The Shadow and Doc Savage - Back In Action!

Thanks to such books as Jim Steranko's History of Comics and Tony Goodstone's The Pulps:Fifty Years of American Pop Culture , both of which came out in 1970, I developed an interest in the so-called "bloody pulps". These cheap magazines with lurid and cheesy prose and illustrations were quite popular in the early 20th century, reaching it's peak in the 1930s and 1940's.


(Steranko's History of Comics ,Volume One)

A history of the cheap pulp novels can be found at this site, which does the topic more justice than I could. I wasn't even born till they had gone out of existance and had to make do with paperback reprintings of the exploits of pulp mainstays The Shadow and Doc Savage from publishers such as Bantam and Pyramid in the 60s and 70s. (See below.)



I enjoyed the reprints of these goofy adventure/thriller novels which were originally published between 1931 (Doc Savage popped up two years after The Shadow, in '33) to 1949 by Street & Smith. In the 60s & 70s, you could find these paperbacks not only in bookstores, but also drug stores, newsstands, bus stations, airports & supermarkets as well. Try finding anything like them today at Stop & Shop. Anyway, Doc Savage's adventures were reprinted starting in 1964 and continued on (with new installments written by Will Murray & Philip Jose Farmer) until the early 90s, while The Shadow's tales never seemed to find a home (Bantam published around 6 or 7 novels in 1969-70 then Pyramid took over for a run that lasted from 1974 to 1979, with covers by none other than Jim Steranko himself!).



(Below: The Shadow by Jim Steranko.)


Since the last Doc Savage novel was published in the 90s by Bantam, I kept hoping for another publisher to pick up the reins and reprint the books. Happily, Anthony Tollin's Nostalgia Ventures has begun (actually, they've been doing it since late 2006) to reprint these characters' adventures. Using the original published typeset, plus the original covers and illustrations from the pulp novels themselves, Mr. Tollin has succeeded in bringing back the fun and excitement of these delerious but exciting novels. Below are repro's of the new reprint editions:




With the assistance of Will Murray, Mr. Tollin has also included articles on the creators of the characters, Walter B. Gibson (The Shadow), who wrote as "Maxwell Grant", and Lester Dent (Doc) , whose pen name was "Kenneth Robeson", as well as the historical & personal circumstances behind the creative processes of these stories. You can order copies from here as well as see what upcoming novels will be hitting the stores shelves next.

And did I mention that last month marked the 75th anniversary of the publication of the first Doc Savage novel, The Man of Bronze ?

Below is how Doc was depicted on the Bantam Books covers, starting with the 1964 reprint of The Man of Bronze , illustrated by James Bama:



No, I never knew why Bantam chose to depict Doc as a scowling bronze giant with a weird-looking skull cap & perpetually torn shirt, but, hey, it sold books!


-Ed