Gold Key Doc Savage Report!

I finally got to read this story by Leo Dorfman and Jack Sparling. It's an adaptation of the vintage pulp "The Thousand Headed Man" by Kenneth (Lester Dent) Robeson, one of the early Doc pulp stories. The one-shot comic was produced by Gold Key in 1966 in conjunction with a planned-but-not-produced film featuring Chuck Connors as Doc. The cover is by James Bama.

The story is a solid Doc adventure with a mix of urban and jungle action. There's a neat mystery concerning three keys and some ancient treasure and there are villains galore. The mystery begins in London but winds its way in complex form to Cambodia where an ancient cult of cobra worshippers who use versions of the cobra venom to create mists that make folks unconsious. The London part of the story seems pretty much intact, though the notion of the keys is changed substantially in the comics story. They are just keys, but in the pulp I think they are sticks which function as keys. The mystery here is in what they are composed of which is the same as the pulp. The Cambodian element of the story is very compressed, and I'll have to say the pacing of the story isn't completely successful. The first part seems neatly done, but they have to really run through the more exotic aspects of the story. A plane explosion is relegated to a single panel, and isn't at all threatening.

Jack Sparling isn't a fave of mine, though he does his typical journeyman job here. I can follow the story most of the time without fail, though the sheer number of Doc's aides seems a bit of a problem for him at times. Doc himself looks like the Bama painted version, but when rendered by Sparling here he looks like a very old man instead of the hard-bitten adventurer that Bama presents. It's nice that Sparling stayed close to the source material, but it doesn't completely work.

All in all this is a fun and diverting comic. Not a completely successful adaptation, but it's unclear if they were adapting the pulp or perhaps a screen treatment, so I'll not condemn the producers here for those flaws necessarily. A worthy addition to the collection, and I'm very glad that I at long last got to read it.

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