Some outstanding news! Two of the great fictional creations of the 20th Century are about to meet officially. Lester Dent's Doc Savage and Merrian C, Cooper's King Kong are on the verge of a fan's dream when the two worlds collide this spring thanks to the imaginations of longtime Doc scribe and scholar Will Murray and current Kong literary caretaker Joe DeVito. Doc Savage and his Fab Five (perhaps) will plumb the mystery of Skull Island and ferocious fauna which reside there. Here's a link to the Altus website with the details.
Fans have long imagined such a pairing, resulting in some fun images and even a storyline or two. I forget where I disocovered the cover above originally, but it offers up a wondrous what if pulp cover starring the Man of Bronze and the Eighth Wonder of the World.
Below are some of my fave mash-up faux paperback covers hooking the RKO icon and Street & Smith superhero up. They make clever use of some vivid images by a host of talents starring the two creations.
This one blends Steve Assel's cover art from Escape from Loki (Philip Farmer's official Doc novel...ironically Farmer is an author who has blended the two before unofficially in print in his short story "After King Kong Fell") with the cover to arguably my all-time favorite single comic book, George Wilson's cover for Gold Key's 60's adaptation of the tale.
This cover mashes up the lush artwork of Basil Gogos with Fred Pfieffer's cover for Bantam's The Mystery on the Snow. It's ferociously effective. To see a host of other Doc Savage "team ups", even some more with Kong check out this link.
This fantasy image has been skittering around the internet for quite a while. Doc Savage and King Kong on a faux cover of high quality which brings together two Bantam classics by Doc Savage artist-supreme James Bama. To see more of these check out this wonderful site.
So in our imaginations, Doc and Kong have been together for quite some time. This spring it appears that event will happen officially. It should be a blast. Even Carl Denham would have a hard time overselling this one.
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First the DOOMSDAY.1 post, and now this! Thank you soooooo much, Rip, for keeping me plugged into the potentially cool new stuff that's coming around. Don't know what I'd do without ya!
ReplyDeleteYou would miss these precious gems and suffer a lifetime of regret, that's what you'd do.
DeleteSeriously, thanks for the kind words. I know when I stumble across these bits of news, I'm so excited I want to shout to my friends not to miss out. Thanks to this here internet machine, I'm able to do just that.
I love being able to look foward to stuff. That anticipation is what makes fandom fun.
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These are fun images. Too bad such a cross-over will never get past the Photoshop stage...
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