Three years after Bantam’s Doc Savage paperback reprint series began, its popularity inspired Gold Key to publish a one-shot Doc Savage comic.
The connection to the Bantam revival couldn’t have been more heavily underlined. Although the interior of the November 1966 comic featured Jack Sparling’s idiosyncratic, action-unpacked work, the cover was a glorious James Bama painting, the same kind that helped sell so many pulp reprints for Bantam.
Inside, Leo Dorfman penned an adaptation of Doc Savage’s 17th pulp adventure The Thousand-Headed Man, the second Bantam paperback published. This 1934 story by Lester Dent was also the basis for a never-filmed 1960s screenplay that would have starred Chuck Connors and an NPR radio drama in the 1980s.
“Doc himself is at his peak,” observed pulp historian Dr. Hermes. “He’s not infallible or invincible (he makes mistakes, tries tricks that don’t work, and is overcome several times by the mysterious rustling weakness around the city), but he is definitely the greatest adventure hero of his time. The bronze man travels through the trees of the dense jungle, hangs by his fingers outside a window to eavesdrop, flattens half a dozen knife-men at a clip. When two big alligators are ready to take a bite of a thug, our boy wedges sticks in their open mouths, keeping them busy long enough to get away.
“We find that Doc speaks fluent Malay (let’s see, that makes um, 14 languages). He also has an ID number, SX73812, with the British Secret Service, with which he has worked ‘some years ago,’” Hermes noted. “In the dark night time jungle, Doc also identifies the ‘unmistakable’ scent of a tiger, something I’d rather not test personally.”
Fin de siècle French supermen like Fantomas were all rampaging Id, glorying in their elaborately planned terrorist attacks and, without hesitation, murdering anyone who stood between them and their desires.
“Whether as conscious reflections of ideology or disguised myth, basic cultural assumptions embedded in our national mythology often appear in our popular forms of entertainment,” wrote Columbia University film professor Jim Holte in his essay Pilgrims in Space.
“Puritan ideology stated that sexuality was an outward and visible sign of a corruption that would destroy any covenanted community beset with such real and immediate external dangers as the wilderness, the Indians and a seemingly endless number of heresies. To confront the terrors of the unknown and continue his mission, the Puritan needed all the discipline and resolve he could muster. No distractions were permitted. It was enough to make anyone grim.”
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