Anthony Tollin is doing wonderful work. Working with Nostalgia Ventures, the longtime comic book production man and radio/pulp historian has brought back to print the adventures of the two greatest pulp-magazine superheroes: Walter Gibson's THE SHADOW and Lester Dent's DOC SAVAGE. Better yet, he is releasing them in luxurious 7" x 10" editions (the approximate size of the original pulps), two novels to an edition, using the original typesetting, two-column layout, and text illustrations.
Doc Savage is most notable for having touched off two publishing phenomena. His original magazine from the 1930's and 1940's was a best-seller. In 1964, Bantam Books began reprinting his adventures in a series of numbered paperbacks, with magnificent covers by James Bama. (Bama created the look most readers of that time associate with Doc -- a vaguely-Lee-Marvin-looking bronze giant, with rippling muscles and that utterly bizarre widow's peak crewcut.) The paperback run continued through 1991, and racked up tremendous sales, with millions of Doc Savage paperbacks in print.
As a kid in the late '70's, I'd pick up Doc Savage novels by the handful, and inhale one in a Sunday. They feature some of the most engaging pulp writing of the era (outside of the Hammett-Chandler school of hard-boiled detective prose). True, it's purple as a two-day-old bruise, and bereft of subtlety and subtext. But it's colorful, compelling, fast-paced, humorous, and delivers the goods on action and atmosphere.
Much the same can be said for the SHADOW books. Whereas Dent's inspiration was international explorers and adventurers (of which Dent himself was one), Gibson's influences were his own career as a stage magician and escape artist, along with ninjas, mystics, and other Asian men of mystery. The result was a hero who operated more like a villain -- he dressed in black, he melted into the shadows, he blasted opponents to oblivion with long-slide .45 automatics, and his trademark was a sinister laugh.
The Shadow's pulp adventures were also reprinted in a series of paperbacks -- most notably, in a run with covers by comic book writer-artist Jim Steranko.
The Nostalgia Ventures editions feature covers taken from some of the original pulp paintings. But a variant cover to the first Doc Savage edition reprints the magnificent Bama cover to the paperback reprint of THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE (yep, Doc had the fortress before Superman did) -- complete with the funky '60's-font logo.
