘sovereigns who willingly agreed to present themselves as cops or executioners, in fact, now show in the end their original proximity to the criminal’ (2000: 107). It is only proper, then, that in issue 4 we are told that Doom did not create Battleworld from his own strength or will but from powers he stole from the Beyonders. It can therefore be said that the sovereignty of Battleworld was founded in a criminal act. Resisting Doom’s Law While Secret Wars is a study in sovereignty and exceptional politics, it is primarily a narrative focused on discovering the truth about Battleworld and resistance to its order. When we join the story, supposedly eight years into the creation of Battleworld, there are already elements attempting to undermine Doom’s rule, a problem accentuated by the unanticipated arrival of the two rafts from the Regular and Ultimate universes. What is interesting for this article, however, is the way in which the theme of sovereign space remains absolutely crucial for the increasing instances of rebellion that we witness across the planet. In issue 2 of Inhumans: Attilan Rising, for example, it has already been noted it is home to the only space where people from different regions are allowed to mix. This space, known as the Quiet Room, is also the location for significant plotting against Doom. Interestingly, the resistance that goes by the name of the Voice Unheard uses the basement of the Quiet Room as a way station for guerilla missions throughout Battleworld, enabled by their use of an Eldrac Gate, a piece of technology based on the Inhuman known as Eldrac the Door, a living piece of architecture enabling interdimensional transportation of anyone or anything that moves across its threshold. In so doing it transgresses and undermines the first law of Doom, but it is also the Curtis: Doom’s Law 15 antithesis of the law itself understood as the arrangement and maintenance of space. The gate is potentially the dissolution of the law and hence of (any) sovereign order. In terms of movement and the crossing of borders as a form of resistance, possibly the most dramatic instance of this occurs in Captain Britain and the Mighty Defenders. The resistance in this region is explicitly carried out by the titular character of the comic, a British Muslim woman and doctor, named Faiza Hussein who we see walking across the deserts of New Mars towards the Yinsen City wall. Yinsen City is a sub-division of the Battleworld region known simply as City. The usual walls separate it from the surrounding regions, and from its neighbour Mondo City—a deeply authoritarian area that playfully references the infamous Mega City of Judge Dredd comics. The residents of Yinsen City see Captain Britain approach through a window in the wall that divides them from New Mars. The sighting of Captain Britain is reported by White Tiger who assumes she is a refugee and in need of help. “We have to let her in”, she says. “This city’s supposed to be a utopia—not some privileged little enclave where you have to be born here to count” (Ewing and Davis 2015: np). Here, White Tiger is articulating the problem the refugee presents for the concept of sovereignty. As has already been discussed, a political community is founded through the identification of those who do not belong. Sovereignty, even in its most democratic form is tied to a specific and predetermined identity. For Agamben, the refugee is therefore a limit concept that breaks the supposedly natural ‘continuity between man and citizen […] birth and nation’ and causes bare life to appear (1998: 131). The refugee, in other words, is one way in which sovereignty’s exclusionary violence is highlighted. It quickly becomes evident, however, that Captain Britain is in no need of assistance, and in one of the most brazen acts of defiance across the entire event she simply smashes the wall and walks into Yinsen City. This literal and figurative breaking of Doom’s law is motivated by memories of where she used to live. Speaking this way, as She-Hulk points out, is also heretical, but Captain Britain has no care for that. When Baron Yinsen explains that they can rebuild the wall, and She-Hulk points out that it is the transgression of god’s law not the physical damage that is the 16 Curtis: Doom’s Law problem, Captain Britain says that is not true: “Doom is a man—a man with power, but human all the same. He is not any kind of god” (Ewing and Davis 2015: np). When this leads to a wider discussion of the memories of other lives and homes that citizens of Yinsen City admit to, Doom arrives to administer punishment. He notes that only his law, namely the dividing wall, is what protects them from the totalitarian and paramilitary region that neighbours them. “You dislike my laws, Baron Yinsen?” Doom asks. “Then you may disregard them. Your neighbours, too” (Ewing and Davis 2015: np). With this, Doom’s law and hence his sovereign protection are withdrawn when he makes the dividing wall disappear, and Yinsen City is abandoned to its fate at the hands of Mondo City. It is quickly invaded by a sentient, multiarmoured tank called War Machine, and two Mondo police officers called Boss Cage and Boss Frost, who lead the internment of Yinsen citizens in temporary detention camps, only for the whole cycle of breaking walls to start again. In A-Force issue 1 this theme is also taken up, but the challenge to Doom’s order is presented in a radical way. The comic introduced a new team of all female Avengers that protects the region of Battleworld known as Arcadia, an island located very close to The Shield. Arcadia is immediately threatened by a giant shark that appears in the waters around the island, but after a defensive maneuver by members of A-Force it is blown out of the water and ends up inside the city walls. Although it is incapacitated, America Chavez picks up the leviathan, raises the monster above her head—in a dramatic image of sovereign power—and promptly hurls it over The Shield into the The Deadlands to the south. Immediately the Thor Corps are dispatched for failure to comply with Battleworld’s first law regarding the sanctity of borders. For this, Sheriff Strange orders America Chavez to be exiled to The Shield where she will face a permanent life and death struggle against the forces of annihilation that threaten Battleworld. Most interestingly, though, the issue closes with another transgression of boundaries when a totally new character falls from the sky and we are introduced to Singularity, a pocket universe that has taken the form of a young girl. Why this is interesting is that Doom has declared the sky a limit beyond which there is nothing. Battleworld, he claims, is the totality of the universe, so where did she come from? While Singularity’s arrival signals there is something and some place beyond Curtis: Doom’s Law 17 Battleworld this is not, however, the most striking moment of resistance in A-Force. In issue 3, when the team are under attack from Doom’s forces, Singularity grows in size so that her new friends can hide inside her. As a pocket universe, she is in effect an alternative dimension, a space completely at odds with Doom’s nomos. She defies the predetermined division and arrangement of Battleworld and becomes the antithesis of his order, something that is exaggerated in the fracturing of space that is an important aspect of the image (Figure 4). In fact, as a mutable and mobile dimension she is the antithesis to order itself. She recognizes Figure 4: A-Force #3, Margueritte Bennett, G. Willow Wilson, Jorge Molina, Craig Yeung, Laura Martin, VS’s Cory Petit. © Marvel Worldwide, Inc., 2015. 18 Curtis: Doom’s Law no boundaries, nor do any boundaries contain her. She is both inside and outside Battleworld at the same time, and in a story in which the law is so clearly based in the organization and regulation of space, Singularity turning herself into a borderless, transportable refuge for her female friends is a wonderful image of resistance, and one that also clearly speaks to the gendered nature of Doom’s tyranny. Returning to the boundary set by Doom’s declaration that there is nothing beyond the sky, it has already been noted how Singularity’s arrival is both a transgression and a negation of that claim. However, the sky is interesting not only because it is a limit decreed by Doom, but because the vertical limit is itself so crucial to sovereignty. In an important essay on the topic, Jean-Luc Nancy argues that sovereignty ‘designates, first, the summit’ that ‘towers over and dominates’ (2007: 96), going on to argue that sovereignty is not marked by having the attribute of height, but that the sovereign is the subject ‘whose being consists in height’ (96). The sovereign is detached and separated from the mundane order of things. Sovereignty is thus superlative. It is the ‘Most High’ and the ‘Inequivalent’ (97). As Doom becomes increasingly aware of the growing resistance he laments in Secret Wars issue 3 that he has failed to inspire his people. In keeping with Nancy’s analysis, he talks about the difficulty of being both an earthbound ruler and a god. ‘I am a poor god’, he concedes to his wife. ‘I think now that once having made the world, I should have removed myself. Perhaps the gods of old had it right… It is better to be unseen—demanding faith, and beyond being defined by the mundane’ (Hickman and Ribic 2016: np). This ultimate sovereign limit is challenged in Captain Marvel and the Carol Corps where a squadron of all-female pilots known as the Banshees, lead by Captain Marvel defend a region of Battleworld called Halla Field. Resistance to Doom starts here because one member of the squadron, the especially inquisitive engineer called Bee, has a theory that the vertical limit cannot in fact be a limit. She is reminded by a team mate it is Doom’s law that above the sky is simply the void, and yet she persists with enough conviction to begin to raise doubts in the mind of Captain Marvel. These doubts are amplified when the squadron is scrambled to take out a ship containing an ‘invading A.I. force’ of Ultron robots that is sailing towards Halla Field (DeConnick, Thompson, Lopez 2015: np). Curtis: Doom’s Law 19 When the Banshees engage the ship they discover it actually has a human crew, but not before rockets have been fired to sink it. Captain Marvel manages to enter the ship and save one member of the crew who turns out to be a refugee from an increasingly unliveable region of Battleworld called Limbo. It is interesting that the refugee in this story is once again a figure that challenges sovereign order and increases Captain Marvel’s desire to challenge the vertical limit set by Doom. The rest of the comic involves the Banshees trying to avoid the surveillance of Halla Field by Baroness Cochran, before Captain Marvel and the rest of the Banshees take flight in issue 4 and break through Doom’s ultimate limit and discover the whole world to be a lie. Conclusion: Sovereignty Undone Dr. Doom’s sovereignty and his near omnipotent power are most clearly shown in the final issue of Inhumans: Attilan Rising where, after what appears to be a successful rebellion he simply clicks his fingers and resets the world and the timeline of that particular region. Doom attempts this again in the final issue of Secret Wars when he tries to get rid of Reed Richards who is undermining his rule and threatening to dissolve his kingdom. This time, however, nothing happens. “What is this?” he asks, “Mister Reece?” The man to whom Dr. Doom is referring here is Owen Reece also known as Molecule Man, a character who possesses extraordinary levels of power even in the superhero genre. He has control over the atomic structure of reality. He is also one of Marvel’s two composite entities that exist in every part of the Marvel multiverse at the same time. We are first introduced to Owen Reece’s role in issue 5 of Secret Wars. After the death of Dr. Strange in issue 4 we discover that Dr. Strange was not the only assistance Doom received when he created Battleworld. The energy and reality altering power actually came from Reece who did a deal with Doom to protect himself from the Beyonders after they had tried to use his power to destroy the multiverse. Now existing only in one dimension, and kept captive in an underground bunker, Reece’s power is diminished, but it is still enough to enable Doom to run Battleworld. This relationship is the final significant feature of sovereignty that appears in Secret Wars and marks out the difference between the two poles of sovereignty 20 Curtis: Doom’s Law that Antonio Negri (1999) calls constitutive and constituted power. In the case of government by monarchy sovereignty comes from God but is represented in the divine right of the monarch as legislator and protector. In the case of government by democracy legitimacy is conferred by the People, and is transferred to their representatives in government who write law of their behalf. In the language of Agamben that has been used throughout, once this power is given actuality in a particular government, the potentiality of constitutive power suspends itself. In other words, the revolution that created various democratic constitutions, and is now supposed to lie outside that legislative act as the earlier moment of violent rebellion or the state of nature manifested in civil war, is simply suspended within the constitution, always at hand for the formation of something new. It is interesting that Secret Wars writer, Jonathan Hickman, visualizes this suspension quite literally. When we first see Owen Reece in his underground bunkercum-prison he is floating or in self-suspension in the centre of a white void. The strength of the light emanating from him is an index of his potency. The bunker is also directly beneath a statue of Own Reece/Molecule Man in the garden of Doomstadt. This is a memorial to his contribution to Battleworld, but it is also a lifeless avatar that actually hides or masks the true power behind Doom and Battleworld. In such an authoritarian regime the creativity of constitutive power is carefully policed if not removed from political life. This means the spatial configuration of the bunker under ground, directly beneath the inanimate image of the power it is substituted for, astutely represents the way that constituted power always needs to defend itself against the radical creativity of constitutive power by preventing its living appearance within the arrangement of the nomos. The questions “What is this? Mister Reece?” consequently mark the moment where Owen Reece withdraws his power from Dr. Doom and in effect disables him. Although Doom fights on he is already undone, and the end of Battleworld comes in a blinding flash of a new constitution and the creation of new universes replacing those destroyed by The Beyonders. With Owen Reece released and able to multiply himself again, Valeria Richards explains to her mother what’s happening. Owen, she says, ‘is the key. He’s kind of a human repository of unlimited power. And that Curtis: Doom’s Law 21 omnipotent power has to be directed—used—by an individual. In this case, Dad [Reed Richards]’. Franklin her brother, she explains is ‘a universal shaper’ and has ‘ideas’ for universes that use Owen’s power to become reality. ‘Finally’, she concludes, ‘they slice off a bit of Owen’ to go with each one as they spin off into the newly emerging multiverse (Hickman and Ribic 2016: np). This is also, of course, a moment of significant ideological work. Having raised all sort of questions about the nature of sovereignty especially under the exceptional conditions that have governed the world since the 11th September 2001, the story proposes that when the constituted power—the element that gives constitutive power its direction and shape—is the beneficent, liberal and democratic Reed Richards the world is once again open, free and legitimate. In other words, the suggestion is that under such conditions the darker elements of sovereignty will not appear within the nomos, when in truth the manifestation of exceptional politics is always available to any sovereign in any territory because it is the constitutive centre of the concept. Unless we stop thinking sovereign violence only happens in other places, outside or beyond the boundaries of our democracies, we will continue to live a fantasy far more bizarre than Secret Wars.”

Daniel Dotson, "Portrayal of Physicists in Fictional Works":

“Victor Von

Doom Fantastic 4 m physicist

Highly driven to succeed and make

money. A space accident increases his

craving for power and his love interest, leading him to murder.

Traits: obsessive,

mental

health

problems,

socially

inept, too

careerfocused,

out of

touch, arrogant,

stubborn

Arnold Dexter, Don Chambers, Dr. Lozardo, Hans Reinhardt, Professor Weston, and Victor Von Doom all see others as less important than their goal.

Socially inept does not always cross

with timid or withdrawn. Several characters are socially inept due to being in unfamiliar surroundings.

Dick Solomon, Dr. Lozardo, and Ponter Boddit are not from the world in which they find themselves.

Dick Solomon and Dr. Lozardo are aliens in human form. Much of their social ineptitude is due to not

understanding humans. Ponter Boddit, a Neanderthal inappropriately sniffs rape evidence and castrates the rapist (the punishment on his own world). Some characters are socially inept mainly around

the opposite sex, such as Michael Merriman, Steve Mills, and Stuart Conway. Others see no problem

with using people, including Don Chambers and Victor Von Doom.

Victor Von Doom, while arrogant, seems rather normal at first. His behavior becomes erratic after a space accident results in the crew gaining various powers. His personality traits: obsessive, mental health problems, brave, socially inept, too career focused, out of touch, arrogant, and stubborn.

Horror films from 1931 to 1960 portrayed mostly scientists as essentially evil and about a quarter of scientists were at fault for disasters (see Sandison and Dingley 35). While most of the scientists examined were not evil, Victor Von Doom and Hans Reinhardt were examples of this.”

The encyclopedia of super villains:

“

DOCTOR DOOM (C, TV, N)

Real Name: Victor von Doom

First Appearance: 1962. The Fantastic Four #5, Marvel Comics.

Costume: Green tunic; darker green cloak with hood held by golden clasps; iron-gray mask, gauntlets. boots, and bodyarmor (see Weapons): brown (sometimes black) belt.

Weapons: With the possible exception of Superman's foes LEX LUTHOR and BRAINIAC, Doctor Doom has employed the greatest arsenal in villaindom. His armor endows him with superstrength, creates a virtually impenetrable force- field, carries its own air supply, boasts a "jet flying- belt," has a "miniature (index) finger-gun." contains a megaphone as well as various radio- transmission devices, a translator, and more, and is so-constructed that Dam can tap its power and send out destructive blasts. Among his other gadgets are a machine which can pluck objects from the past; the XZ-12 device, which increases a person's natural abilities (for instance, sensitive cars are made sharp enough to hear a feather drop); a cosmic beam gun that fires concentrated cosmic rays; an ether gun; sun- dry robots (including a duplicate of himself and the Fantastic Four's mighty Thing); a dimensional transport machine that puts people in another dimen- sion until Doom needs them; the "acrosub," for travel through the sea and sky; a "rocket plane" for journey- ing through the ionosphere; a small, cylindrical mag- netic "grabber" that can locate any object and, finding it, lift it and bring it to Daan no matter what the object's weight (it has been used, for ex- ample, on a skyscraper); a "spider-wave transmitter" that can only be heard by Spider-Man; and, perhaps most ingenious of all, a device consisting of "iron globes, revolving at great speed around a magnetic core," the globes covering virtually every square inch of a room and making it impossible for even most superheroes to avoid being clobbered.

Chief Henchmen: Boris, his devoted friend countless funkies over the years Biography: The son of Werner and Cynthia Vic for was born in a Gypsy camp near Hasenstadt, Latveria. His mother, a witch, was killed by "a petty official" when she was unable to cure a horse, his father, a healer, perished while flocing a local noble whose wife he was unable to save. Alone in the world. Victor dedicated himself to making the world suffer for his loss. Staying with his father's friend Boris, the "proud and handsome" Victor lived by selling magical potions based on his mother's recipes. In the meantime, he studied hard and became a self- educated scientific genius: so great was his subse- quent fame that he was given a scholarship to the State University of America. Coming to the United States, he met fellow student Reed Richards, who would later become the stretchable Mr. Fantastic of the Funtastic Four. One day, Richarde stopped by while Victor was working on a device which he hoped would enable him to communicate with his mother-whose spirit, he learned, was "trapped in an infernal extra- dimensional netherworld." held there by the demon MEPHISTO "as payment for arcane knowledge" he had given to her. So engrossed in his work was Victor that he didn't hear Richards approach; curious, the young man took the liberty of reading Victor's notes. When the Latverian finally noticed him, he grew furious with his colleague's prying, so furious that he refused to listen when Richards informed him there was a mistake in his computations. As a result of Vic ter's intractability the machine blew up, shattering his hody and leaving a lengthy scar on his face. Though he recovered, the scientist was expelled and his tortured mind blamed Richards for his troubles. Tra eling to Tiber, he took over a community of monks who helped him build his armor as well as a mask to concal what the vain Victor felt was no longer a perfect face. Unfortunately, in his haste to don the mok, he failed to wait until the metal had cold and all but melted his face. Returning to Latveria as Dec- Kom the demented native deposed the King and took over the country. There, he settled in a castle in Haasenstadt, whose name he took the liberty of changing to Doomstadt. There he created the many weapons which he has used against the Fantastic Four Spider-Man, and other heroes. He also labored cessly to free his mother from Mephisto. During the 12-issue run of Manel Super Heroes Secret Wars (1984-85), Doom's face was healed when he ab sorbed "ast energies" from the alien entity, the Be yonder (#10). However, the reparation was undone two issues later when the Beyonder reclaimed his power Quote: "You dare lay hands on me? You have little regard for your life, foc And I have even les Comment: som is certainly the most notorious villain in the Marvel universe, the physical parallels between this character and DARTH VADER are pronounced was the villain in the Fantastic Four novel Doomsday written by Marv Wolfman in 1979, and was also featured in several episodes of The Fantastic Four cartoon show which aired on ABC-TV from 1967 to 1970, and in another series which was broadcast on NBC-TV from 1978 to 1979.”

The supervillain book : the evil side of comics and Hollywood: