If the embed won’t play, Marvel’s special look is also here on YouTube.
Most tourist boards try to sell you on the scenery. Latveria’s has gone with the monarch. A map of Doctor Doom’s homeland has surfaced from a new Avengers: Doomsday tie-in book, and it doesn’t so much chart a country as print one man’s name over and over until the parchment gives up.
The map comes from From Endgame to Doomsday: A Marvel Studios Visual Dictionary: Avengers, Allies, and Foes, and it has been doing the rounds on X since Saturday. A gold star marks the capital, Doomstadt, with Castle Von Doom parked next door. Spread around them are the towns of Doomvale, Doomsburg and Doomton, plus Doomwood Forest, Doom Falls and a peak called Mt. Victorum, which is what passes for restraint in these parts. Somewhere in the Latverian civil service, a cartographer was told he could name one mountain after anything he liked, so long as it was Victor.
None of this is out of character. Doomstadt has been the capital of comics Latveria for decades, and Doom has been plastering the place with his own likeness since the 1960s. Doomton, though, is a fresh addition, and sounds exactly like the sort of commuter town where the castle staff have semi-detached houses and complain about the trains.
The same book carries an updated write-up for Robert Downey Jr.’s Doom: Latveria’s monarch, master of both sorcery and technology, with an intellect to rival Reed Richards’s. It gives him a “rich and complex history” with the Fantastic Four, and notes, with all the deadpan of a royal protocol officer, that his country has been conspicuously missing from Sue Storm’s Future Foundation gatherings. Which tells you everything. Sue sends a card at Christmas; Victor sends a Doombot to check whether it was opened.
ComicBookMovie reads all this as confirmation that this Doom comes from Earth-828, home of the Fantastic Four: First Steps family, rather than being a sinister Tony Stark who took a wrong turn through the multiverse. Marvel isn’t saying either way, which is precisely how Doom would want it.
Latveria has also just made a sort of live-action debut, in a Jeep advert released this week. Steve Rogers, Johnny Storm and the Thing, who gets behind the wheel of a Wrangler, take a road trip through assorted realities that ends with a row of Jeeps parked in front of the Doomstadt Tower, looming over a mountain city. Whether the Doomsburg ring road can cope with seven 4x4s is not addressed. Nor is where you’d park. Presumably everywhere in Latveria is a Doom-only bay.
It all adds to the blizzard of Doom marketing we rounded up yesterday, and here at SFcrowsnest we’re beginning to suspect the campaign is less an advert for a film than a state visit. First the stained glass, then the throne room, now the road atlas. Next week, presumably, the national anthem, all eleven verses of it in praise of the same chap.
Avengers: Doomsday opens in cinemas on 18 December 2026, with Avengers: Secret Wars following on 17 December 2027. We’d book a mini-break to Doomton in the meantime, but the visa application asks for your opinion of Reed Richards, and there is only one acceptable answer.
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