#The Adventures of Doc Savage

[chernobog13]

Dream casting for an early 1960s Doc Savage television series.

[cantsayidont]

August 1984. This won't change anyone's feelings about cult movie perennial THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI: ACROSS THE EIGHTH DIMENSION one way or the other, but if you're wondering what the hell the deal is supposed to be with Buckaroo Banzai and his team, the answer is, "It's an obvious pastiche of the pulp hero Doc Savage."

Launched in 1933, Doc Savage was one of the leading adventure heroes of the pulp magazines. Doc (whose full name was Clark Savage Jr.) was scientifically trained from childhood to the peak of human perfection, singularly adept in everything from mechanical engineering to medicine to martial arts. He had a secret headquarters called the Fortress of Solitude and a whole array of specially designed vehicles and equipment, but he was also a public figure, with offices in the Empire State Building. Doc had a team of eccentric, highly specialized aides — Monk Mayfair, Ham Brooks, Renny Renwick, Long Tom Roberts, and Johnny Littlejohn — who each had a particular skill and a couple of distinctive personality traits (for instance, Monk was a skilled industrial chemist, but also an "ape-like" brute with a ferocious temper). They were sometimes aided by Doc's cousin, Pat Savage, who was almost as capable as Doc, although he tried to keep her out of the fray because she was (gasp) a girl.

This was a fairly common pattern for pulp heroes. For instance, the pulp version of the Shadow (who was distinctly different from the radio incarnation) relied on a whole network of agents, some appearing only once or twice, some recurring across many of his published adventures. From a narrative standpoint, the agents and assistants had two principal purposes: The first was to offset the rather overpowered heroes — pulp heroes didn't necessarily have superhuman powers, but even those who didn't tended to be preternaturally skilled at nearly everything, so it was convenient to limit their direct involvement in an adventure to crucial moments, and let the assistants (who could be much more fallible) do much of the legwork. The second object was to beef up the characterization. Doc Savage was morally irreproachable as well as absurdly multi-talented, so there wasn't a lot to be done with him character-wise, while maintaining the mystique of a character like the Shadow required him to remain a fairly closed book.

Although the pulp heroes were a huge influence on early comic book superheroes like Superman and Batman, some of these conventions didn't translate well to other media: In a 13-page comic book story or half-hour radio episode, having too many characters was cumbersome (and expensive, where it meant hiring extra actors), and comic book readers normally expected to follow their four-color heroes quite closely, even before the breathless internal monologue became a genre staple. So, Superman inherited Doc Savage's Fortress of Solitude, but not his "Fabulous Five" assistants, while heroes like Batman and Captain America generally stuck with a single sidekick rather than a team of aides. Even the late Doc Savage pulp adventures (which ended in 1949) de-emphasized the assistants to keep the focus more on Doc himself. Ultimately, the pulp heroes didn't really have the right narrative center of gravity for visual media, which is why they've become relatively obscure, despite repeated revival attempts. The 1975 Doc Savage movie with Ron Ely, for instance, was a notorious commercial flop, and elements like Doc's childishly bickering assistants seemed odd and dated, even taking into account the film's nostalgia-bait '30s period setting.

What BUCKAROO BANZAI tried to do was to bring that old pulp hero formula into the modern era with a big infusion of '80s style and humor. Like Doc Savage, Buckaroo is a wildly gifted polymath (in the opening scenes, he rushes from performing brain surgery to test-driving his Jet Car through a mountain), so famous and important a personage that he puts the president of the United States on hold, and he surrounds himself with an array of brilliant, eccentric aides with silly nicknames who play in his rock band when they're not fighting crime or doing advanced scientific experiments.

Alas, judging by the poor box office returns, general audiences were no more amenable to the '80s version of this formula than they had been to DOC SAVAGE: MAN OF BRONZE nine years earlier, even with the 1984 film's extraordinary cast and memorably witty dialogue. Granted, even many of the movie's most diehard fans are baffled by the convoluted plot — a crucial expository scene where the leader of the Black Lectroids (Rosalind Cash) explains much of what's going on is nigh-incomprehensible without subtitles or closed captioning — but beyond that, THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI is essentially an extended riff on a particular slice of pop culture that had long since dropped out of the public consciousness, which is both part of its charm and also its commercial undoing, at least as mainstream entertainment.

(Also, if you're wondering, yes, the TOM STRONG series by Alan Moore and Chris Sprouse is also an obvious Doc Savage pastiche, although at least some of its plot and character concepts were probably retoolings of unused ideas from Moore's earlier Maximum Press/Awesome Comics SUPREME series, which was an extended pastiche of the pre-Crisis Superman.)

[evilhorse]

Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze #1

[spacenoirdetective]

Doc Savage fighting a giant octopus by James Elliott Bama

[vintagegeekculture]

RIP to James Bama, the artist for the 1960s paperback revival of Doc Savage. Even more so than his pulp era, this age, when the pulp adventurer was revived to fit the taste of 60s-70s era “Men’s Adventure” novels, defines our mental image of the character....and it is primarily due to imagery created by James Bama. 

It was Bama who first drew Doc as a lantern jawed, grave faced man with a blazing gaze, a rugged cowboy primarily based on model Steve Holland. The ripped t-shirt is the look associated with the character, and Bama created it off occasional references in the book to strongman Doc Savage’s muscles ripping clothes when he really flexed. The novels also described Doc’s hair as a close cropped skullcap with a dramatic widow’s peak, two things forgotten in illustrations but which Bama captured perfectly. 

Bama is best known for his Western illustrations, as he was a native of Wyoming. He seemed to have an eye for craggy, pained faces that have done a lot of suffering and hard living that you can see in their eyes, like the kind hard living men in the West used to have. Tragically, with his death, one more link to the world of men’s adventure in the 60s closes behind us. After all, you can always tell a Bama illustration when you see one, even if it isn’t Doc Savage or a Western, like this one:

[driveintheaterofthemind]

5 Random Pulps

[pulpsandcomics2]

Doc Savage Comics v2 #4 June 1943

[buzzdixonwriter]

Doc Savage

For two generations of young readers — the original pulp fans of the 1930s and 40s followed by the reprint fans of the 1960s and 70s — Doc Savage remains not only an iconic figure but a template for all adventure heroes who came after.

Doc and his team — the ape-like chemist Monk Mayfair, his rival attorney Ham Brooks, construction engineer Renny Renwick, electrical engineer Long Tom Roberts, archeologist / geologist Johnny Littlejohn — inspired such diverse teams as Captain Future and his crew, the Challengers of the Unknown, the Fantastic Four, the crew of the Enterprise, Buckeroo Banzai’s Hong Kong Cavaliers (many of whom, we must be fair to observe, executed the formula fair more successfully than Doc and his crew), and Team Venture.

Doc also proved a direct inspiration (read “rip off”) of several key concepts later popularized by Superman, including “the man of bronze” vs “the man of steel” and first use of an arctic Fortress of Solitude for those times when he just needed a break from adventuring.

There have been radio serials, comic books, movies (one by producer George Pal, another by teen fans in the 1970s), and a heart-breaking number of announced but never made media projects, including a serial (eventually rewritten as Fighting Devil Dogs) and abortive TV projects (including a proposed animated series by Ruby-Spears that went so far afield of the original concept that it’s a blessing it got shelved after early development).

So what makes the character so fascinating?

He represents an ideal embodiment of the ultimate of humanity abilities.  Unlike Superman (born or another planet) or other superheroes (either mutants or enhanced by some form of magic or super-science), Doc’s abilities are the result of his father’s relentless training regimen for him since birth.  He’s a brilliant polymath in all sciences (a legit doctor with and MD plus a plethora of PhDs), a fluent linguist in virtually all languages including ancient Mayan and American Sign Language, a skilled mimic and disguise artist, an expert martial artist and judo master (this at a time when martial arts were virtually unknown in America), plus a pilot / sailing master as well as a world renown philanthropist.

The only thing he isn’t is genuinely human, and from the very beginning there’s an unspoken yet nonetheless present undercurrent in all his adventures that his frantic activity is pretty much a defense against admitting he really has no inner personal life.

Over the next several months (probably years) I’m going to recap the Doc Savage novels as re-published by Bantam Books in the 1960s. Their covers by James Bama probably did more to cement Doc’s iconic appeal than the stories themselves, creating the look that every succeeding interpretation has followed. While Bantam eventually reprinted all the original pulp stories, they didn’t do so in order of publication; I will add that to help you understand the development of the character and series.

© Buzz Dixon

[b-movieenema]

Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze was a patriotic, jingoistic sort of superhero from the pre-Superman pulp era. By 1975, he was most definitely too passe to find an audience.

[vintagerpg]

On Monday, remember how I said FR1: Waterdeep and the North is really just about Waterdeep? Well, FR5: The Savage Frontier (1988), released the following year, is basically the “and the North.” In form, though, it pairs with FR2: Moonshae as a pretty typical Gazeteer-style sourcebook, full of lore, notable locales and interesting inhabitants. Unlike that volume, this one contains explicit adventure hooks, which are a nice feature.

While a lot of the material here is derived from Greenwood’s notes, I think it is interesting that TSR trusted this book to a freelancer, even if that freelancer was RPG heavyweight Jennell Jaquays (who penned Dark Tower and Caverns of Thracia, and co-authored Griffin Mountain, among a pile of other important RPG books). FR5 covers all the major spots on the Sword Coast, probably the most visited region of the Realms — Icewind Dale (home of Drizzt), Mithril Hall, the Spine of the World, Luskan, Neverwinter, Hellgate Keep and more are profiled here pretty much for the first time (Icewind Dale, of course, had already debuted in R.A. Salvatore’s novel The Crystal Shard, though). I can’t help but wonder if the enduring appeal of these places is partly down to Jaquays’ influence.

There is some weird stuff, too. I noticed, probably because it was so fresh, that Doc from I12: The Egg of the Phoenix is hanging out here, despite that other module taking place in Greyhawk (you read that post way back in March, but I wrote it yesterday). I looked up Shannon Appelcline’s notes for the book on Drivethru and he has no explanation for this, but he does note that Jaquays also recycled Amelior Amanitas and Jingleshod the Iron Axeman from her excellent DragonQuest module The Enchanted Wood (1981), which I really should post about one of these days.

Great Larry Elmore cover with his trademark snow. What a bunch of weirdos, right? Skull guy and mage guy and blue guy and orc guy make quite the group. Interiors are by Esteban Maroto. They aren’t bad, but they seem undercooked — this is probably the first instance of underwhelming art in a Forgotten Realms book, but it sure won’t be the last.

[yourobedientserpent]

Athelind Long's Superhero Chronology

Cross-Published from my Blogspot blog, Kirby Dots & Ditko Ribbons. INTRODUCTION  There's a tendency to divide the different eras of comic book superheroes into "Golden," "Silver", and "Modern," with occasional, tentative attempts to parcel off the Bronze Age, as well.

Let's just say that this lacks nuance. The Superhero Genre has gone through a lot of trends and phases and distinctive cultures over the years, and lumping almost half of its history into some concept of "The Modern Age" is just phoning it in. 

Some notes: 

This is not quite the same as the ages of COMICS, though there's similar nomenclature, largely because comics history tends to focus on the superhero genre even when it tries not to. This is about SUPERHEROES, in more than just a single medium; the "Ages" only indirectly impact other genres. 

All dates are approximate. 

There's plenty of overlap between Silver/Bronze, Bronze/Iron, and Iron/Aluminum, but when I started looking a keystone events, I was astonished by how neatly everything fell into 15-year chunks! 

THE CHRONOLOGY

Prelude (1830s-1938): The dawn of mass-produced popular culture: penny dreadfuls, dime novels, pulp magazines, newspaper comic strips. Folk heroes and detectives start sharing the pages with costumed adventurers, some with peak-human or superhuman abilities. Professor Challenger, Sherlock Holmes, The Nyctalope, The Shadow, Doc Savage. 

Golden Age (1938-1953): Begins with Superman, of course; ends with Post-War Superhero Implosion and Frederic Wertham's anti-comics crusade. The JSA stopped appearing in All-Star Comics in 1951. Fawcett stopped publishing Captain Marvel in 1953. 

Interregnum (1950ish-1960ish): A lot of historians make much of the gap between the Golden and Silver Ages, but, in retrospect, it's surprisingly brief. Superheroes never really go away, but they are de-emphasized in favor of other genres in comics, including horror, romance, and science fiction. Even at DC, other than Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, superheroes are relegated to back-up stories in anthology titles. Still, The Adventures of Superman with George Reeves remained popular throughout this period. 

Silver Age (1954-1970): The Reign of the Comics Code Authority (est. 1954). Really starts to roll with the demise of EC Comics and the reboot of The Flash; peaks with the "camp" craze popularized by the 1966 Batman TV series; ends when Kirby Moves to DC and Marvel publishes the Spider-Man Drug Stories without the Code Stamp. Early on, formerly-anonymous creators start getting openly credited on the title pages of their stories; this starts at Marvel, but DC eventually follows suit. 

Bronze Age (1971-1985): Begins with O'Neil and Adams revamping Batman and Green Lantern; Ends with the Crisis on Infinite Earths. Both DC and Marvel start paying closer attention to continuity and "relevance", and the most successful titles are the ones that most fully embrace an ongoing serial storyline (Legion of Super-Heroes, X-Men, The New Teen Titans). The specialty comic book shop starts becoming more common at the beginning of the era, and the closing years of the era herald a growing Creator's Rights movement, the birth of the Direct Market -- and the dawn of the independent publishers. 

Iron Age (1986-2000): Begins with Deconstruction: Elementals, The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, and the Wild Cards "mosaic novel" series. Ends with Reconstruction: Morrison's JLA, among others. Dominated by a determined effort to Take Superhero Comics Seriously. The Big Two kill off or "reinvent" goofy, campy Silver Age characters. DC tries very hard to bring coherency and consistency to its new, Post-Crisis timeline. Several independent publishers try cold-starting superhero "universes" of their own; most of them fail, but a lucky few manage to sell their characters to the Big Two (Ultraverse, Wildstorm). 

Aluminum Age (2000-2015): When Everything is Recycled. Marvel starts the Ultimate Universe. DC resurrects Silver Age characters who got killed off in the Bronze and Iron Age. The Comics Code finally dies in 2011. DC does a succession of "sequels" to Crisis on Infinite Earths: Identity Crisis (2004), Infinite Crisis (2005-2006), and the deceptively-named Final Crisis (2008), culminating in another Hard Reboot with the New 52 in 2011. Marvel does its own version of Crisis with the Multiverse Incursion story arc in New Avengers from 2013-2015. "Decompression" and "writing for the trade" become common as trade-paperback collections become more economically important than the traditional monthly comic magazines ("floppies"). 

Digital Age (2015-Current): Superhero not only become mainstream, but actually dominate movies and TV for several years -- this starts in the Aluminum Age, with the MCU in 2008, but is solidly codified by the debut of Arrow in 2015 and an explosion of weekly prime-time superhero shows that lasts almost a decade.

Comments are welcome, but be civil! This is intended to provoke conversations, not fights.

[cthulhubert]

Reading the original Vampire Hunter D novels was a very fascinating experience that I can't actually recommend to anyone.

In most ways, they're very straight-forward pulpy adventure stories. Nothing about the plots or dialogue are compelling. The translation is competent at least.

But the world building is fascinating, rife with fun little details.It's like the author, Hideyuki Kikuchi thought of some off the wall stuff and threw it in for aesthetics, but then comes up with background to explains it, and then actually builds on that explanation, rather than leave it as a fig leaf.

The books are set post post post apocalypse. Humanity nearly wiped themselves out in a nuclear war, so the vampires and other creatures of the night came out of hiding and ruled for ten thousand years... and then started slowly but steadily declining. No longer strong enough to have total control over the world, but more than powerful enough to topple humanity's attempts to organize.

Humanity is in this weird pseudo-medieval state except they also have stuff like cyber-horses. Why? Because that's how the Aristocracy (the v-word is gauche) liked it!

Humanity has been genetically engineered with psychological blocks, such that if they ever learn about the vampires' great weaknesses (other than the sun: garlic, crosses, holy water) they'll immediately forget them!

It's ostensibly "pure sci-fi" because there's no magic. The story is clear about this. Vampires just have novel biology. That gives them telekinesis. (And hemokinesis too. I've always thought that should be a fundamental vampire ability. It's how they slurp every last drop of blood out of a human without needing to like suspend the body and let them bleed out. They also soak cloaks with the blood of virgins over the course of decades and end up with one they can control, to turn into shield or sword.)

D is your classic pulp-y OP protagonist (I compare him in my mind to Doc Savage). Made from the gametes of the Aristocracy's greatest scientist and genetic engineer (whose name also starts with D, wink wink nudge nudge), and his lover: humanity's greatest psychic. He was implanted with a parasite engineered to not take over his body and be helpful instead. He inherited an indestructible sword crafted by the greatest swordsmith who ever lived. He's equipped with a supercomputer in a pendent that can auto-hack most technological locks and defenses. He uses the same cyber-horses as everyone else, but because of his "ability to commune with their inner natures" can wring double performance out of them.

What started me thinking about this is the dhampir like protagonist of yet another forgettable Isekai story (actually, this was a "Returner" manhwa, a genre much more popular in Korea now, which involves people reincarnating back from isekai worlds, or traveling back in time, etc). This guy, like the protagonists of many stories, is so overpowered he is a geopolitical super-power embodied in a single person. That always takes me out of the story, because I can only think about how much responsibility that would entail in my mind, and these guys just use it to fuck around.

[krinsbez]

Presenting...the Pulptober 2024 Prompts

It is months later than it should be, but I have finally gotten it together!

@chronivore, @oldtvandcomics, @themailedfist-blog, @skjam, @haldrada-art And anyone else who is interested.

1-The Shadow/The Hidden Master 2-Doc Savage/Sci-Fi Superman 3-The Green Hornet/I’m Your Villain 4-El Santo/Champion of Justice 5-Vampirella/Monster Hero 6-Steve Canyon/Adventures In Exotic Places 7-The Phantom/Beyond Their Homeland 8-Barbarella/Pulp From Around The World 9- The Lone Ranger/Weapons of Justice 10-Dark Agnes/Iconoclastic Icons 11-Carson Napier/Feats of Courage, Despite Feet of Clay 12-Jack Reacher/Unintentional Pulp 12-Conan/Blood-Stained Smirk 13-Hellboy/Pulp Survivor 14-Dhalua Strong/Behind Every Hero 15-Raffles/Pulp..Hero? 16-The Dragon Lady/Enemy To Ally 17-Doc Sidhe/The Highest Form of Flattery 18-Imaro/Warrior Hero 19-Charlie Chan/Pulp With an Asterisk 20-Sherlock Holmes/Man of Many Talents 21-The Domino Lady/Thrills, Not Kills 22-Zorro/Hero Of The People 23-The Spirit/Hero With A Harem 24-The A-Team/Team of Elites 25-Luke Cage/Hero For Hire 26-Red Sonya and Red Sonja/Not As We Know Them 27-The Sandman/From Pulp To Super 28-Ram Singh/Servant of Justice 29-The Punisher/Justice At Gunpoint 30-Bettie Page/Hero In Adaptation 31-Batman/Undying Heroes

[evilhorse]

Doc Savage (Volume 1) #3

[chernobog13]

Bob Larkin's cover for the Doc Savage novel The Red Spider by Lester Dent (writing as Kenneth Robeson).

The Red Spider was written in 1948 for publication in the Doc Savage pulp magazine. However, Dent's new editor killed the story even though it had been commissioned by the previous editor. Dent moved on and continued with his Doc Savage tales.

A copy of the story was found In Street & Smith's (the publisher of Doc Savage, as well as The Shadow) files. The story was finally printed in 1979 as book #95 in Bantam Books paperback reprint series of all of Doc's adventures.

[vintagegeekculture]

The 1945 Doc Savage mystery, "The Wee Ones," was a ripped from the headlines case inspired by newspaper stories of the Mad Gasser of Mattoon, an unexplained series of gas attacks in Illinois where a masked mystery man blasted others with sprays from a gas gun.

Considered Illinois's answer to the Mothman, many psychologists now believe that the Mad Gasser was just a case of mass hysteria, no doubt fed by irresponsible Illinois police departments who attempted to calm people down, but instead gave statements like (direct quote) "a gas maniac is on the loose."

A well known symptom of schizophrenia are what are called "ray delusions," where schizophrenics believe some dark, malicious figure has a poisonous ray that goes through walls, causes sickness, or turns food rotten or milk sour. Being attacked by a mysterious gas gun wielding assailant is perfectly in line with schizophrenia ray delusions.

Unfortunately, the "Wee Ones" is seldom read because it is in the 1944-1945 era of Doc Savage, when Doc's semi-superhuman, large scale adventures with apocalyptic imagery and natural disasters were subdued and turned into more commonplace mystery thrillers.