Reconstruction of the Fables

Justice Inc. (2014-2015/ Collected 2015): based on characters created by Lester Dent, Walter Gibson, Paul Ernst, and others; written by Michael Uslan; illustrated by Giovanni Timpano and others: I mean, if you're going to resurrect the three most popular heroes of America's pulp era of the 1930's and 1940's, you might as well get a writer who knows the characters and is willing to have fun with them. Michael Uslan (sometime comic-book writer and listed as one of the producers of every Batman movie since 1989) knows Doc Savage, The Shadow, and The Avenger.

Maybe a bit too well: a recurring meta-joke about the young Doc Savage's haircut looking like Clark Gable's hair recurs a couple of times too often, as does a bit in which various people react to Doc's 'skull-cap' haircut. Both jokes stem from things exterior to actual Doc Savage stories: the illustrators of Doc's pulp magazine novels in the 1930's were told to make Doc look like Clark Gable; the tremendous, iconic Jim Bama cover illustrations for the Doc Savage reprints from Bantam books in the 1960's gave Doc a skull cap/widow's peak hairstyle based on a misreading of the novels (Doc had a close-fitting helmet that looked like this, but it wasn't actually his hair). See what I mean about knowing too much?

But anyway, Justice Inc. is actually fun. Its revisionism makes sense within the bounds of the story. And the revisionism doesn't fundamentally alter the characters of these three heroes. Doc and the Avenger still believe in the rule of law; the Shadow still has a tendency to act as judge, jury, and executioner. Together, they're a fun, occasionally bitchy team.

And they face villains familiar to fans of Doc Savage and the Shadow, slightly revised in what's really a very Marvelesque attempt to create links among characters who were never linked in the pulps. Both the Doc Savage and Shadow villains behind the potentially world-shattering conspiracy that drives the plot now share part of an origin with the Shadow, at least when it comes to the Shadow's somewhat murky and plot-convenient mental powers. 

Originally published as a six-issue miniseries from Dynamite, purveyors of ancient copyrighted characters for ancient fans, Justice Inc. isn't a mind-blowing super-epic. It is very entertaining however, which is more than I can say for a number of recent efforts to breathe new life into Doc, the Shadow, and the Avenger (DC's depressing Firstwave, I'm looking at you!). 

Giovanni Timpano's art has just a touch of the illustrative retro feel that such a project requires. His renditions of the various iconic characters are mostly swell. Somewhere in the Uslan/Timpano collaboration is an occasional difficulty with smooth panel-to-panel and page-to-page progression. It's not jarringly off-putting, though it occasionally causes one to struggle making sense of what has just happened.

My only other real complaint isn't actually a complaint: Uslan understandably limits the roles of the various sidekicks and helpers of the three great pulp heroes. Many of them make cameos (Monk Mayfair, Margo Lane, and Pat Savage most prominently), but there clearly wasn't room for both the crossover and an encyclopedic use of all the major characters from three different pulp-hero rosters. Especially when Albert Einstein, Howard Hughes, and H.G. Wells make relatively major appearances. So it goes. 

If this is the last time we see a new Doc Savage comic-book adventure, he goes out on something of a high. And I'd imagine the Shadow and the Avenger aren't far behind him. Well, probably. All three characters have been remarkably stubborn about shuffling off the pop-culture coil to this point. Recommended.

Fighting 'round the World (1933)

Doc Savage: The Polar Treasure  by Lester Dent writing as Kenneth Robeson; restored and edited by Will Murray and others (1933/This edition from Nostalgia Ventures 2007): From the first year of the adventures of pulp superman (and partial inspiration for Superman) Doc Savage comes The Polar Treasure, a fairly bloody voyage into the North Polar regions in search of a lost ship and a buried treasure. 

Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze, was already a physical and mental marvel early in his career, as were his five compatriots. Doc's main chronicler, Lester Dent, had done a lot of research on polar exploration for other projects before penning this novel, and the research certainly came in handy: it's a compellingly eerie and dangerous landscape for a Doc Savage adventure.

These reprints from Nostalgia Ventures offer Doc's adventures in something close to their original magazine size of the 1930's, along with reproductions of covers from their original appearances and in some cases from the Bantam reprints that started in the early 1960's and ran until the early 1990's (!). Pulp Maester Will Murray and others also restore sections to the novels when there have substantive changes to Dent's manuscript dating all the way back to the original publication. Here, that adds about 1000 words to the novel. It's all good though occasionally racist fun, with Doc's violence not yet toned down by Dent. Also, Doc Savage beats up a polar bear. Recommended.

Doc Savage: The Pirate of the Pacific  by Lester Dent writing as Kenneth Robeson; restored and edited by Will Murray and others (1933/This edition from Nostalgia Ventures 2007): Fairly bloody and somewhat racist Doc Savage adventure from Doc's first year of publication, lovingly restored and presented by the fine people at Nostalgia Ventures. Doc and his five merry pranksters foil the attempt of a modern-day pirate to stage a coup in a thinly disguised Philippines (here dubbed the 'Luzon Union'). 

All the stuff involving Mongols and 'half-castes' and 'yellow people' speaking pidgin English can be pretty tough sledding at times, and the narrative does get stuck on a ship (literally) for what seems like an interminable number of pages before we finally reach the Luzon Union. Maybe the weakest of the early Doc Savage novels, with an atypically un-weird super-villain behind everything. It really feels more like a job for the Shadow or Terry and the Pirates or those guys who fought Fu Manchu all those times. Lightly recommended.