Apocalyptic Bio Picks!

Joe DeVito

Finally my copy of the new version of Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life from Altus Books arrived at my doorstep a few days ago. It has me looking forward to autumn with cooler temps and some exceedingly tasty reading as I again climb the intricate family tree of Philip Farmer's faux-biography of the famous Man of Bronze. 

Jean-Paul Goode

Actually I'll begin with Tarzan Alive from Bison Books which I've had in my stacks for a while now. This is the exotic examination which elaborated for the first time Farmer's deviously detailed Wold-Newton concept.

I've never read these two books in close proximity before and neither in a good many years, so the synthesis of that should be most enlightening. Looking forward to it.

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The Silver Pyramid!

The Silver Pyramid is one truly weird Doc Savage adventure. This limited series, originally published by DC Comics in the late 80's but reprinted only a few years ago when DC again had the Doc license, is a Doc Savage tale for the ages, and span the ages it does moving from the 40's into the then modern day of the late 80's.

At the end of WWII when many are weary of the long struggle against the foreign threats, Doc and his aides are to have dinner to celebrate the end of the struggle when they are brutally attacked by Nazi sympathizers. The attack was arranged by a Nazi madman named Wessell who Doc and his men seek out in South America, but not before it is revealed that Doc has fathered a child. On that trip into the jungle they find a magnificent silver pyramid in which Wessell has found and operates a weird weapon. He uses it on Doc and he is seemingly killed. And that's just the beginning.

The story then shows us the fates of Doc's descendants, first his son and grandson "Chip". None of these latter Savages seem to meet Monk Mayfair's expectations and he constantly suggests they have "thin blood". Doc's aides in the meantime become older and older men, always trying to recapture the glory of Doc's mission, but always falling short. They remain together save for Tom who becomes a monk.

The story is about what happens to these men and those inspired by Doc's long ago mission. But it is a story told by a writer who does not it seems have much sympathy for the kinds of yarns spun by Lester Dent so long ago. Denny O'Neil seems to want to deconstruct the Doc mythology a bit, allowing it its bravado but rejecting to no small extent the sense of virtue which informed it. The Doc Savage of this story is a flawed man, and the aides are grumpy old farts far from the resolute hard chargers of the classic tales.

Having said that, I found myself taken away by this story, eager to find out what happened to the folks involved, and I have to say that despite a few plot details which ring a tad false, the story holds up well enough, though I'd be hard-pressed to call it a Doc Savage adventure. It seemed finally a bit too fantastic for that.

The artwork by the Brothers Kubert is pretty keen, though it seems obvious to my eye that someone has confused Doc's aides Long Tom and Renny throughout the story. Again, this seemed produced by folks who had no specific love for Doc Savage, but did know how to produce a fascinating comic book. 

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Doc Brass!

Doc Brass is the creation of Warren Ellis and John Casaday, a character in their sprawling science fiiction comic adventure Planetary.  Clearly he is meant to be Doc Savage, as the cover above makes all too plain.

I have been meaning to read the fuller adventures of Doc Brass ever since I first found the debut issue of Planetary. I never read another issue of the comic until a few days ago when I snagged a copy of the first trade collection. Doc Brass figures signficantly in two of the six issues contained within.

Doc Axel Brass is an adventurer from the 1930's who was a member of a secret gang of other world-savers. Among their ranks were dopplegangers for The Shadow (called The Spider) and Fu Manchu (named Hark). There is also a Tarzan lookalike (named Lord Blackstock), and some guys meant to Operator 5 and G-8, along with a youthful character named Edison who is supposed to stand in for Tom Swift. This is a clearly a variation on Philip Farmer's Wold-Newton concept, but this time with the twist that all these "heroes" die, or nearly do battling an inter-dimensional invasion by a force of superhumans who look remarkably like the Justice League of America.

Brass went on to become to a sometimes advisor to the Planetary team. But his role is quite diminished and if I read more of those adventures remains to seen. For more on Planetary see this link. Meanwhile here are the covers for the issues in this trade.

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Three Cows Shot Me Down!

This has to be one of the most charming images the great Neal Adams ever concocted. It's the cover for a trade reprint of the famous Avengers epic the Kree-Skrull War. There is apparently some meager and mild dispute between Roy Thomas and Neal Adams about who created what during their brief tenure together on the storyline, but there's no dispute that Adams wanted to title his first issue of the epic "Three Cows Shot Me Down!". Instead the much more dramatic "Beachhead Earth" was substituted by Roy "The Boy". (Many of the story titles in this classic saga had titles which were variations of vintage sci-fi epics.)

When those classic stories were collected in 2000, Adams was commissioned to draw a new cover and he at long last got his wish by adding this scene for the weirdly attractive cover of the Vision just before he bursts through the doors to drop "dead" at the feet of the Big Three. Neal is uncertain if the scene is to be read as the Vision or the Big Three are seen in reflection, but it works either way. Given the Vision's ghastly nature I prefer to think of him as the reflected image.

I do notice that in the originals for this scene, the Vision is given a strange Cockney accent with him dropping the "H" on the word "Help". It's an odd image, but overall, one I find strangely fascinating.

Oh and the three cows (as if anyone needed to know) were actually three of the original Skrulls the Fantastic Four battled way back in their second issue, hypnotically commanded for the safety of mankind to assume the form of cows and end their days chewing their cuds.

from Fantastic Four #2 by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and George Klein

They got better.

from The Avengers #93 by Roy Thomas, Neal Adams and Tom Palmer

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Dynamite Doc!

Good news I guess for Doc Savage fans like me. Doc and his sidekicks will be once again gracing a comic book as they have done many times before for Street and Smith, Gold Key, Marvel, DC, Millennium, and Dark Horse. The publisher this time out alas is Dynamite. I'm a little skeptical given Dynamite's treatment of other classic heroes over the past several years, but I will remain optimistic that this Doc will look and feel like the classic all-purpose hero created so many decades ago by Lester Dent. Here is an interview with the writer for this new comics series headed our way this winter.

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Bring Out Your Dead!

The success of the Avengers has led to many offbeat trade collections, none more so than Legion of the Unliving showcasing some of the most curious and decrepit opponents the Assemblers ever faced, the Walking Dead. Not those Walking Dead, but various gangs of deceased heroes and villains from Marvel's sprawling continuity.

The first delegation of  the dead showed up in the middle of Steve Englehart's most memorable 1975 run. It time lord Kang himself who gathered up some of these desperate souls from the great beyond to battle the Assemblers. This first team illustrated by Sal Buscema and Joe Staton consisted of Baron Zemo, the Frankenstein Monster, Midnight, Wonder Man, the Ghost, and the original (android) Human Torch. For more on this original gaggle of the gone, look here.

The deadly dead returned many years later in the 1987 Avengers annual written by Tom DeFalco and drawn by a who's who of Marvel's Bullpen of the era. This time the unliving were assembled by the Grandmaster for one of his gambits and was a veritable army. Picked to battle both the regular Avengers and the West Coast team they were comprised of Swordsman, Nighthawk, Green Goblin, Terrax the Tamer, Red Guardian, Bucky, Executioner, Hyperion, Drax the Destroyer, Captain Marvel, Baron Blood, Death Adder, Michael Korvac, and the original Black Knight. Here is more on this enormous expired ensemble.

Immortus trotted out a batch of beyond-the-grave types to take on the West Coast branch alone in 1990. The dead this time were Iron Man 2020, Grim Reaper, Oort the Living Comet, Left-Winger and Right-Winger, and returning for another belated bow were Swordsman, Human Torch, and the Black Knight, though this time it was the villainous Silver Age model. Here is more on this rotted bunch.

The Grim Reaper, still rather dead himself, scratched up a team of the unliving for his ownself. In three 1992 issues of the Avengers we get to meet the deceased Nebulon, Star Stalker, Count Nefaria, Ahmenhotep, Inferno, Necordamus  for the first time, with longtime deceased Red Guardian, Baron Zemo, and Black Knight creeping up again. Here are the cadaverous details.

And finally during the 1998 epic run by Kurt Busiek and George Perez we meet the latest rendition of the deadest enemies with Thunderstrike, Doctor Druid, Hellcat, and Mockingbird joining regular undeadites Captain Marvel, Swordsman, and Wonder Man. This cadre of the decrepit was led by the Grim Reaper yet again, and oddly enough Wonder Man got better as a result of this encounter. Look here for more deadly details.

And to my knowledge that's the whole bunch, unless in the myriad Avengers titles littering the stands today, this concept has crawled from the tomb yet again. It well might have.

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Dynamic Delineation!

My local store was having a buy-two-get-one-free sale on trades and I used it to liberate the three volumes of Batman Illustrated by Neal Adams seen above. It's probably no stretch to say that Neal Adams was the most important artist of the Bronze Age of Comics. His artwork transformed how the comic book was seen by the broader world as he brought a thoroughly sophisticated illustrative style to his powerful pages.

And as much as I adore his Deadman work, as much fame as his Green Lantern material deserves, it's clearly his work on Batman which really elevates his name in the annals of comic artists. Few who venture here will not know that Batman had gone from languishing title mired in often tedious sci-fi plots back to its crime-ridden roots when the TV show made the name a pop touchstone for generations. But it was Neal Adams who took that revived character of the night and made him truly awesome in the full sense of that word.

Adams made Batman heroic and dashing, but also very very scary. That palpitating feel of real blood and guts which permeated the pages made the Batman more real than any superhero then on the stands. As wonderfully effective as an Irv Novick story could be, it was always a special surprise to find that Adams had done the story underneath the usually awesome cover. It was a treat, and one not regular enough to make it lose its zest.

Adams for all his magnificence as an artist was just slow enough that he didn't spoil his audience. He did more than Jim Steranko who produced gems only rarely, but not so much as John Buscema who was the gift that gave and gave and gave. I was struck in these tradepaper collections that apparently I started reading Batman stories at just about the same time as Adams began to draw them, so I was one of the lucky ones who got to enjoy his talent in its full glory in real time.

I have many of these stories in other formats, many in the original still, but it's very neat to have the whole of the Adams Batman at my fingertips. What I don't already own are some of the rarities included like the Power Record books.  These are really significant stories in the vast scheme of comics lore, these comics changed the way things were done, the way things were seen. These are important.

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