I feel like this question is going to be out of left field, but Google is especially useless to me now (doubly so with RDJ!Doom)... But do you know why Tony has a small crush on Doom? I keep seeing it referenced here and there in comics. Is it just a writer bit? Is it an actual thing? Is it the face or the intelligence or both?
So Doom and Tony have had a hero-villain rivalry thing going on since Doomquest (IM #149-150), from 1981, when they both accidentally visited Camelot together, and it was great:
I wouldn't say they're each other's biggest enemies; I think Doom's extremely complicated thing with Reed Richards is absolutely his number one rivalry. But since Doomquest, they have often gone up against each other, probably partly because Tony doesn't have a lot of other villains who are at the I Want To Take Over The World threat level, other than, like, the Mandarin, and there areā¦ uhā¦ let's just say, a lot of problematic stories featuring the Mandarin. (There are also some good ones! Haunted is one of my favorite Iron Man arcs ever. But the bad ones are very bad.)
The thing about Tony having a crush on Doom is (almost) entirely Bendis' fault. Doom, famously, wears a mask to hide the scars he tragically received when he was in college, while trying to build a machine that would help him rescue his mother from Hell. (Comics are just like this.) But his machine was flawed and he didn't heed Reed's warnings and it exploded and also then he got expelled from college, meaning he is not in fact actually in possession of a doctorate, although you probably don't want to point that out to him.
At the end of the Secret Wars event in 2015, Reed healed Doom's face, and that meant that Doom went around maskless for a while, because who even knows why he does what he does. Did. He's dead right now. Probably. Uh. Spoilers for One World Under Doom, which just ended. He's dead now. At least, it sure looked like he died. Wanda is (going to be) Sorcerer Supreme, and Doom has made Reed the executor of his will, because that's the kind of guy Doom is.
Anyway, back while Doom was maskless, he generally got drawn as being a fairly handsome man, and this was back when Bendis was writing Iron Man, and for some reason Bendis decided that Tony was just not going to shut up about how Doom was handsome now. Seriously. It comes up a lot. Tony still clearly doesn't like Doom as a person at all, even in this run. He is obviously not happy being around him. Representative example from Invincible Iron Man #6:
This is not a guy whose company Tony enjoys at all. But, hey, Tony does seem to think he's hot. Or was hot. So there's that.
There was also this extremelyā¦ interestingā¦ part of Legacy of Doom in which Doom penetrated Tony with Excalibur, so it's not like they've never had weird homoeroticism in their relationship before.
But the Bendis IM run is, as far as I am aware, the only time Tony has actually thought of Doom in a way that expressed any kind of interest. If I had to guess, I would say Bendis just thinks it's funny, because he also decided that in New Avengers: Illuminati #4 (a long time before his IM run) that the rest of the Illuminati (okay, fine, Namor, it's Namor) should make fun of Tony for sleeping with Madame Masque, after Tony says she wears a mask like Doom:
I mean, I don't think this is particularly funny; it's definitely not one of the better scenes Bendis has ever written.
But, anyway, Bendis clearly enjoys implying Tony has some kind of thing for Doom, or having other characters imply it, or whatnot. He doesn't seem to be depicting any kind of situation that I would say is at the level of an actual crush. It was just that there was a period of time when for some reason he thought it would be great if Tony called Doom "handsome" a lot.
