DOCTOR DOOM

Victor von Doom debuted in Fantastic Four #5 (1962) holding the ultimate weapon, and aimed it at a chest of pirate gold. Having captured Sue Storm as leverage, Doom revealed his Time Platform — a ten-by-ten-foot slab with a control console, capable of dropping travellers anywhere in Earth's timestream — and ordered Reed, Ben and Johnny back to the eighteenth century to retrieve the enchanted treasure of Blackbeard, which held Merlin's magic stones.

The errand produced Marvel's slyest history joke: bearded, barrel-chested Ben Grimm blended into pirate society so completely that he became the basis for the Blackbeard legend itself. Reed, wise to Doom's accounting habits, filled the returned chest with worthless chains instead of the gems, and the furious figure Doom sent after them turned out to be a robot — the real Doom was watching from elsewhere, as the real Doom generally is.

The Platform outlived its debut by decades. The Fantastic Four captured one unit and kept it in the Baxter Building, riding it to ancient Egypt, to a dinosaur incident, and to confirm wartime history, while Doom built successors and wired time circuitry into his own armour so no console could strand him. A design flourish from that lineage even surfaced on screen in 2022, when the Mister Fantastic of Earth-838 stepped into the Illuminati chamber through a portal its producers identified as Doom's Time Platform technology.