DC’s Perfect Doctor Doom Tribute: The Flash’s Forgotten Daughter Takes Center Stage

Doctor Elemental is an obvious homage to Marvel’s Doctor Doom: both are men cloaked in metal gloves and menacing masks who can’t seem to bear being exposed. Even their introductions have some similarities, each entering with the goal of gaining the heroes’ powers before strangling them to death. In Doctor Doom’s first appearance in Fantastic Four 5 by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Joe Sinnott, Stan Goldberg and Artie Simek in 1962, he takes Sue Storm hostage to blackmail the Fantastic Four into doing what he wants. . Doom then tries to suffocate them. For his part, Doctor Elemental takes Jay’s wife Joan hostage and then attempts to drown her in an elemental infusion. This homage to Silver Age cruelty seems intentional, as Judy Garrick’s story pits the past against the present. Judy brings much-needed optimism to DC’s sometimes dark world: Jay even cited Dark Crisis as an example of the type of villain Judy may not be ready to face. By introducing Doctor Elemental to readers as a brilliant, playful character like Doctor Doom in his first appearance, it both established his credibility as a genuine threat to the Flash family, just invited readers to speculate about how this character has changed over time. This sets up a conflict between a hero who represents half a century of innocence and a villain who is expected to only get worse over time.