We listed the
Doc Savage Northerns in another piece but we didn’t really get to look at comic books.
Doc Savage Comics #3 (February 1941) adapts the fourth Lester Dent novel,
The Polar Treasure (June 1933). The author is not known but the art is by
Harry Kiefer. This adaptation of a short novel is only eight pages long. This was done by recapping the first half of the book and only drawing the last half, which takes place in the Arctic.
With his submarine
Helldiver sunk, and his plane crashed and his five famous assistants missing, Doc Savage is stranded near Greenland. He and Victor Vail know what they must do: find the
Oceanic and they will find Keelhaul DeRosa. They head out into the snowy darkness.
Doc Savage realizes something is stalking them. It is a polar bear. He jumps on the beast’s back (Tarzan style) and beats it senseless with his fists. (The artwork is cribbed from the Paul Orban illustration from the Pulp. No problem: Street & Smith owned both Pulp and comic.) Finished with the bear, Doc finds Victor Vail has disappeared, leaving a trail of blood.
Doc presses on. Hearing a woman’s scream he discovers the ice-covered hulk of the
Oceanic. He sneaks aboard, finding the murdered passengers and crew. They have been shot with bullets and have frozen stiff. Doc is then jumped by a band of Eskimoes. Jujitsu and punching ensues. Doc decides to talk to them, convincing them he is a good spirit, come to help. They refuse to believe he is good and attack
en masse. Doc flees.
Ducking into a door, he comes across Roxey Vail. Doc learns that Roxey’s mother escaped. She is about to explain to Doc why the Eskimoes are so angry when they find the couple. Doc picks Roxey up and whisks her off to the secret treasure chamber on the ship. (Remember this super-saga is called “The Polar Treasure”.)
Doc opens the chest that once held a fortune in gold and diamonds. The fifty millions worth of treasure must have been taken either by DeRosa or by another villain, Ben Ogard, the man who crashed Doc’s plane. Roxey now explains that the Eskimoes had taken a white-haired man prisoner. Doc tells her that the man was her father. The Eskimoes are approaching. Doc uses his knowledge of pressure points to do the Vulcan neck-pinch on them. Doc explains to Roxey about a map that is tattooed on Victor’s back. It can only be seen with special light. DeRosa and Ogard had cooked up this scheme but now were rivals fighting over the tattooed musician.
Doc surmises that DeRosa was surprised to find the treasure gone, and has been giving the Eskimoes booze and dope to try and loosen their tongues. The bad guys, and their Eskimo allies show up with four machine guns. Doc takes several out with a grenade (This is before Doc got into mercy bullets. Some of the bad guys die.) Doc hides Roxey in the snow, then begins his attack. First he knocks out an Eskimo, then pretends to be one himself, having caught Doc Savage.
When the bad guys come close, Doc starts a punch up. Meanwhile DeRosa’s men get Roxey and take her to the ship. At the ship, Roxey finds her mother. Later Doc sneaks aboard while Ogard and Derosa fight for control of the ship. Doc tells her to take her mother to the spot where the land juts out into the sea. Doc rescues Victor Vail then finds his five lost aides. He sends everyone to join Roxey.
Ogard wins the boat. (I assume DeRosa has died.) Doc leaves and the bad guys chase him out onto the ice. Doc uses a special chemical to melt the ice and end Ogard. He later uses the same chemical near Roxey’s location to reveal the
Helldiver. Doc had stolen it back from Ogard then covered it with snow.
Monk asks about the treasure. Doc reveals that it was taken from the ship and put on the sub by Ogard. The treasure has been rescued, the Vail family is reunited and everybody is ready to go home.
This super-concentrated version has some mighty big info-dumps and plot captions. I wonder why they didn’t either spread it out over two issues or simply make it a sixteen-pager in this issue. There were plenty of crappy filler comics in
Doc Savage Comics they could have dumped for more Doc. I suppose we will never know. Street & Smith might have thought their readers might not hang around long enough for a serial or that comics should be self-contained. Either way, we lost plenty in this version, such as the big scene where Doc takes out the bad guys. We had to read that in a short caption box! This was 1941 and one of the earliest Doc comics so we can be happy to remember later Doc Savage comics improved greatly.
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