5 More Comics to Read Before Avengers: Doomsday. The Second Reading Path, Now That We Know What the Movie Is Actually About.

When I wrote the first reading list, we had a casting announcement and a release date. That was it.

Now we have a trailer with half a billion views, a poster fans are dissecting thread by thread, and Comic-Con footage where Sue Storm says everything Victor loved was taken from him while Doom raises an army of Sentinels. The movie stopped being a mystery and started showing its cards. And every card it’s shown points at comics that weren’t on my first list.

At the end of that first article I floated a few books in the questions I left you with, Triumph and Torment, the original Secret Wars, Hickman’s Fantastic Four run. Time to make good on that. This is the second path: five more comics, picked because of what we now actually know about this movie. Same rules as last time. Not the definitive list. Not a 200-issue homework assignment. Just the books that make what’s coming in December hit harder.

Let’s get into it.

1. Triumph and Torment: The Comic That Might Explain the Poster

Every year on Midsummer’s Eve, Doctor Doom storms Hell to fight for his mother’s soul. Every year he loses. In this 1989 graphic novel by Roger Stern and a young Mike Mignola, Doom finally gets help: he wins the right to one request from Doctor Strange, and instead of power, instead of Reed Richards’ head on a plate, he asks for help saving his mother from Mephisto.

Here’s the backstory the book delivers: Doom’s mother was a sorceress who made a desperate bargain with Mephisto, and the power he gave her spiraled into a massacre she never intended. Her soul has been his prize ever since. Her son has spent his whole life trying to win it back. The book takes Strange and Doom into Hell itself, and the price Mephisto asks, and what Doom does about it, is one of the coldest and most revealing character beats in Marvel history.

Why I’m reading it for Doomsday: Look at the poster again. Doom climbing stone steps toward a tapestry of a woman and a child rising above a broken world, angels around them. A shattered planet underneath a mother and child. That’s incursion imagery hanging on Doom’s wall. Fans are split on who that woman is, but one of the loudest theories says it’s comics-accurate: Victor and his mother. If the MCU is pulling anything from Doom’s actual emotional history, this is the book that history lives in. And after Comic-Con, where the footage had Sue saying Victor used to be kind until everything he loved was taken, this stopped being a deep cut and became possible required reading. If the tapestry theory is right, this is the story Marvel is adapting the heart from.

2. Secret Wars (1984): The Original Battleworld, and the First Time Doom Stole God's Power

Before Hickman’s masterpiece, there was the original. A cosmic being called the Beyonder kidnaps Earth’s heroes and villains, drops them on a patchwork planet called Battleworld, and tells them to fight. Slay your enemies and all you desire shall be yours.

I told you in the first list that the 2015 Secret Wars is the one to read, and I stand by it. But the 1984 original by Jim Shooter and Mike Zeck earns its place now for one reason: it’s the story where Doom refuses to play the game. While everyone else fights, Doom aims higher. He attacks the Beyonder himself, steals the power of a being beyond the entire universe, and for a stretch of this series, Doctor Doom is functionally God. More than forty years before RDJ put on the mask, this is the comic that established the ceiling: Doom doesn’t want to win the battle. He wants to own the board.

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Why I’m reading it for Doomsday: The movies are called Doomsday and Secret Wars. The second title is this book’s title. And with everything now pointing toward Doom holding godlike power over what’s left of reality, the 1984 story is where that image was born. Reading it next to the 2015 version shows you the two Dooms the MCU can blend: the conqueror who takes power because he wants it, and the survivor who takes it because someone has to. My bet after the trailer is the MCU version is both.

3. New Avengers: Everything Dies. Where the Incursions Begin.

My first list had Time Runs Out, the endgame of Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers saga. This is the opening move, and after the trailer, I think you need it more.

New Avengers (2013) starts with the Illuminati, Iron Man, Reed Richards, Black Panther, Doctor Strange, Black Bolt, Namor, and Beast, discovering the incursions: parallel Earths colliding, two universes dying unless one Earth destroys the other first. The smartest men in the world sit in a room and slowly realize that every option in front of them is monstrous. The title of the first arc is the thesis: Everything Dies. Then you watch the greatest heroes on Earth prove it, compromise by compromise.

Why I’m reading it for Doomsday: The trailer put the word on the table. Doom’s voiceover warns of something that can’t be deterred and an unthinkable decision. The SDCC footage has Doom telling the heroes they’ve lived stolen lives and must give them back. That’s incursion language. If the MCU is adapting the incursion crisis, this book is where you learn what it actually costs the people trying to stop it, and why someone like Doom would look at heroes fumbling the problem and decide he’s the only one who can solve it. Time Runs Out shows you where it ends. This shows you how good people start down that road.

4. Days of Future Past: The Sentinel Story the Footage Just Made Relevant

The Comic-Con footage ended with Doom raising an army of Sentinels out of the ground. If that image made you cheer without fully knowing why, this is the book that built the reflex.

Uncanny X-Men #141 and 142, 1981, Chris Claremont and John Byrne. Two issues. That’s the whole thing, and it’s one of the most influential stories in comics history. A future where Sentinels rule North America, mutants are in camps, and the surviving X-Men send a consciousness back in time to stop the assassination that doomed the world. Every dark alternate future in superhero fiction descends from these two issues.

Why I’m reading it for Doomsday: The X-Men are in this movie. Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, the Fox cast, all confirmed. And now the Sentinels are too, raised by Doom himself. Days of Future Past is the story that defined what Sentinels mean: they’re not robots, they’re the future nobody stopped. Whatever the MCU is doing by putting them in Doom’s hands, the emotional charge of that image was built here, in two issues you can read in an afternoon.

5. Emperor Doom: The Comic That Asks the Question Marvel Is Marketing With

At Comic-Con, Marvel handed out 6,500 Doom masks and RDJ told the crowd decisions will have to be made. The whole campaign is daring you to side with Doom. This 1987 graphic novel is the story that takes that dare seriously.

In Emperor Doom, Doom wins. Using the Purple Man’s mind-control powers as a living battery, he takes over the entire planet, bloodlessly. And here’s the part nobody expects: the world gets better. Wars end. Crime ends. The whole thing runs. The one hero the control never touched, and the handful he frees, have to face an ugly question: if the world is at peace, what exactly are they fighting to restore? And the ending lands the best Doom beat of all, he gets bored. Ruling a world that can’t tell him no turns out to be beneath him.

Why I’m reading it for Doomsday: Because the MCU is clearly building a Doom with a case. A man whose universe died, who blames the heroes’ choices, who says they’ve lived stolen lives. The scariest version of that character isn’t the one who’s wrong. It’s the one who might be right, and Emperor Doom is the purest version of that argument Marvel ever published. Read it before December and Doom’s side of the movie will sound very different to you.

The Path So Far

First list: Books of Doom, Avengers vs. X-Men, Time Runs Out, Secret Wars 2015, Infamous Iron Man. That’s Doom’s soul, the philosophy, the collapse, the godhood, and the aftermath. This list is the other half: his mother, his first godhood, where the incursions start, why the Sentinels matter, and the question of whether he’s actually wrong.

Ten books total. Every one of them will be echoing somewhere in that theater in December.

So same question as last time: what did I miss? Is there a Doom story you’d put above any of these? Are you reading Hickman’s Fantastic Four for the Council of Reeds? Did Unthinkable mess you up as bad as it messed me up? And for the people who read the first five: which one changed how you’re watching the trailers? Drop it in the comments. December is close, and the reading time is running out.