doc savage magazine

5 = tip-top
4 = an enjoyable romp
3 = fair to middling
2 = not so much
1 = lame-o

There was death afoot in the darkness.

It crept furtively along a steel girder. Hundreds of feet below yawned glass-and-brick-walled cracks--New York streets. Down there, late workers scurried home-ward. Most of them carried umbrellas, and did not glance upward.

Even had they looked, they probably would have noticed nothing. The night was black as a cave bat. Rain threshed down monotonously. The clammy sky was like an oppressive shroud wrapped around the tops of the tall buildings.

One skyscraper was under construction. It had been completed to the eightieth floor. Some offices were in use.

Above the eightieth floor, an ornamental observation tower jutted up a full hundred and fifty feet more. The metal work of this was in place, but no masonry had been laid. Girders lifted a gigantic steel skeleton. The naked beams were a sinister forest.

It was in this forest that Death prowled.

Death was a man.

Those were the opening words of the very first issue of "Doc Savage Magazine".

Sure, the writing is less than scholarly; but doesn't it just GRAB you? Well, it did me. It was published in March of 1933, and introduced a set of characters that continued for 181 issues over the next sixteen years -- till July of 1949.

Here's the basic premise:

"Doc Savage, whose real name is Clark Savage, Jr., is a physician, surgeon, scientist, adventurer, inventor, explorer, researcher, and musician — a renaissance man. A team of scientists assembled by his father trained his mind and body to near-superhuman abilities almost from birth, giving him great strength and endurance, a photographic memory, mastery of the martial arts, and vast knowledge of the sciences. Doc is also a master of disguise and an excellent imitator of voices, though he admits to having trouble with women's voices. "He rights wrongs and punishes evildoers." Dent described the hero as a mix of Sherlock Holmes' deductive abilities, Tarzan's outstanding physical abilities, Craig Kennedy's scientific education, and Abraham Lincoln's goodness. Dent described Doc Savage as manifesting "Christliness."
- From an essay by Micah Wright.

I think I read my first Doc Savage story around age twelve, maybe a little earlier. The stories were being republished by Bantam Books at the time (between 1964 and 1990) and I'm sure it was the cover art that caught my eye. How could an undersized nerdy kid like myself resist such a heroic looking book cover? (Answer: I couldn't.)

Anyway. All together, Doc Savage has been brought to life through the original pulp magazines, the Bantam reprints, via comic book, radio, and even a (really bad) movie.

On my end, I've managed to collect maybe 30 or so of the Bantam books and even a couple of the original pulp magazines. A few years back, the whole series was available for free in e-book format, so I've read nearly all of the stories due to that.

And - get this - it even turns out that Doc Savage was (loosely) based on a real person:


While visiting John L Nanovic, the editor of the Doc Savage magazine, writer-researcher Will Murray learned that Doc Savage may have been, in part, based on a real-life person named Richard Henry Savage (1846–1903). Like his fictional namesake, Savage was a true renaissance man—soldier, engineer, diplomat, lawyer, novelist, civic leader, and war hero.

Richard Henry Savage was born on June 12, 1846, in Utica, New York, the son of Richard Savage and Jane Moorhead Savage (née Ewart). His ancestors were English, Scottish and Irish, and his grandfather, a civil engineer, arrived in America around 1805.

Savage graduated from West Point in 1868 and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He joined the Egyptian army as a major in 1871. He subsequently served as U.S. vice consul in Marseilles and Rome. On January 2, 1873, he married Anna Josephine Scheible of Berlin, Germany.

Later, Savage served on the Texas-Mexico frontier and as a chief engineer on a railroad in California, retiring in 1884. Following his retirement in 1884, Savage traveled extensively, visiting Turkey, Japan, China, Russia, Asia Minor, Korea, and Honduras.

Returning to the United States in 1891, and a confidant of President Ulysses S. Grant, Savage was given several diplomatic appointments around the world. Savage could talk of all the wild spots in the world that he had visited and had many personal mementos of his strange life.

Savage wrote his first novel, My Official Wife (1891), which proved to be his most famous. Savage wrote over 40 books, including Our Mysterious Passenger and Other Stories (1899), which was published by Street and Smith a year after a 17-year-old Henry W. Ralston, the future co-creator of Doc Savage, joined the firm.

Savage became senior Captain of the 27th U.S. Volunteer Infantry and was appointed Brigadier General and Chief Engineer of Spanish War Veterans in 1900.

After living such an adventurous life, Savage was run over by a horse-drawn wagon while crossing Sixth Avenue in New York City, on October 3, 1903, dying eight days later at the age of 57.
- Wikipedia

Weird, huh?

So. Yeah.

I really like Doc Savage.

I could list out all the cultural and literary merits of the series, and have a discussion on how the Doc Savage character affected the blue collar population during the Great Depression - and while those things are cool, they're not really the main reason I like Doc Savage so much.

Really, I just want to be him....