Doc Savage

By 1933, a revolution was stirring in pop-culture... the rise of the superheroes, a movement which continues and evolves to this day. Even though the likes of Superman was still a good distance away, these new heroes were somehow larger than life, possessed of qualities heroic and admirable. The Shadow had started this movement, and was followed by imitators, the first of which was The Phantom Detective, published by Standard Publications. Street & Smith added another hero to the growing ranks of pulpsters by publishing Doc Savage, the high-adventure counterpart of The Shadow. In the two S&S characters, future echoes of the Batman/Superman pairing: one was a creature of the night, shunning the spotlight and any recognition and feared by many of the innocent as well as the guilty, the other a figure of the light, of public admiration... a great yin and yang for the pulp world. The "Man of Bronze" was created as a rough outline by S&S circulation editor Henry Ralston, then fleshed out a little bit by Shadow editor John Nanovic, but it was Lester Dent (who wrote under the pseudonym of Kenneth Robeson), a former telegraph operator and aspiring writer from Missouri, who would breathe life into Doc Savage and the other characters in the stories. Just like Walter Gibson (who wrote The Shadow novels), Dent was a sort of mirror-image of the character he wrote. He had the same flair for adventure (he dived for sunken treasure off the Florida coast), gadgetry, and multi-tasking (he was a pilot, plumber, architect, radio operator, and electrician), and he posessed the devilish sense of humor that would always lie just beneath the surface of the Doc books. There would eventually be over 180 Doc Savage stories, and while some were "ghost-written" by other authors, the bulk of them were written by Dent. In the 60's, 70's, and 80's Doc's popularity experienced a boom- the novels were all reprinted by Bantam while The Shadow's books lingered in liscensing hell, and a whole generation of fans found the Doc Savage phenomenon (just compare the numbers of Doc sites to Shadow sites on the web). A movie was spawned in 1975: it was a bizarre stinker... more on that later. Science fiction author Phillip Jose Farmer wrote a "biography" of Doc (plus a number of pastiche novels, the "Doc Caliban" stories) and included him in his "Wold-Newton Universe", which connected an enormous amount of pop culture events and pulp-superheroes in the same world. In the early 90's, author Will Murray wrote a series of books which used old and unused Doc scripts and ideas. And of course, Doc has appeared in comics for almost as long as his literary life. Let's take a look at the Man of Bronze, and what made him an original action hero...

Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze

• Clark Savage, Jr. was born on board the schooner Orion in the bahamas. The exact date is in dispute, but it is placed around November 12 or 13. The year was 1901. The Orion was to sink later under mysterious circumstances, drowning Doc's mother.
• At just over a year old, Doc was placed in the care of a group of scientists while his father travelled around the world.
• This team of scientists sole purpose for young Clark was to train him in a controlled environment, to mold him and shape him into a kind of superman.
• His training regiment strengthened mind and body. Doc became proficient in a very vast array of fields: medical study, geology, engineering, archaeology... the list goes on. Doc's mind was trained to be a virtual computer, a store-house of information. His body was honed as well: body-building, gymnastics, martial arts... these were all in the program to build a perfect human specimen. The sole purpose for these programs was to train Clark for his future profession: a globe-trotting adventurer who righted wrongs and punished the guilty while aiding the innocent. A discussion on the ethics of these aspects will be found elsewhere on this site.
• At the age of sixteen, he enlisted in the Army Air Service during WWI... this was done in secrecy and against the scientist-groups wishes.
• He was a fighter pilot in Europe when he was shot down by the Germans and was held prisoner in POW camp. He received the nick-name of Doc due to the medical treatment he administered to other prisoners in need.
• It was at this time that he met the five individuals who would become his friends and teammates in future adventures. More on them in the Doc's Team section...
• Doc and his friends organized a mass breakout from the camp, after which Doc rejoined his unit.
• After the war's end, he continued his training until the age of 20. After it's completion, Doc returned to the States and attended Johns Hopkins University, where he officially received his doctorate.
• At this time, Doc discovered and perfected an operation on the brain that could remove the criminal tendencies from the minds of crooks, thus rendering them open to training to become good citizens. This will also be discussed in another section on this site...
• Doc reunited with his five friends from the concentration camp, and together they began periodic campaigns against crime.
• The death of Clark Savage, Sr. and the surrounding circumstances left Doc and his men a vast fortune in gold from the South American republic of Hidalgo. This enabled the group to set up headquarters in a Manhattan skyscraper, and to develop the myriad of gadgets they would use in their ongoing crusade against injustice.
• Doc was a large man, standing 6' 8, but was adept at disguise techniques and could make his mass appear to be smaller than it actually was.
• His skin color was an amazing bronze hue, reportedly due to many years beneath the sun of the tropics. His hair was only a shade darker than his skin, and his eyes appeared golden... This is obviously where the Man of Bronze gets that title.
• In moments of concentration or stress, Doc unconciously made a trilling sound, supposedly somewhat musical in nature. This is definitely an odd trait... one wonders what it was supposed to sound like.
• Doc's arsenal of gadgets are almost legendary, not only because of practicality or usefullness, but because of the prophetic, Jules Verne-like quality of the gadgets. Flash-bang grenades, full-auto machine-pistols, chemical handwarmers, Polaroid-type instant photos, electronic surveilance, automatic doors... the stunning list goes on and on. Not only did many of these inventions eventually come into use, but many of them also are commonplace in the modern age.
• Doc not only possessed unique headquarters (the 86th floor office, his artic Fortress of Solitude), but also an impressive fleet of vehicles: the Helldiver submarine, the Amberjack blimp, plus boats, cars, and planes of varying type and function. These are mostly housed in his waterfront warehouse, which was secretly accessable from his office via a secret high-speed elevator (called the Flea-Run).
• Over the course of time, Doc's attitude and mannerisms changed. In the early stories, he was still a virtual superman, but he was quick with a smile and would join in with his team's verbal banter. Over the course of the first year of his campaign, that changed and he became the cold and calculating man of bronze we now know him as. This was perhaps a logical progression; perhaps he discovered that he could confront the events before him easier if he were as emotionless as possible. In this respect, he was just as eerie as The Shadow...