CoronaVirus Comics GIANT-SIZED DOC SAVAGE "Master of the Red Death!" Part 1

When Last We Left Our Heroes...

Adventurer Doc Savage and his five associates, having survived an assassination attempt by a gunman in Mayan ceremonial garb at their NYC headquarters, are proceeding to the Central American country of Hidalgo to investigate the suspicious death by unknown disease of Savage's explorer father.
As they come in for a landing at the airport...

Are Monk's buddies dead?

Did Ham's suit get wrinkled?

And, where's the Man of Bronze when you really need him?

Tune in Tomorrow for both the Astounding Answers and This Titanic Tale's Cataclysmic Conclusion
at our "brother" RetroBlog...
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Doc Savage

The Man of Bronze

CoronaVirus Comics GIANT-SIZED DOC SAVAGE "The Man of Bronze" Part 1

Who's the superhero whose origin is tied in to deadly disease?

And, ironically, he's one of the few superheroes who's also a practicing MD!

Doc and his buddies go in pursuit of the would-be assassin...
Tomorrow!

at our "brother" RetroBlog, Atomic Kommie Comics!

In the early 1970s, bolstered by the success of Conan the Barbarian, both DC and Marvel attempted to launch other pulp characters who had successful paperback reprint series as comic book titles.

Hoping that the audiences for them would carry over as Conan's had, Marvel acquired the rights to Doc Savage, while DC snagged both The Shadow and The Avenger.

The Doc title lasted only eight issues from 1972-73, but the license remained in Marvel's hands when the George Pal movie came along and Marvel invoked their right to do a comic based on the movie.

Compare with page 7 above.

Since the flick was an adaptation of the premiere novel "The Man of Bronze", which Marvel had already used as the basis for the first two issues of their previous comic, it was decided to repackage that material as a double-sized one-shot to tie-in with the movie's release.

The art was modified to match the appearance of Doc in the movie, substituting an open-collared shirt for his Marvel-created blue vest and a buzz-cut for the James Bama/Bantam paperback "skullcap" (see left).

(I always wondered why Marvel didn't go with the torn-shirt look of the Bantam paperback covers on the comics.

Maybe they didn't want people confusing Doc with their resident torn-shirt aficionado, Nick Fury.

Thankfully, Marvel returned to the torn shirt "look" on the 1975-77 b/w magazine covers by Ken Barr.)

The original two-issue comic adaptation had updated the 1933 novel to the then-present 1970s.

The Giant-Size Doc Savage "re-mastering" modified the technology back to 1930s levels, except the adaptation's replacing of the Mayan assassin's elephant gun with a laser rifle, which remained!

They also re-did Monk's hair from the incorrect black-with-blue-highlights to the red color it had in the pulp stories (and the remainder of the Marvel run).

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Doc Savage

The Man of Bronze

Reading Room DOC SAVAGE "Polar Treasure"

The Polar Vortex reminded me of an early Doc Savage novel...

...which was condensed into the shortest comics adaptation I've ever seen of a novel!

Two notes:

1) the flying man on the cover is Ajax the Sun Man, who had his own strip in the book.

(Ajax is not in the Doc Savage tale.)

2) the story may be NSFW due to racial stereotypes common to the 1940s.

The first few issues of the 1940s Doc Savage Comics condensed and adapted Doc pulp novels.

This issue (#3 from 1941) took the 1933 pulp tale "Polar Treasure" and fit it into only eight pages!

Both writer and artist of the adaptation and cover are unknown.

Lester Dent wrote the original novel under the "Kenneth Robeson" house pen-name.

Trivia: both the original and paperback editions of the novel are #4 in their respective series.

(After the first novel, "Man of Bronze", Bantam Books reprinted the stories out of order, going with what they felt were the most exciting tales first.)

Paperback art by Jim Aviati or Lou Feck. Pulp art by Walter M Baumhofer

Bookmark us (if you haven't already) since we have a lot of cool never-reprinted material coming up this year!

Reading Room: DOC SAVAGE "Television Peril"

Doc Savage, though incredibly-popular in pulps, never made it big in comics.

But it wasn't for lack of trying, as this never-reprinted tale from Shadow Comics #91 (1948) shows!

Oddly, Doc, who doesn't hesitate to utilize captured equipment (like the HellDiver submarine*) in his fight against evil, doesn't adapt this teleportation device in later stories to enable him to reach distant locales faster than otherwise possible!

The writer is unknown, but the art is by Bob Powell's art studio, which was "packaging" (providing editorial and art services) for several titles for the publisher.
Doc Savage went thru a couple of incarnations in the 1940s.
He started out as a backup in Shadow Comics for three issues before receiving his own 20-issue book featured a bare-chested version wearing a hood with a mystic jewel from Tibet that gave him various powers as needed by the scriptwriter.
After the title was cancelled, Doc returned to the back of Shadow Comics, where he was portrayed as a better-than-normal (but not superhuman) investigator battling weird threats, staying to the end of the title in 1949.

Note: there's lots of currently-available Doc Savage material (pulps, comics, movies, and even radio shows), all well-worth picking up (most of them are in my personal collection), but we're be showing only the stuff not included in those volumes!

*The HellDiver was captured by Doc in The Polar Treasure.

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Reading Room: DOC SAVAGE & THE SHADOW "Case of the Shrieking Skeletons" Conclusion

When Last We Left Our Heroes...

Art by Stan Manoukian and Dave Stevens

The plot's a bit convoluted, but you can re-read it from the beginning with Part 1 HERE, Part 2 HERE, and Part 3 HERE.

Right now, all you need to know is that Doc Savage and The Shadow have been taken prisoner by an alliance of Nazis and gangsters who are using genetically-modified humans turned into giant monsters who then deteriorate into shambling skeletal zombie-like creatures.

But holding the Man of Bronze and the Master of Darkness is another matter...

Writer Steve Vance tossed in a kool Easter Egg...Professor Reinstein himself, and the "secret government project"!

If you're a fan of a certain Star-Spangled Avenger, you'll recognize the scientist's name!

Professor Reinstein did receive a position at a government facility where he perfected his formula...

 But Professor Reinstein's legacy lives on...