The Man of Bronze/The Land of Terror

For a project that was truly written "on spec", the origin of the "Man of Bronze" story hangs together quite well three generations later. Some of the devices are a little creaky--like the movie serials, there are few too many fist fights--but the adventures of this "Fab 5" are a testament to the optimism of the age in which they were written.

I can't get enough adventure fiction and I've found precious little of my favorite variety; high adrenaline action that doesn't get too technical or political. After having devoured all of Cussler and his ilk, my mind dredged up a memory of a movie and a couple paperbacks left lying around the house when I was a kid, so I put Doc Savage in the search engine. I found a treasure trove: 182 volumes of high-octane pulp fiction await! [...] has already published the first half in 2-book volumes, so I bought one to test the waters. This is only the beginning of a beautiful relationship. Doc Savage is Dr. Clark Savage Junior. He's gorgeous, brainy, strong, and is too busy working out solutions to vexing problems and using his amazing strength to save humanity to give women a thought. Begun publishing in 1933, political correctness is nonexistent, yet Doc Savage and his crew possess a surprising sensitivity to the environment and native culture. Brainiac Doc has invented or improved upon a number of gadgets that in 1933 must have tested the limits of one's imagination. Today, they're the norm. "The Man of Bronze" is the first Doc Savage adventure. He has just returned to his 86th floor home in New York after several weeks spent exercising his body and mind in his Arctic Fortress of Solitude, which he does from time to time to hone his already amazing skills, to find that his father is dead, killed by a strange malady. Doc gathers his five sidekicks and dodges several attempts on his life to travel to Central America to claim his inheritance, a tract of remote jungle. Doc's inheritance is tied up in a fiendish plot to overthrow the government of fictitious Hidalgo and steal riches from a tribe of ancient Mayans, and Doc has to defeat the bad guys and save the day. In "The Land of Terror," a friend of Doc's disappears almost before his eyes, and the only trace left of him is a forearm and a vile cloud of smoke. Doc chases his friend's murderer, and finds that a fiendish mastermind is behind the murder-by-Smoke-of-Eternity, a compound that dissolves everything it touches. Doc and company follow the villain, Kar, to a strange island in the far South Pacific, where dinosaurs roam wild. Their plane crashes courtesy of a pterodactyl, and upon parachuting to the ground, they must dodge T-rexes and other dangerous dinosaur predators, all the while hunting their quarry, Kar. In the end, Doc's amazing brains, brawn, and skill save the day and defeat the villain, who meets a gruesome end. Seekers of realism should look elsewhere. This is pure adventure fiction, as Doc uses his amazing abilities to pull off impossible stunts and outthink his enemies at every turn. Every page underscores what an unusual specimen Doc Savage is, but he is a man devoid of arrogance, so I was smilingly rooting him on before long. His sidekicks are an eclectic, bantering lot it might take a couple books to become familiar with, there being five and all, but they, too

NOTE: The Blackmask edition has long since been discontinued, but Doc Savage is now being reprinted in a magazine facsimile form, available at comic shops. The Doc Savage sagas originally appeared between 1933 and 1949 in a monthly magazine, featuring one novel a month. In 1965, Bantam Books began reprinting the series in a set of distinctive paperbacks; in 1990, they published the last of the 182 original stories, and issued a few new books. After that, interest in the character appears to have faded out. Now e-publisher Blackmask is reprinting the series again, two to a volume. (The later stories are much shorter and will probably appear four or five to a volume.) For the first time, Blackmask is presenting the pulp magazine covers and interior illustrations, and has reset the type so that it's easier to read than the old Bantam paperbacks. A few minor flaws in these editions: the paragraph indents are too small, making the left margin look ragged; chapter titles sometimes appear at the bottom of a page, with the text on the next page, and periodically there are inexplicable extra blank lines added. Most folks will likely not care much about this; the paper is of high quality and the books are a trade paperback size that is an improvement over the small Bantam paperbacks. But... nothing will ever surpass those Bantam covers. It was the covers that snagged me in 1965, when I was eleven years old, and it was the covers that kept me coming back every once in a while for more. Ideally, collectors will want the Bantams for the covers, and these new editions for reading. One other improvement: the stories are being republished in their original order. Bantam reprinted them seemingly at random, so that the third story was published as #68. I would give this five stars, except for the sloppiness in typesetting. And, let's face it: Lester Dent, who wrote most of these "novels" at breakneck, assembly line speeds, is hardly the world's most skilled writer. Lots of exclamation points! When none are necessary! The passive voice is used frequently (i.e., "several cigarettes were smoked by the criminals as the minutes passed"). The characters are stick figures and Doc Savage is so omniscient and omnipotent that no one has a chance against him. Unlike Superman, who is at least vulnerable to kryptonite, Doc has no real weaknesses and is always one step ahead of his opponents. So why do these stories work so well? Despite his flaws as a writer, Dent had a certain vision. If he'd had more time to polish his work, he might have been taken more seriously. Could you crank out a 150-page novel every month and have any of it make sense? Something has to happen on every page, in every paragraph. Action, action, action... and it has to hang together. Dent could do it, and he deserves some credit for making these stories, as camp and hokey as they sometimes are, so entertaining.

These editions are wonderful! They have the original pulp covers and the illustrations form the 1930's, so you get the flavor of the era. Plush the type is all reset and in a large and readable format. They blow the 1970's Bantam, editions out of the water!