By Dan Brown

Spoiler warning: This review contains plot points involving Marvel characters, so if you value surprise stop reading now.

If you’re a fan of big Marvel events – the company-wide crossovers that depict all of Marvel’s heroes uniting against a common foe – then you’ll love the collected One World Under Doom.

It contains all nine issues from the main One World Under Doom title, which unspooled from February to November last year.

The premise: Latverian dictator Doctor Doom takes over the planet, making the entire globe his domain. The unexpected reaction: Some people welcome the apparent Utopia Doom is offering.

So not only do superheroes like the Thing, Captain America and Thor have to battle the armoured villain, but they also find themselves waging a public-relations war. “He’s given the world peace, health care, education, food security,” Squirrel Girl, a minor Avenger, laments at one point.

Written by Ryan North with pencils by R.B. Silva, the series followed on the heels of another crossover, Blood Hunt. 

The anthology has a cover that’s a riff on a cover from 1977, the one for Super-Villain Team-Up No. 14. It shows the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, Spider-Man and the X-Men kneeling before their nemesis, who is not only a scientific genius, but was also the Sorcerer Supreme in the Marvel continuity of last year.

In the early chapters, the good guys come across as complacent. Taking an invisible jet liner to Eastern Europe, they find it impossible to breach the magic bubble protecting Doom’s castle. 

What seemed like just another Doom ploy soon leaves the heroes without a good answer. As they continue to battle Doom’s allies, like his army of Doombots and assorted Hydra flunkies, his political support across nations grows. 

“We just need to make him look weak and silly and angry,” Johnny Storm (the Human Torch) reasons. Turns out doing so is easier said than done. Even such champions of justice as Thor, who is himself the monarch of Asgard, begin to question whether Doom being emperor is such a rotten development.

Some of the chapters are told from Doom’s point of view, and one even contains a Jack Kirbyesque collage. Doom’s tangle with Dormammu is the artistic highlight of the book. 

Of course, not everything is as it seems. When the protagonists do finally find a way to get inside the castle, they find a massive complex beneath it where Doom has imprisoned the population of Latveria and is draining the life force from each resident, shortening their lives while boosting his powers.

Valeria Richards, the daughter of Mister Fantastic and the Invisible Woman, plays a big role in the story. If you have been reading Marvel in recent years, you will know she is Doom’s goddaughter, and possibly the only other human being he cares about. She tries to talk him out of his plan, becoming collateral damage in the final battle scene.

Big crossovers are now a staple of comic companies like Marvel and DC, and have been since the 1980s. If you’re hungry for some superhero action that may also provoke thought about current politics, check out One World Under Doom.

Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 32 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.