Pulp Power

Preaching From
The Pulp Pit

Pulp Power
by Neil McGinness
Abrams Books
ISBN: 9781419756160

Before I embark on this short but, very sweet review of a wonderful book given to me by a very special friend this Christmas, I should probably warn the more educated and literate readers among you of the thing on the cover which caused paroxysms of rage to manifest upon my golden aged, chiselled features because, yeah, it’s a problem. A subtitle to this glorious tome reads... “The Shadow, Doc Savage, And The Art Of The Street & Smith Universe.” Yeah, that’s right, there’s a hideous comma before the word ‘and’. Further rage was felt when I discovered that this wrongness... I’ll say it once, you never put a comma before the word AND under any circumstances, unless you are a complete idiot... has now been perpetrated upon an unsuspecting public more than once, under the guise of a completely nonsensical creation called ‘the Oxford comma’. And this is why Oxford should always be destined to lose their boat race every year because, frankly, the King’s English shouldn’t be abused in this manner. 

Further insult to injury continues in the interior passages of this book where the writer (or perhaps it’s a wrong headed editor) has failed to realise that the full stop always comes after a passage in parenthesis and not, by any means, before. If you use it before, that means the sentence has been finished and there’s no need to put the following text in brackets. Got it? So... you know... stop teaching young children and troubled, impressionable adults to get it wrong please.

That aside, what a great book Pulp Power is! I’ve been reading 1930s and 40s pulp novels (in paperback reprint form, I’m not well paid enough to be able to buy first editions) since the release in cinemas of the Doc Savage movie in 1975 (reviewed here) and I’ve always admired the no nonsense and efficient manner these great, fast paced stories, which enthrall the reader at every twist and turn, are written. Not so much The Shadow, written by Maxwell Grant (mostly by Walter Gibson under that Street and Smith pen name) but most assuredly the sheer economical energy found in the Doc Savage tales written by Kenneth Robeson (the majority penned by Lester Dent under that house pseudonym). So a book celebrating the artwork on those 1930s/40s pulp covers was definitely something I was looking forward to cracking open in this nice, coffee-table sized wonder.

But, it turns out, this book is so much more and, while it is filled with many beautiful pages of the cover artwork, not to mention the less familiar interior, monochrome illustrations for the original pulp editions... there’s also a fair amount of text which deals with not only those two mighty heroes mentioned above but also with the origins of publishing house Street and Smith from its 19th Century birth, under founders Francis Street and Francis Smith, before passing to one of their heirs and then to its later acquisition by Conde-Naste. Following a suitably humble forward by the great Frank Miller, this companionable compendium is split into six chapters and breaks down thusly...

Section 1. The Shadow
Although named after one of their more famous heroes and certainly covering some interesting facts and figures that I was unaware of about the character, this chapter is where the bulk of the text is laid down and also deals with the company and the people who worked for it... as well, of course, as featuring lots of artwork from the interiors and exteriors of the 30s and 40s editions of The Shadow, not to mention some rare artefacts from the extensive collection of one of the many Shadow collectors in this world. It covers the birth of the character on the radio and highlights what that character was as opposed to what he became when, by demand a year later, the first Shadow pulps were launched... and a very brief glance at a couple of films and theatrical serials based on the character, although the two 1950s attempts at a TV show are not mentioned. What I did find interesting was that Walter Gibson was very quickly established as being so prolific with the character on his typewriter (and you would have to be, at a penny a word) that Smith-Corona produced a standee, endorsement of him as his pen name Maxwell Grant, as a reciprocal promotional gimmick. It also tells of the eventual cancellation of both The Shadow and Doc Savage magazines in favour of a new, glossy breed of magazine venture which became known as the slicks, in direct contrast to the pulps (also named after the quality of the paper used)... specifically a teenage girls magazine called Mademoiselle at the end of the 1940s (which was still running until sometime in the last decade).

Section 2 - Doc Savage, tells a little of the story of Lester Dent’s tales although, I have to say, that the text in this section is not as illuminating or as detailed as the first section. Nevertheless, there’s still a lot of the cover paintings and interior illustrations rendered beautifully on the page. These pages also include lots of big pull quotes from Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, presumably from around the time that he was in the running to play the character in a new film series (what the heck happened to that, please?).

Section 3 - The Super Crew looks at the other heroes created for both the Street and Smith pulps and some of their comic counterparts... dealing with The Whisperer, The Skipper (aka Captain Fury), The Avenger (along with his team, Justice Inc) and the first metatextual comic book character, Supersnipe. It also deals with the original and later, very different incarnations of a character who I saw highlighted on book shops shelves a lot during the 1970s and 1980s... namely, Nick Carter. I didn’t realise just how different the various revised versions of this character were or, just how prolific the writers were... surpassing even the extremely lengthy runs of The Shadow and Doc Savage novels (both numbering in their hundreds) by many hundreds more.

Section 4 - Paperback Revolution looks at the era of the characters I know best, especially in terms of James Bama’s dynamic 1960s and 70s Doc Savage paperback reprint covers (who I’ve mentioned many times before in articles for this web site, was modelled on Steve Holland, who played Flash Gordon in a dire TV incarnation of the character in the 1950s). There are some nice paperback covers of The Shadow included too, by comic book legend Jim Steranko.

Section 5 - Comics Evolution looks at, not just the 1930s and 1940s incarnations of these characters in their comic book equivalents but also looks at their presence in comic books over the years, especially from stables like DC and Marvel. Indeed, there’s even an interview with the great comic artist Bill Sienkiewicz about his run on The Shadow. I did notice, however, that the truly excellent Doc Savage covers for the comic books put out by Millennium Press are strangely absent from the mix... hmm... perhaps there was some politicking going on.

Section 6 - A New Future is devoted to the continued life of some of these characters. I was surprised as a big follower of Doc Savage that, not only were writers such as Philip Jose Farmer and Will Murray, who have penned some great entries in the series in modern times, curiously absent here... but also that modern popular novelist James Patterson has already released a novel apiece for both The Shadow and Doc Savage. How that got by me without any kind of publicity is beyond my understanding and they’re definitely something I’m going to have to read but, I have to say, the blurb on Amazon for the Doc Savage story is pretty dire and off the point, it seems to me. I guess I’ll have to tread carefully when I’m reading this one. DC already tried modernising him in the comics in the 1980s and, frankly, it didn't work.

And that’s that. All the way through, the writer keeps reminding the audience of something they should probably already know... that characters like The Batman and Superman certainly owe more than just a passing debt to The Shadow and Doc Savage, repeatedly emphasising the easiest ‘borrowings’ to identify their common traits and stressing that these superhero characters would never have come into existence without the groundwork laid by these specific pulps. However, despite this and a few glaring omissions (why show things like the membership badge for the 1930s Shadow Fan Club without showing the similarly charming Doc Savage Club equivalent?), I’d have to say that Pulp Power is a wonderfully illuminating and terrific tome and highly recommended as both an object of beauty and as an education, especially to those readers unfamiliar with some of the stories. The fact that I learned a lot from it and am very familiar with the characters anyway, in various incarnations (most specifically Doc Savage) says a lot, I think. A really nice book and an absolute pleasure to spend some time between the pages with, I must say.

Justice Inc

Avenger's Ensemble

Justice Inc
Dynamite comics Trade Paperback reprint
ISBN: 1606906623

So here we have another modern comic strip "mash up" of 1930s pulp characters, this time teaming up Doc Savage, The Shadow and The Avenger. Now I read a DC series called First Wave a few years ago which teamed up these characters but, as I recall, I found it so awful a rendition of the original source material, being nothing near these fictional people in either spirit or tone, that I just flat out refused to bother to review it. This one is a little better but... it's still not great and, especially in terms of Clark Savage Jr, still not what I would call a credible portrayal of the character.

The Avenger was a relatively short lived character created by the Smith and Street magazine as another one to try and rival their two aforementioned heroes in popularity but, despite having a radio series too, the magazine folded after a few years. The published pseudonym for the writer of the series was Kenneth Robeson and the publishers promoted it as being written by the creator of the Doc Savage tales but, honestly, I don’t think Lester Dent, the main Doc storywriter and creative force behind the property, ever wrote any of The Avenger stories. The initial novel, Justice Inc, told of how the hero Richard Benson loses his wife and daughter in a villainous plot involving a plane crash. He survives death but the shock of his ordeal causes his skin to go grey and harden like clay. This means he can resculpt his features to resemble anyone and this master of disguise, along with his aides, sets up Justice Inc to avenge the victims of crime. That's pretty much all I can remember of that initial pulp story, to be honest, as it's been over twenty years since I read it.

This first story hit the newsstands in 1939 and it's in this year that the bulk of this new comic book is set. Starting off with their new, present day incarnation of The Man Of Bronze, a time travel element is introduced into the story to allow Doc to travel back to 1939 to meet himself before returning to the present, leaving us readers back in 1939 to continue the story. A story which, as it happens, is almost a retelling of the original Justice Inc version of The Avenger, but interpenetrated with Doc Savage and The Shadow, intersecting the timeline and with Doc's miraculous science being responsible for the clay faced resurrection of Richard Benson as The Avenger. After both Doc and The Shadow train Benson in how to take care of himself, the three go on to work together to try to foil the dastardly plans of The Shadow's villain The Voodoo Master, Doc Savage's two-time nemesis Johnny Sunlight and a mysterious third villain who is another variant on the Lamont Cranston personae... who is neither The Shadow nor, in this version and more in keeping with the later novels, a dupe identity for The Shadow.

And there you have it.

Except the writing isn't brilliant to be honest. I can't speak for The Avenger because I've only ever read the first novel but Doc is engaging in far too much chit chat here and even displaying a
sense of humour and self awareness that just wasn't part and parcel of Doc's almost emotionless, inpenetrable character. Similarly, The Shadow seems way too verbally aggressive and disrespectful of people for me to take him seriously as a credible version of the character. So this didn't sit well with me.

A good point about the comic is the artwork, which gives it a nice, painted, 1930s style pulp sensibility throughout... but the plot is fairly choppy (if this was a movie I'd say it was badly edited) and is a distraction to comprehension at certain points, I found. Furthermore, the geeky fanboy nods to the actual identities of the writers of the original books, like having characters with names like Ernst, Grant and Robeson, felt clumsily done and less enjoyable than a more sly, subtle set of references.

Another element which didn't sit well with me was the lack of the original companions of the characters. Sure, Monk Mayfair and Margo Lane are in there briefly but they don't seem too much like their original, pulp counterparts and, especially in the case of the Doc Savage novels, they were very much ensemble pieces with all of the subsidiary characters carrying a lot of weight and bearing on the feel of the stories. Here, they're pretty much ignored, it has to be said.

Adding insult to injury, they've included Doc's cousin Pat Savage, The Woman Of Bronze, in the story but she's hardly in it. The pretext that Margo Lane uses to recruit her into the escapades sets up a plot development which seems to me, unless I somehow missed it, to be completely superfluous to the main storyline and a complete loose end, not picked up later on in the narrative. Which is a) not so great writing and b) completely pointless and a waste of a great character who has always had a lot of potential. Even Lester Dent himself uses the character a little too sparingly and she only appeared in a small fraction of the more than 180 original Doc Savage novels, as if Dent himself failed to exploit the richness of the character. Modern Doc scribe Will Murray, who writes the latest incarnations of the novels, has probably done more to make use of Pat's personality for dramatic purposes... perhaps even more so than Dent did. Here, though, writer Michael Uslan kinda drops the ball with the character as far as I can see. Of course, on the plus side, with Pat hardly being in this volume, at least she isn't as badly presented as Doc is here. So that's something.

So could I recommend this volume to fans of the characters and of comics in general? Well certainly I would tell Doc fans to steer clear. It's not great, to be sure, although it's a hell of a lot more entertaining than DC’s First Wave interpretation of the character, it has to be said. If you’re a fan of comics in general... well the story is fairly simplistic, as you would expect it to be when dealing with 1930s pulp characters, but if you’re into rip roaring adventures with plenty of action then you might find this one an okay addition to your library. For anyone else, however, I'd say go back to 1970s Marvel for a better comics fix of Doc Savage and 1970s DC for a better comic book version of The Shadow. Much better versions, to be sure, and ultimately more satisfying... especially the black and white Marvel magazine style comic of Doc Savage... that run was an absolute masterpiece of a series.