#doommariner

We are outcasts. You and I. In this world, yet not of it. We are fated to rule.

Prince Namor & Doctor Doom art by @ecairnsart Namor Week 2025 - Day 3 - Arrogance @namorweek

NAMOR WEEK DAY 2 - Romance

More Doommariner will be released later this week! I worked on this comic for freaking ever!!!

day 20

I started reading Marvel comics again after a really long break and I surprised myself by shipping Doommariner and Oceanshield. Needless to say I'm not a fan of the way Namor is portrayed whenever he's around Sue, and I think this is thematically connected to the way Doom is portrayed whenever he's around Reed. I believe I'm not alone in this so I'll be giving my two cents here.

Warning: I'm not American, and what I'm going to say might hurt some NATO snowflakes' feelings. Proceed with caution.

So my first point is that both Namor and Doom's obsession with the Richards couple is deeply rooted in a particular form of American narcissism. The most extravagant example of such narcissism is the 911 comic in which everybody was sad about a tiny amount of Americans dying. Doom even shed some tears, his eastern dictator status be damned, because every human being on earth should give a fuck about precious American lives, even if Americans often don't even know other peoples exist. And both Doomreed and NamorSue are just relationship versions of this narcissism.

How so? For a start, let's dissect Namor's essence as a character. In 1939's very first issue Namor was explicitly stated as enacting 'a crusade against white men'. Mind you, it was 1939. Segregation was the norm. White men's empires still ruled the earth. Most third world countries were colonies back then. Namor's face was drawn like an Asian, while Atlantis was crushed, like so many actual Asian civilizations, under the boots of white violence. Naturally, Namor, the avenging son, tried to do something about that.

At this point, there was no Sue in sight. Namor picked fights with American humans and Androids, destroyed many properties, and abused some animals in the New York zoo. He can talk peacefully to white people, but he was antagonistic most of the time.

Things changed in World War II. As in real life, many colonized peoples helped their colonizers in the fight against Fascists, Namor also joined forces with Captain America to punch Nazis and Japanese imperialists. Mind you, this was 1940s. Segregation and colonialism were still on, just like Atlantis was still polluted and assaulted by industrial capitalism all the time. But Fascism was the greater evil, so Namor made the necessary choice, and formed a personal friendship with Steve Rogers.

Then the Cold War came, and Fantastic Four, Marvel's first family, was created. Namor was reintroduced in F4 comics, and, after just one page explaining his righteous anger towards white capitalist countries for ruining Atlantis, he saw Sue and started simping for her.

It's quite obvious that Stan Lee didn't want the reader to think too much about Namor's cause against white men so he distracted us with Sue. And the distraction stays.

Now let's take a look at Doom. Unlike Namor, who was created in the age of the twilight of old empires, Doom was created in the age of the iron curtain, when newer empires like USA and USSR were carving the world in two, while German, French, British, Japanese etc empires were struggling in their ruins. Another thing we should note is that Stan Lee came from a family of Romanian Jews, and while Stan Lee was Americanized through and through, his ancestral country was on the other side of the iron curtain.

With this in mind, it's easy to see that Doom was a stand-in for Stan Lee's fantasies and fears for the homeland he never knew, while Reed Richards was, you know, an American from top to toe. That's why Doom was designed to be jealous of Reed, because Stan Lee must justify his immigrant way of living and imagine his ancestral land as a magical alien other. It was inconceivable, for both the comic creators and their initial readers, that other peoples on earth might be uninterested in the American Dream. No, everyone must aspire to be American, everyone must envy American achievements. The smartest person in the world is of course an American white guy married to a blonde woman, who is insanely attractive to men from other races but will always remain loyal to her husband. Namor's original story had to be reconfigured to meet the demands of this narcissistic narrative, while Doom didn't even have an older story, he was created to glaze Marvel's first family.

There you have it, Namor and Doom, one Atlantean and one Latverian, both fictional nationalities serving as narrative stand-ins for all things unamerican: the unknowable depths of the sea, the eastern autocratic monarchy, the volatile temper, the unreadable mask, the Other, the Alien, the Enemy. Together, they form a crusade against the Western World.

And this Otherness often creates extremely entertaining dark ironies. For example, in both the 80s Emperor Doom story and this year's event One World under Doom, whenever Doom rules the world, he's always doing great stuff like free healthcare, colony liberation and ending apartheid. It's such a Freudian slip that the writers unconsciously admit that maybe the status quo defended by American superheroes is actually an oppressive hellhole filled with misery, while the autocratic entity from the other side of the iron curtain probably is doing a lot better than the self-serving Americans. Maybe the Americans are deceived by themselves, while the other side knows the truth...

But no, this won't do, so villains must lose, and heroes must win. The American dream must be preserved, even if the dream is severely detached from reality.

Which leads to my second point: the essence of Oceanshield, or the essence of Steve Rogers in general, especially in 2025. As is mentioned, despite his general disregard for humanity, Namor still likes Steve Rogers. And, unlike F4, which was created during the cold war, embodying the white middle class in the hegemonic American empire, Rogers was conceived during a time in which American soldiers really did help the Spanish revolutionaries during the Spanish Civil War, the Chinese revolutionaries during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, and even aided the Soviets against Nazis (in a very old comic Namor even helped Rogers and Co. delivered some weapons to Stalin himself). In short, it was when Americans genuinely had some progressive influence on a global scale. Heroes born during and after the cold war don't get that feature.