The Doc Savage Black & White Magazine

Marvel Comics pursued a line of black & white magazines in the early 1970s. The idea, no doubt, came from the success of the Warren line of comics for older readers with titles like Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella. No surprise Marvel came out with Tomb of Dracula, Zombie Tales and Monsters Unleashed. Later magazines included The Hulk, Planet of the Apes and The Deadly Hands of Kung Fu as well as some very short lived Science Fiction titles. The most successful of all of these were the Robert E. Howard magazines with Kull and the Barbarians, Savage Tales and finally Savage Sword of Conan that ran for 235 issue, long after all the other magazines were forgotten.

One of the also-rans was a black & white Doc Savage magazine. This one ran for eight issues from August 1975 to Spring 1977. The first issue used the Roger Kastel painting from the Michael Anderson film. Marvel hoped to use the movie to jump-start a publication with as much power behind it as the Conan material. Like Robert E. Howard’s Pulp hero, Doc Savage had many fans both from the Pulp days as well as the long-running Bantam paperback reprints.

The debut issue had plenty of articles so that if customers only bought the first one they would feel like they had a nice keepsake of the film. Despite this, the comic story, “The Doom on Thunder Isle”, wasn’t an adaptation of the movie as with The Land That Time Forgot, their first movie product. This new story written by Doug Moench and drawn by Conan’s John Buscema with two extra pages by John Romita, were all inked by Tony deZuniga. Of these men, Moench and deZuniga would remain for the majority of the run, giving the magazine its look and feel.

Also part of the package was every issue after the first bore a Ken Barr painting featuring the paperback Doc with his Coiffe of Bronze. Though the first issue wished to tie-in with the film, the covers by Barr (which strike a nice Pulpy feel but also the photo-realism of James Bama) were certainly directed at the paperback fans.

These fans were made up of three distinct groups: old fans, fans of men’s adventure paperbacks, and younger Science Fiction fans (of which I was one). The comic book was there for all three groups but Marvel would have known it was largely the last group who also bought their comic books. Because of this, the comic was destined to have some elements of the fantastic in them, both because of the readership as well as the Marvel style of comic writing and drawing. The Barr covers feature a lizard man, the Loch Ness Monster, a giant bee and a weird tentacular beastie. Issue #3 has Doc rescuing a woman while escaping on skis, a very James Bond motif that I am sure was intentional.

Now to Marvel’s credit, they did not update the series to the 1970s. Springing from a movie set in the 1930s it would have been odd to do so. Later comics would bring the team up to the present, in one case by freezing Doc in suspended animation (shades of Captain America!) and giving him a new team. This approach, to my mind, removes much of the charm of the premise. Doug Moench has it easy creating newfangled inventions that seem less so in the 1970s.

The interior art has a nice crispness to it thanks to the inking of Tony deZugnia, an artist who uses gray washes and textured zipatone. This gives the art a different look from Marvel’s earlier Doc Savage color comic, which also ran for 8 issues starting in October 1972 to January 1974. I don’t know if the comic faltered or was dropped with the knowledge a b&w magazine was on the way. That comic had a different look with its Jim Steranko covers and its coloring that made Doc look very bronze-skinned. Most of these covers show Doc in a punch-up with costumed villains. The effect is very similar to any other superhero series.

The interior art for the color series was by Ross Andru and Tom Palmer and looks old-fashioned in a Marvel sense though not in a Pulp sense. This was not the first Doc Savage comic though. Street & Smith created that back in 1940 to run alongside the Pulp issues. But it was Marvel’s try and not a bad one. The writing on the comic was sporadic but it did include Steve Engelhart and comics grandmaster, Gardner F. Fox.

The final issue of the b&w magazine saw a change in some of the line-up with Tony deZugnia being replaced by Ernie Chan. This seems to be another Savage Sword of Conan link with John Buscema, Tony deZugnia and Ernie Chan all being famous for their Conan work. Doug Moench did the scripting from a Warner and Whitmore plot. Editor, John Warner, wrote an editorial explaining why the magazine was ending: reading between the lines — poor sales.

There were several Doc Savage comics after the b&w magazine but none of them ever gave me the same thrill. That could be because of the age I was when they appeared, or that I liked what Doug Moench did with his writing. His comics always felt like the paperbacks even though I knew they were a Marvel product. The best of the Conan comics do this as well. I, like many fans, wish the comic would have had a 235 issue run like SSOC but alas…. (Try to imagine what issue #157 would look like, with Doug Moench long gone, a new artist for the tenth time and the plots seeming pretty much the same as last month… There was a reason why they dubbed it The Same Old Sword of Gonad…. Still, these are the problems I wish I had.)

There’s talk of a new Doc Savage TV show. When isn’t there? Still, if it were to happen I’d love to see Doug Moench (who is now 72) as a creative consultant. Doug might laugh at that, his Doc days long gone, but I would feel a lot better about a new show if someone whose handled the 1930s setting so well had some input. They will probably make it modern anyway…sigh. What can you do? We will always have 1975-1977…