Savage Radio Returns

Street & Smith's DOC SAVAGE series of pulp novels in the thirties and forties is exactly the sort of series that should have been made into a radio serial. It had a stalwart hero, exotic locales, characters with distinctive catch phrases, sinister villians, and non-stop action. Yet, oddly, at a time when LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE of all stories was a popular radio series, Doc Savage's adventures did not make the cut. In 1985, National Public Radio remedied that lacuna by producing an all-new DOC SAVAGE serial, adapting two of Lester Dent's novels. That series has not been commercially available -- until now.

Radio Archives has packaged both novels' adaptations (along with an audio documentary about the making of the series) into a clamshell case graced with a painting of Doc and his cousin Pat Savage by frequent DS paperback artist Bob Larkin, and has made the whole set available for $24.98. I snatched it up, and so far I've listened to the adaptation of "Fear Cay" and part of "The Thousand-Headed Man." Now, these stories are pulp-hero fiction, so don't expect sub-plots or complex characterization. And there are some limitations imposed by the radio-drama format: There's a lot of dialogue describing what the characters are seeing; and Doc, who's generally taciturn in the pulp stories, is quite loquacious as he narrates his observations and deductions. Nevertheless, these stories are enormous fun for anyone who enjoys over-the-top 30's adventure. Recommended.

The Marvel of Bronze

In the early 1970's, Marvel Comics, enjoying success with its license of Robert E. Howard's pulp-magazine hero Conan the Barbarian, licensed another pulp hero: Lester Dent's Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze. Now, in a strange twist of licensing fate, Marvel's short run of Doc Savage color comics has been reprinted for the first time by the current holder of the license -- DC Comics.



DC's paperback collection of the Marvel series shows how a license that would seem to be a natural for comics can fail. Doc Savage seems tailor-made for a Marvel series; after all, he is one of the prototypes of the comic-book superhero who would come along just shy of a decade after Doc's debut. Although Doc had no superpowers per se, he was a physical and mental marvel who had an origin story (a father who had a squad of scientists raise him to be the pinnacle of human development), a warehouse full of crime-fighting vehicles and gadgets, a Fortress of Solitude (which Superman would appropriate), a life mission of selflessly vanquishing evil, and a horde of weird super-science ne'er do wells to battle. He influenced Superman, Batman, and any number of four-color folks.

Moreover, although Doc's pulp magazine died in the post-war era (during which he was already becoming an anachronism), Doc, like Conan, had a revival of popularity in the 1960's paperback market. Conan's sales were fueled by Frank Frazetta's book covers; Doc's can be attributed to James Bama's stunning cover paintings, which transformed the wavy-haired Doc of the pulps into a Lee-Marvin-like bronze giant with a crewcut and widow's peak.

The Marvel Doc Savage comics did not want for creative talent. The writers included Marvel second-in-command Roy Thomas; Steve Engelhart, who wrote some of the best-remembered comics stories of the seventies, for both Marvel and DC; and Gardner Fox, who actually wrote pulp and comics stories in the '30's and '40's. Artistically, the comics boasted knockout covers by Jim Steranko; and the interiors of most of the issues combined the fluid, cartoony art of Ross Andru with the dramatic finishes of Tom Palmer.

So why did the comic last only eight issues, plus a giant-size reprint (done to tie-in with the abysmal 1975 Doc Savage movie)? It's hard to say nearly forty years (eep!) after the fact. The pacing of the issues (which adapted some of the Doc Savage novels in two-to-three-issue arcs) seems clunky, with lots of exposition mixed haphazardly into the action sequences. One problem was likely the editorial choice to deliver a lot of the exposition through Doc's dialog (even when no one else is present), likely to prevent the comics from becoming masses of narrative captions. The result turns the taciturn Doc of the pulps into a nonstop chatterbox. Or perhaps he merely fell victim to the chaotic world of 1970's comics publishing, in which rising paper and printing costs threatened to destroy comics, and Marvel and DC published tons of reprints in an effort to force each other off the newsstands.

This certainly wasn't the end of Doc's adventures in comics. Marvel ran a black-and-white Doc Savage magazine (tying into the movie) from 1975-1977; and numerous other comics companies have licensed the Man of Bronze since then (including DC, in a prior attempt in the late eighties). But it's interesting to see comics from 38 years ago adapting stories from 30 years before that.

Savage Birthday

According to Mark Evanier's blog, yesterday was the 75th "birthday" of Doc Savage. More precisely, it marked 75 years since the pulp fiction hero exploded into life in the pages of his Street & Smith magazine.

When I was a kid, Bantam was still publishing its paperback reprints of the Doc Savage pulp stories. Those paperbacks were a publishing phenomenon, primarily because of the new covers James Bama did for them. Bama's Doc, with his infamous widow's peak, didn't look much like the 1930's pulp paintings or illustrations of the Man of Bronze. But they did sell huge numbers of reprints of 30-40 year old stories.

I used to gobble up the reprints. They were cheap, easily available in used book stores, and short enough that I could consume a 125-page book in a few hours on a Sunday. I can't remember many of the details of those stories, but I loved them as the prose equivalent of the comic books I collected.

I've recently bought some of Anthony Tollin's reprints of the Doc Savage books. Reading them as an adult, I can see that the stories were linear and lacked subplots. I can tell that writer Lester Dent reserved characterization for Doc (not always easy, considering Doc's repressive upbringing and emotional control -- I savored every scene in which Doc suffers some emotional failing, just because he's otherwise so omnicompetent), his closest assistants, Ham and Monk, and the occasional interesting villain. And I note that Doc's three other assistants are primarily defined by their catchphrases, which are repeated ad infinitum.

Yet I can still get swept up in Dent's masterful storytelling. Anyone who wants to write adventure fiction of any kind should read some of the Doc Savage books, just to see how to use vivid descriptions and suspense to suck the reader along at a breakneck pace.

Pulpy Heroes

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.