Doctor Doom!

I also liked the story where in an unlikely sequence of events Reed Richards was trapped in the armour of Dr Doom and started kind of turning into him.

DD's personality is pretty simple: he is very intelligent (by super-villain standards anyway) and extremely arrogant. He's also extremely European, despite his education - if you can read Doom as American then the writer's getting something wrong (or it's a DOOMBOT!). He's kind of an agglomeration of Old Europe stereotypes - feudal, tyrannous, romantic, slightly mystical, overbearingly haughty, one foot deep in the past, un-knowable. There is therefore something a little ridiculous about him, just as there is something ridiculous (but recognisable) about the twisted Ruritania that Latveria is always written as.

(The actual set-up for Latveria is basically: what if Lichtenstein was ruled by a super-villain? On the few occasions you see maps it's absolutely tiny and seems to be in the armpit of Switzerland somewhere.)

in a 'new' avengers i read recently, bendis seemed to be writing doc d as some kind of international war crim - which, while not totally unlikely, did seem to be in slightly bad taste

Tom and DV both OTM in every word -- the I-am-become-Doom story is why I say I like Claremont's run on FF, and I was just thinking last night (while reading Wikipedia's entry on Jim Shooter) that Doom really rose above the rest of the cast in Secret Wars, while Magneto -- Marvel's hero/villain du jour -- was bland and tiresome.

(Shooter transfers the whole "he's a bad guy he's a villain but the world would be better off under his wing" business to Korvac in his Avengers run, so I think there's a personality type involved here that appealed to him as much as omnipotence did.)

We've vilified Byrne before, I think, for "revealing" that Doom's disfigurement was nothing but a minor facial scar, the real wound being to his vanity et cetera ad byrneum.

I mean, there's a ton foreshadowed about the character just in the name -- which would probably have been something like "Daniel Doom" if Stan hadn't made him European, or "Alexei Doom" if he hadn't had a thing for alliteration, and both of those are terrible.

I wasn't aware of that! I have a very vivid memory of a Byrne panel in which Sue is looking at Doom's bare face with a 'Dear lord! He's hideous!' type thought balloon, but it may be false.

Byrne tried to give arch-nemesis Doctor Doom a more consistent characterization. For example. Lee and Kirby disagreed about the extent to which Doom's unmasked face was disfigured. Lee thought Doom had horrible scars but Kirby felt it was only a minor scar. Byrne resolved these viewpoints by revealing that Doom originally had a small scar but put on an iron mask while red hot, causing horrific disfiguration. Also, Byrne felt that Doom's guest appearances in other books was mischaracterized (such as in Chris Claremont's X-Men) so robot doubles of Doom were revealed to have appeared in those instances instead.

(Other google hits make it sound like Byrne's solution wasn't just a matter of marrying Stan and Jack but explaining references to this "small scar" as well as instances of people seeing Doom unmasked and being horrified.)

I had no idea Byrne started the Doombots.

And I also liked that story in Iron Man #250 where Doom and Iron Man travel into the future. Doom meets his future self, now more machine than man and is so disturbed by this hideous sight that he blasts him into smithereens. Along the lines of...

Doom: 'Bah! I swear I will never become this mockery of a man!'

Future Doom: 'Yes... I remember saying those words, so long ago now...'

http://i40.tinypic.com/2h2qqs2.png

Now that is a hot date

I always liked the idea that Doom's "hideous deformity" is in fact just a minor scar on one cheek, but he is so vain that he considers this blemish a ruination of his hitherto perfect visage.