Doctor Doom Debuts Epic Redesign After Replacing Mephisto
Jared is a writer, editor, and Communications Studies graduate who loves popular nerd culture (almost anything to do with Marvel, DC, Star Wars, or The Lord of the Rings) and the interactive storytelling medium. Jared's first console was the PS1, wherein he fell for Spider-Man, Spyro the Dragon, and Crash Bandicoot.
Sign in to your ScreenRant account
Warning! The following contains SPOILERS for Captain America #16.
Well, the cat’s out of the bag: as per Captain America (2025) #16, Doctor Doom has officially taken Mephisto’s place as the ruler of Hell. Depending on how profound a particularly unanticipated retcon turns out to be, Captain America #16 could be one of the most monumentally pivotal single issues in Marvel Comics lore from here onward, too.
It’s still unknown whether or not this imbues him with the same devilish abilities, such as being able to portray himself as a gigantic red beast or a sky full of eyeballs, but it’s certainly a considerable upgrade for Victor von Doom’s status quo and status quo in the mainline Marvel Comics universe. In this fascinating new role, Doom arguably dons his best look yet.
Usurping Mephisto and assuming the crown instead of Veratok, who is happy to see it go to him, Doom debuts a look composed of red-and-grey Roman general-inspired regalia, though with Doom’s classic mask and hood, now adorned with a bay laurel wreath, and four enormous, feathery wings. The color palette is especially striking as red tear lines run down along the mask from its eye slits, and Doom’s eyes now glow red behind the mask.
It’s an incredible redesign that he’ll hopefully have for the foreseeable future. However, it’s not Doom’s new design or dominion over the realm that’s drawing readers’ attention; it’s the fact that his first decree is to free Hell’s inhabitants and effortlessly ensure that “All of Mephisto’s contracts are now null and void.”
Is a deal a contract? It’ll probably take parsing fine print and discovering clandestine clauses in order to get an actual answer as to whether or not Peter Parker and Mephisto’s arrangement was truly fed to a paper shredder, yet this is undoubtedly the closest that Marvel Comics has come to addressing and potentially undoing Spider-Man’s divisive “One More Day” storyline.
The closest thing we have to evidence of this is that Spider-Man does appear in a single panel thereafter, from wherever he was at the time, saying, “What’s-- What’s happening…?” This doesn’t outright confirm that the existence of Peter and Mary Jane Watson’s marriage will be woven back into the fabric of Earth-616’s history, but Doom being the one responsible for retconning Marvel Comics’ most controversial retcon ever would be quite the surprise indeed.
Moreover, Peter and the Avengers will apparently be battling a dethroned Mephisto in Zdarsky’s upcoming Avengers run, so it may not be much longer until we learn whether this has truly had any effect whatsoever on Peter and MJ’s union. Either way, as a benevolent ruler of Hell, Doom might have the wherewithal to expunge this cursed retcon.
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.