One World Under Doom #1

History

The event was publicly announced at San Diego Comic-Con on July 26, 2024, and was originally solicited as a five-issue miniseries under the title The Rise of Emperor Doom; it was later renamed and expanded to nine issues as One World Under Doom, with no official explanation given for either change. Its release date shifted from a planned November 2024 window to February 12, 2025 (cover-dated April 2025). The series spins directly out of the 2024 Blood Hunt event by Jed MacKay and Pepe Larraz, in which Doctor Strange transferred the Sorcerer Supreme mantle to Doom as an emergency measure to end a global vampire invasion — a handoff Doom subsequently refused to reverse. Ryan North, who had been writing the flagship Fantastic Four ongoing since 2022 and had developed Doom's characterization across that run, was a natural fit to helm the core series, with R.B. Silva (a veteran of major X-Men books) on art, David Curiel on colors, Travis Lanham on letters, and Tom Brevoort as editor.

Trivia · 8 facts

• Released February 12, 2025 (cover date April 2025); written by Ryan North, penciled and inked by R.B. Silva, colored by David Curiel, lettered by Travis Lanham, with a main cover by Ben Harvey and edited by Tom Brevoort.
• Serves as chapter one ('The Exercise of Power') of a nine-issue limited series — expanded from an originally solicited five-issue run titled The Rise of Emperor Doom — and functions as the umbrella launch for an event spanning more than a dozen tie-in series including Superior Avengers, Amazing Spider-Man, Doctor Strange of Asgard, Red Hulk, Iron Man, Fantastic Four, Storm, NYX, and Doom Academy.
• The story's inciting premise flows directly from Blood Hunt (2024): during that vampire-invasion event, Doctor Strange ceded the Sorcerer Supreme title to Doom to cast a world-saving spell, with the promise Doom would return the mantle; Doom kept it on the technicality that the world was not yet fully 'saved.'
• In this issue Doom broadcasts a global address commandeering every broadcast medium on Earth, declares himself Emperor of a unified 'United Latveria,' and announces two binding edicts: an absolute ban on war (the Pax Victoris) and mandatory universal healthcare and education for all citizens — framing his autocracy as a welfare state.
• The assembled hero resistance explicitly includes both living Captain Americas (Steve Rogers and Sam Wilson), the core Avengers roster (Captain Marvel, Iron Man, Thor, Scarlet Witch, Storm, Vision, Black Widow), the full Fantastic Four (Reed Richards, Sue Storm-Richards, Ben Grimm, Johnny Storm), Doctor Strange, Spider-Man (Peter Parker), Squirrel Girl (Doreen Green), Nancy Whitehead, and Brain Drain (Werner Schmidt).
• Brain Drain (Werner Schmidt) — a reformed WWII-era villain originally created by Roy Thomas and Frank Robbins and first appearing in The Invaders #2 (October 1975) — appears here as a hero-allied supporting character, a status established during Ryan North's earlier Unbeatable Squirrel Girl run where Doreen Green and Nancy Whitehead reprogrammed him away from his Nazi conditioning.
• A key story beat involves Baron Helmut Zemo leading Hydra forces in a simultaneous assault on Latveria, attempting to override Doom's global broadcast to declare Hydra's opposition — setting up a three-way conflict between the heroes, Doom, and Hydra in subsequent issues.
• The event title is considered a likely homage to the Marvel 2099 storyline One Nation Under Doom, and Marvel's own editorial framing explicitly compared the scope of the status-quo change to the Dark Reign era launched in 2008.

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Variants (11)