Dungeons of Doom #3 is all killer no filler. Literally – this is one of the more violent and gory comics I can remember from Marvel in recent years, and it’s satisfying the way the end of a Twilight Zone episode is. These arrogant people sought out power they didn’t understand and they were annihilated by it in every sense of the word. It’s a bloody and disgusting issue that should be required reading for anyone that enjoyed the One World Under Doom, and frankly, for people who want to see something gross.
Picking up the threads from the previous two issues, we follow the four disparate factions fighting for control of the powerful artifacts left behind by Dr. Doom. There’s the Americans, the Hydra Agents, the Latverian freedom fighters, and the Wakandan secret agent, Umbra. The four groups are meddling with powers they don’t understand and aren’t capable of controlling. Let’s break down what’s to like by each faction.
Marvel
The Americans are in the second-most Eldritch horror themed tale, and the only one with any superhero spectacle. They’ve accidentally unleashed a horrific entity from its prison and is now systematically jumping from victim to victim by sound. It’s eerie as hell seeing horror set to such a casual melody, but thankfully Thunderbolt Ross figures out a way to stop this terror from beyond at huge collateral damage to the nearby Latverian village. The arrogance and indignity on display from Red Hulk here makes you hate him more than you thought you could.
The Hydra Agents are falling victim to a cursed hammer made by an angry dwarf in Svartalfheim. The user becomes extremely powerful but extremely paranoid, and he begins bashing the absolute hell out of his team before inadvertently making things nearly impossible for himself to overcome.
Umbra, the Wakandan, is caught in a sort of Faustian bargain, or something like what Orpheus had to deal with in Greek Myth. It’s probably the most tragic story here simply because of the hope it lets you feel right before pulling the rug out from under you.
The Latverian Freedom fighters take the cake for highest degree of difficulty in terms of Cthulhu-adjacent threats. A giant monster made out of eyeballs and tentacles while a spirit coaxes out the devils of their lesser nature the entire time.
Marvel
All four stories in Dungeons of Doom #3 are competing with each other in the sense that I was constantly asking myself which situation I would rather be in. And the answer is none. Every story here is an extremely terrifying horror tale that shows the dark side of the coin of the heroes you normally see in a Marvel book. There is no good here, there is only terrible. It’s such a distinct Marvel book that leans into the strengths of its writers, Phillip Kennedy Johnson and Benjamin Percy. The concept is a meatball lobbed right over home plate that the two just absolutely nail out of the park.
The discreet chapters help mask the fact that there are so many cooks in the art-department kitchen. Justin Mason, Robert Gill, Carlos Magno, Georges Jeanty, and Karl Story (not to mention Guru-eFX on colors) all do a great job of making a pretty seamless anthology story that looks truly haunting.
There are no page credits, so I can’t call any one artist out here in particular. I will say I found the Americans/Red Hulk story to be the most visually impressive, the Hydra story to be the most entertaining, the Umbra story to be the most tragic, and the Latverian freedom fighters to be the grossest. No story looked better than any other, but all seemed well-suited to the needs of the story, editorial should be proud of the way the put this all together.
Yuck. I love it.
Marvel
Dungeons of Doom #3 finishes as strong as it started, and looks grosser and more violent than ever thanks to a large art team that nailed their individual assignments. Johnson and Percy played to their strengths and brought about a pretty satisfying conclusion to a book that was pretty clearly more about the journey, and even managed to lay some hints about what to expect from their work in the future. (Readers of Infernal Hulk may want to check this out just for the epilogue, if nothing else.) If you’re a fan of horror, you owe it to yourself to check this out. If you think Marvel has lost its fastball, you owe it to yourself to check this out. If you like seeing tentacle-eye monsters from beyond our most horrible imagination, you’ve hopefully already read it twice.
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