Millennium Comics' Doc Savage: the Manual of Bronze (1992)

Apart from the pun in the name, the Manual of Bronze is a slim below-comic sized volume, a totally unique object printed by Millennium Comics in 1992, during the brief time they had the Doc Savage comics license.

Millennium's work can be pointed out as the single most accurate interpretation of Doc ever, remembering details scattered through 150+ novels, like how Long Tom had a gold tooth that, whenever it was knocked out, he'd vow to get the guy responsible. Their comic adaptation of Repel (aka the "Deadly Dwarf") is one of the most artistically successful ever, and maybe one of the showiest, featuring Doc's archfoe, an evil gay millionaire midget who insists his henchmen walk around shirtless (yes, really).

The Manual of Bronze includes detailed character bios on Doc, the Gang, and a few selected villains (including the aforementioned Deadly Dwarf), and it's even a scrapbook of Doc Savage art by different artists, a prospect that must have been a lot more tantalizing before the invention of Google Image Search. My favorite is Adam Hughes, and here's why:

It's worth owning for no other reason than it's intimately researched and complete and shows diagrams of gadgets and equipment like Doc's Helldiver, the Fortress of Solitude, etc. I didn't care for the Supermachine Pistols' out-there design; since the machine pistol later on became a reality in the form of the uzi, wouldn't it stand to reason they'd look something like that, only with a curled magazine?

In any case, if you like to clip and save diagrams from comics about vehicles and gadgets (and I sure do), this is for you.

What's more, this is the only book of its kind thus far made for Doc Savage. Perhaps one day we'll get a more detailed illustrated reference. Until then, this one will have to do.

Calling Captain Future: A Pulp Hero Who Skewed Young

Edmond Hamilton's Captain Future, starting in 1940, was a product of his era: his stories skewed very, very young.

A decade earlier in the 30s, hero pulps had a target audience of two groups: working class men, and young kids. For that reason, the adventure stories, while "clean," had an element of lurid horror like the crime thrillers. Their composite audience resulted in a composite genre. The hero pulp magazines were undone in the 1940s when this audience fractured: the kids turned to comic books, and adults switched to "men's adventure" paperbacks and thrillers.

You can see the beginning of this fracture in Captain Future, who by 1940, was a latecomer to the pulp hero game.

Just like the history of movies of the 50s was competing and responding to the challenge of television, the history of pulp magazines in the 1940s was about responding to the comics.

There seemed to be three major responses:

Turn pulp heroes into comic books and vice-versa. A good example would be Sheena and Ka-Zar, who were originally magazine characters.

Sarcastically dismiss comics and their "superheroes." This reminds me of movies in 50s that called TV "the idiot's lantern." A big one was the Doc Savage mystery, the "Whisker of Hercules." It was a mean satire of superheroes, with a potion that gave bad guys Superman powers, only to have Doc Savage get the better of them. The potion turns out to make the superguys age and die superfast (Lester Dent felt comics were a fad, so this was a metaphor, too).

Captain Future is in the 3rd Category: a pulp magazine hero designed to grab the "kid" audience moving to comics. 

Captain Future is the hero pulps meeting comics halfway. It has the showy Flash Gordon science fiction, but next to pulp style mystery "reveal the bad guy's true identity" detective plots. Captain Future has superficially similar elements of Doc Savage updated to space: raised to be a scientific superman by a brain in a jar and two robots, who bicker among themselves like Doc's aides, Monk and Ham. Unlike Doc, though, but like Superman, he has a regular girlfriend (Joan Randall, planetary police agent) with a job that leads her to be kidnapped often and get right in the thick of the action, and like Batman, Captain Future has a chief of police who contacts him with a flare signal.

The fact a kid aimed pulp would be science fiction isn't surprising. The love of kids for science fiction, starting around ages 7-12, is almost inevitable according to developmental psychology. Just as teenagers' new moral reasoning abilities lead them to question authority and their parents in that stage of life, as soon as kids start to think hypothetically and reason systematically around 7-12, they start to imagine alternate scenarios and other worlds. Just like teenagers test their new moral reasoning, testing their new ability to think imaginatively leads to a psychological development stage where science fiction is important.

(It's also not hard to understand why the Human Torch is such a popular character among kids. Every kid goes through a stage where they're a pyro.)

It's also unsurprising Ed Hamilton would later on be one of the few pulp writers to transition to becoming a comic book plotter, writing Superman for a number of his most memorable years. Going from the same magazine that gave the world Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard to a hero pulp writer amusing the kiddies to comics writer might be one of the oddest trajectories ever.

Though it nowhere near got as lurid as some of the pulp mags aimed at working class adults, Ed Hamilton was a writer in Weird Tales, and occasionally some horror details slipped in.  One of my favorites was an event right out of the movie Lifeforce, where Captain Future is driven to explore the wreck of a totally unknown spaceship, and discovers an octopoid-like alien race who were awakened to seek nutrients from blood. More like this, please!

Captain Future also has the usual hero pulp "figure out the identity of the mystery bad guy" plots. You'd think mystery wouldn't work in science fiction, but they do here, because all facts, including odd futuristic technological details, are presented to the reader fairly. The science in the stories is so good, it's shocking. In "Calling Captain Future," he figures out the black star headed toward the earth was an illusion, because its gravity didn't distort light around it, a "gravitational lensing" effect Einstein predicted, which is today something every physics student learns, but which was by then ultra-cutting edge.

As weird as Captain Future's origins are, Captain Future underwent a weird trajectory since. He was reprinted in the 60s thanks to the hunger of the paperback market. Doc Savage caught on thanks to punchy, dynamic Bama covers, but Cap's had the most ludicrously generic ones ever.

And it gets even weirder from there. Captain Future was one of two 40s American adventure SF series (the other being the Lensmen) who became, of all things, a Japanese anime. And here's the amazing part: the Captain Future anime? It was so faithful to the 40s pulp novels, it was shocking. The mystery plots were preserved more or less intact, the bickering between the robots, with the only changes were utterly predictable layups like changing locations in the Solar System to different worlds and giving his girlfriend more to do. I'd be inclined to rank it as the most faithful, accurate adaptation of any hero pulp, not that there's much competition there.

Finally, Captain Future is now best known as a hokey piece of pop art instead of an actual character, like the posters adorning the room of the characters in the Big Bang Theory, a sitcom that represents all that is mainstream and evil in the world of entertainment. Captain Future's giant poster hasn't led to a revival of the character, but has led to sales of Captain Future posters.

Captain Future is iconography now. For years, whenever I'd see a later parody of 50s space heroes, I'd see some muscular guy with an exaggerated chin, ray gun, finned costume, and with a personality based on Adam West's performance of Batman. I'm talking "The Adventures of Captain Zoom in Outer Space," Spaceman Spiff, and Buzz Lightyear. I'd see these guys and think, "what exactly IS it they're making fun of?" Real 50s science fiction didn't have heroes like that. It's making fun of something that never existed.

TV Tropes calls this a "Dead Unicorn Trope," something everyone thinks is a cliché and is frequently parodied, but never existed in a straight form. Examples include "the Butler did it" in mysteries, the idea of the mustached and black top hat stock silent film villain (who never actually existed in the silent era), and black and white color coded cowboy hats in Westerns. Superman movies have jokes about changing in a phone booth, when Superman never actually did that.

Real science fiction of the 1940s and 50s had heroes that were cigar-chomping, badass, wisecracking engineers who solved the problem with dubious engineering concepts. They usually talked more like Nick Fury than like Adam West as Batman. There were also a lot of young men who grow up over the course of the story (with science fiction of the 50s, it's always men). The young man on a journey to grow up and learn something is the central journey of all genre fiction, so why should SF be immune?

Captain Future might actually be the closest spoofs like Buzz Lightyear and Spaceman Spiff ever got to resembling a real science fiction hero of the past, and even he's nowhere near close.

A scientific wizard like Doc Savage, Captain Future is a surprisingly warm person, in contrast to the stoic, Vulcan-like Doc. He has a humanizing touch of real scientific curiosity, and at one point, boarded an unknown, scary and abandoned alien ship just to satisfy it. He also seems like a gifted diplomat, and it's rare to find an alien race that is genetically evil; most encounters with aliens are a misunderstanding solved via diplomacy. How very Star Trek: the Next Generation!

The aides (Futuremen) are two robots, Otho (a plastic robot able to shapechange) and Grag (a metal superstrong robot), who bicker back and forth about who is more human. Since they act like assholes, I'd say they're both pretty human. Grag is huge and strong but childlike and has a cute pet Lunar mouse; Otho, the plastic one, is disagreeable and they hint he's a little on the bloodthirsty side. Both of them aren't as redundant as Doc Savage's aides because, after all, even if you're Doc Savage like Captain Future is, a superstrong invulnerable robot is still handy to have around.

My favorite of the Futuremen is definitely the Brain. A brain inside a jar who helped raise Captain Future, his sole remaining emotions are loyal and protective love for the baby he brought up. How endearing is it that the Brain still calls Captain Future "boy?" You get the feeling the Brain has Captain Future as his last remaining link to other people, and if that link was severed he would be a cold, disturbing, possibly villainous figure.

Captain Future's local Lois Lane equivalent is Joan Randall, and her defining characteristic is, she's a big Captain Future fangirl. Captain Future, after all, is his era's biggest celebrity. Every word out of her mouth is Captain Future will save me, Captain Future will stop you, etc. She does dangerous things just to be near him. The love she has for him comes off as the obsessive infatuation of a groupie.

For once, I can understand why the hero wouldn't pursue a relationship, and unlike Doc Savage, it's not because he only has sex once every seven years. As ego stroking (and something else stroking) as groupies can be, would you marry a groupie? Relationships have to be based on respecting the other person (impossible if they admire and debase yourself before you), and obsession isn't the same thing as love.

All the same, Joan Randall is loyal and doesn't lose faith in Captain Future. She seems even tempered, without the whiplash-like changes in mood that make Dejah Thoris and Jane beautiful but psychotic bitches.


Things to Ponder: 

• The Comet, (Captain Future's rocket) has the ability to disguise itself as a real comet, which sounds like the worst camouflage ever. I mean it, it's maybe the worst disguise in history. Once the "comet" slows down, speeds up, or CHANGES DIRECTION, the jig would be up. 

• Captain Future's ring, with nine small gems around a single big one to represent the Solar System, has an atomic motor that keeps the 9 gems turning. Captain Future uses this tiny hidden atomic motor the same way Luke Skywalker uses the tiny battery hidden inside his robot hand: to get himself out of jams when he was captured and all his visible equipment taken away.

• Truly creepy moment: in the Sargasso of Space, Captain Future runs into the "an early earth exploration ship." Its' name? Pioneer. It'd be interesting if someone attempted to assemble a history of Captain Future's Solar System from hints dropped here and there. I'd do it, if I had access to more of these.

• Another creepy moment? At one point in the prison on Pluto's moon, Captain Future mentions the prison armory contains an "atomic bomb" that if blasted, would destroy everything. This was in 1940. 

Doc Savage's oft-misunderstood "Crime College"

Modern readers unanimously find Doc's Crime College pretty creepy and sinister. It's a place where bad guys either get an operation to remove their memories, or are retrained psychologically to hate crime (exactly what the Crime College did wasn't that clear, and the hints varied on the novel). To modern eyes, the Crime College sounds like brainwashing, or a lobotomy, or both. It doesn't exactly help Doc keeps the place a secret.

Doc's Crime College crops up in other places in pop culture, never taken at face value, usually to talk about how disturbing the implications of it are. The B-Mod devices in "Squadron Supreme" were based on it, as was the memory wipe for criminals on Babylon 5. And the Crime College is immortalized in literature thanks to a mention in Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood."

I've always said the Crime College is the single most misunderstood element of the entire Doc Savage canon. It has to be understood in terms of the context it existed. In the 1930s, the Crime College seemed very modern; a humanitarian alternative to prison that emphasized true reform instead of punishment. There was a time when the brain, as an organ, wasn't all that understood and lobotomy seemed like a miracle cure for many disorders. Lobotomy was on the cutting edge (no pun intended), much like how we regard stem cell research today.

The Crime College seems like an extension of the rationalism of the Doc Savage stories, applied to behaviorism and ethics: criminal tendencies aren't due to "evil" or supernatural causes but bad upbringing and problems with the brain as an organ. Modern psychology bears this out: a good portion of violent criminals were abused as children, physically and sexually. This doesn't give them the right to harm innocent people – I'm just saying, it's very possible to create a very reasonable argument violent crime is solvable by psychological treatments. Could anything be more modernist?

What's more, the 1920s and 1930s were defined by the shellshocked attempt to understand the hideous human evil of World War I. The answer, by writers of pulp and horror fiction, was sometimes to say that normal people aren't capable of evil. There were a few stories by August Derleth in the 20s that explained the cause of World War I: an evil subrace of mankind living among us in secret that hated and sought our destruction.

Heck, maybe one of the most famous artists of the early 20th Century, Stanislav Szukalski, claimed that Communism, Facism, WWI and WWII were caused by a subrace of humans that bred with Yeti. He seriously believed this and he was NOT joking. Heck, he devoted a huge chunk of his obvious talent to showing evil people in history kind of look like Yeti if you squint hard enough.

And…c'mon, guys: you really think Doc Savage of all people, Abe Lincoln and Hippocrates in a ripped shirt, would actually lobotomize criminals? It's beyond his moral code. Something like that would make Doc, his world and heroism, look sinister and hypocritical.

I find the view the Crime College is some behavior modification to be untrue. It has to be understood in the context of its age: the belief in rational, compassionate, scientific reform methods that make prison and punitive methods obsolete, and a naïve attempt to understand human evil. I think we have to accept the Crime College at face value and not project suspicion on it..

Doc Savage Reviews: the 1987-1990 DC Comics

The Doc Savage DC comics could have been a series like the Marvel comics adaptation before it in the 70s, which started off adapting famous Doc novels into comic form, and then told original stories in the same vein.They used this formula just fine with Conan the Barbarian, which started with adaptations and then told original stories.

But instead, under Dennis O'Neil and the Kuberts, DC decided to do something more bizarre and unique: they decided to have Doc and his allies age in real time, and advance the timeline to modern day. It was the exact same idea as John Byrne's Superman/Batman: Generations Elseworlds story, where the two famous heroes started in 1939, aged in real time, found wives, and had children and grandchildren who continued their legacies.

The end result is that Doc Savage acquired a dynamism that was really lacking in the novels, which had a status quo like a sitcom. In the O'Neil/Kubert mini, one of his Five was a traitor. Doc got married (Monk and Ham didn't, but I guess they didn't change that dumb law yet). Doc's grandson fought evil, as did Pat's granddaughter. And most importantly, new characters were added as allies…including a woman.

Not only did Denny decide to advance the timeline, he also decided to make another very surprising creative decision: he wanted to actively question and deal with some of the contradictions in Doc Savage, which the books themselves conspicuously overlooked.

For instance, Doc and his gang were staunch humanitarians, but how could they reconcile that with the fact they got into fights for fun and used heaping helpings of violence to solve their problems? A character of Doc Savage's grandson was added just to ask a pretty pointed question I've sometimes wondered: do Doc and the gang go on adventures out of a desire to help mankind...or because it's fun to beat people up? To his credit, Chip Savage isn’t just a buzzkill drag all the time. The story makes you respect him as a person of principle. He acts as the group conscience, and Doc listens to him and adjusts his strategies accordingly.

And then there was Doc's Crime College. Everyone who reads Doc today universally agrees the idea of a place where bad guys are either operated on to lose their memories, or retrained psychologically to hate crime (exactly what the Crime College did was vague and the hints varied depending on the novel) is pretty creepy and sinister. To modern readers, the Crime College sounds like either brainwashing, or a lobotomy, or both. So, why not do a story that deals with that head on?

And then there was some of the implied attitudes of Doc and the group that would come into conflict with the modern world. For instance, the urge to protect women and keep them out of the group, and getting past national rivalries that were white-hot in Doc and the group's time. To that end, one of Doc's new allies was a Russian, and another  was a woman.

In fact, that's a big problem with Doc's new allies, with the exception of Doc's grandson: they can be entirely encapsulated by single word. Hillbilly. Woman. Russian.

Finally, the book makes mention of the fact that it's kind of creepy how the aides do whatever Doc says and don't think for themselves. This is obviously due to their trust, but it is off-putting, and when confronted with that, Monk has a "blue-screen" moment.

In short, the book tries to be a more low-key version of Watchmen to Doc Savage. It was too "different."


The Doc Savage Family Tree

The decision to make Princess Monja from the Valley of the Vanished secretly Doc's wife was a no-brainer. Everyone seems to do that! It makes sense, though: she was one of the few women to show up more than once. She had a take charge attitude that marked her as different from the usual girl. Besides, it's interesting how PJF's speculations had more impact on the perception of the character than the actual content of the original novels did.

Besides, she kinda reminds people of Dejah Thoris from Barsoom, doesn't she?

This reminds me of nothing quite so much as how, in the 1960s, Superman had a lot of "Imaginary Stories" where he did things like get married, die, or reform Lex Luthor. Eventually, the same scenarios came up over and over to the point Imaginary Stories had a kind of weird counter-canon even the actual stories considered the default trajectory of events. Every Imaginary Story made practically the same assumptions, like Clark Kent would replace Perry White as editor of the Planet after Perry White retires. Rokyn was first mentioned in an Imaginary Story as the place the bottled city of Kandor was enlarged on, before Kandor was enlarged there in "reality."

Doc Savage's son with Monja was a neurotic who couldn't hope to live up to the standards of his legendary father, who ultimately lost his mind because he lived his life in a big shadow, and truthfully, was also a bit of a dick. Okay…does this remind anybody else of Dr. Venture from Venture Bros?


The SF Elements

Here's the first big problem: I don't think O'Neil quite understood a Doc Savage story was not quite the same thing as a Fantastic Four story.

His plots all seemed like they were originally meant for Fantastic Four: Doc Savage finds a crashed UFO (interesting, as Doc debunked UFOs in 1946, when they were called Foo Fighters), with a transporter that sends him away for years. In one story, new character Shoshonna Gold is revealed to be a psychic getting mental emanations from the Moon, where aliens are creating war waves. Doc has to head to the Moon in a rocketship to stop them. Along the way, a robot sentry left by the aliens tries to capture Doc's grandson (could that be more FF?).

That may work for an FF story, which was often about expeditions that find weird alien machines, and the solution is to the problem is figuring out the aliens don't understand humans or the damage they're doing. When the situation is explained, the aliens eventually leave, as they mean us no harm. But Doc Savage was about emphasizing plausibility. There are no real aliens or psychic powers, only mysteries with rational explanations.

The worldview of Doc Savage stories is fundamentally skeptical. Even the more far out things in Doc Savage usually were believable at the time of writing: in the 1930s, a dinosaur island was just at the limit of possibility, and based on sound real, current science about closed off/island ecosystems.

Unfortunately, the one place I would forgive a fantasy element – a cell treatment to keep Doc's gang in fighting trim – turned out to be a fake. This had the unfortunate side effect of leaving the original five mostly non-combatant. After fighting aliens on the moon making wars with mind waves, who dissolved when brought to earth…they pick THIS story to play the skeptic card?


Phase II – The Mike W. Barr Years

Mike W. Barr took over Doc Savage after Denny O'Neil left, which constituted a dramatic lurch in the direction of the series to something more traditional, eventually ending in exclusively "flashback" stories to the 1930s. If O'Neil's take is New Coke, then Mike W. Barr is Coke Classic.

I feel sorry for poor Mike W. Barr. You can tell the guy wanted to write Doc but was saddled with a vision he didn't quite understand. He's an old hero and SF pulp aficionado usually given the job of working on licensed properties. During his work on Green Lantern, he slipped in Lensman references, introducing characters named Arisia and Eddore.

I don't think Barr ever warmed up to O'Neil's unique take, and I can't help but feel he was baffled by the whole thing. First chance he got, Mike W. Barr brought back classic Doc Savage elements. He set a story around the Valley of the Vanished, and in what might be the high point of the comic, had John Sunlight return to life thanks to the formula in Resurrection Day.

John Sunlight's return in #11-14 is easily the best part of this series. It is identical to the only Conan the Barbarian novel written by the original author: "The Hour of the Dragon." It's about a conspiracy bringing a mummy back to life to use as their puppet, but the mummy turns out to be smarter and more manipulative than the people who wanted to use him, and turns the table on them, creating an even more threatening menace than before. It's a downright chilling moment to see the Devil Genghis restored.

Let me go out on a limb here: Mike W. Barr's "flashback" issues set in the 30s might just be the most faithful take on Doc Savage, including the PJF stuff.


Why did nobody like it? 

Well, it didn't help it was introduced to the world by what might be the most misleading house ad ever:

In no sense is this ad true. Doc isn't a detective, he doesn't look different.

Personally, I didn't like these comics when I first read them. It was too different from what I was expecting, which was a more traditional Doc adaptation – something it only became near the end.

People usually read comic adaptations to recapture the enjoyment they had experiencing the original. This was a lot more important back in the day, when there was no VCR and movies infrequently played on television. Comics were how you got a "movie experience" when one wasn't playing. For instance, Bob Hope had a comic book that did well. It made sense to do one around Bob Hope, who had a reliable comic persona (an uncharitable person would say he played the same guy in every movie). The only modern comedian with a similar "brand" would be Adam Sandler. The comics replicated the experience of the usual Bob Hope movie, from his travel to his hound dog womanizing. In short, you read the comic version because you liked what it was based on and wanted to see some more.

That said, I liked it more on rereading it once I got over the experience of it being something totally different. It's like somebody handing you a coke and telling you it's a milkshake.

That said, I don't know if I'd really want to see any more in this timeline. None of the new characters are all that memorable, not Woman, Russian, or Hillbilly. The SF elements were so out of place I expected to see Kirby machines.

Worse, the O'Neil run didn't commit to its ideas, so it wasn't even a good Watchmen-like subversive take. If you're going to explore the morality of the Crime College, make a statement on it, instead of just using it as the backdrop to a thriller plot. That's the trouble with this incarnation of Doc Savage: it was too traditional to be subversive, and too subversive to be traditional. It had an identity crisis. The series toyed with some serious ideas but didn't commit to them. It figured just mentioning them is enough, and you've done your job. Monk is disturbed by the idea he might just be Doc's puppet? Have him change or make a decision about that, don't just have a scene where that's brought up!

The only interesting dynamic was Doc's pacifist son, but that's because he was the one subversive idea O'Neil gave some payoff.


Recommendation? 

The O'Neil/Kubert tales are a misfire, but it misfires in a very unique way (this is the difference between a failure and a fiasco – a fiasco is failing with style). Recommended, if you're curious, but know what you're in for.

The Mike W. Barr stories come recommended. Especially the John Sunlight arc at #11-14, and the flashback story starting at #19.


Final Thoughts

• I understand coloring in four color "dot" printing is often imprecise…but why does Doc have the same skin color as Adam Warlock?

• I take it back, the Russian member of Doc's crew was pretty cool. He was a hairy weirdo, but he was a Doc Savage fanboy that wanted to be just like him. I find it hilarious that, like Rasputin, he's irresistible to women despite not getting a haircut or shaving. 

• The later drawings, incidentally, come the closest to how I've always visualized the character in my head. 

• The Air Lord arc starting in #18 is one of the few times Doc fights a true supervillain. Somehow, it feels right. 

Characters You Won't See in the Doc Savage Movie

The Four Golden Boys (Funny, Don, Mental, Elmer)

"The Gold Ogre" was a totally weird Doc Savage novel where the main characters weren't Doc and the gang, but four scrappy mystery-solving teenagers clearly meant to be a "permanent" addition...who thankfully, we never heard from again.

Making Doc a guest-star in his own magazine who shows up midway through someone else's story, is exactly the kind of experiment you can do if you have a long lasting series, and one the series should have tried more, very much like that one novel written in the First Person.

The four mystery solving teenagers are basically the James Bond, Jr., Muppet Babies, or Tiny Toon Adventures versions of Doc and the Five, with brawny Don Worth as the Buster Bunny-like teen Doc Savage (Don, not Doc, get it?), "Funny" Tucker is the broadly drawn comic guy not unlike Monk in that he was both funny and fat, Mental, the erudite Johnny of the group who had the dignity and solemn gravitas of the original Doc that muscle boy Don Worth doesn't have, and Elmer Dexter, who had no clear 1:1 analogue in the five, but who had the five's sense of adventure, love of travel and dreamed of polar expeditions.

The four were placed in a mystery that involved murderous circus midgets, yet another Doc Savage mystery that involves killer circus freaks (see also: the Monsters). Basically, it's some high school lunkheads against the Murder Moppets from Venture Brothers.

As you might guess, the four new characters, added to an already crowded Doc Savage universe, were abandoned. They remind me of nobody quite so much as Captain Marvel's Lieutenant Marvels (Fat Marvel, Tall Marvel, and Hillbilly Marvel), a supposed "permanent addition" who lasted for one appearance and were utterly forgotten about afterward.

Side note: anybody who tells you the Super-Pets (except for Krypto), or the Lieutenant Marvels were a "major part" of their respective comics is flat out lying to you. Not honest error, but a deliberate misrepresentation, for the purpose of  making these books sound sillier and more whimsical than they really were. (Ahem, Erik Larsen.) The Super-Pets barely showed up (and, other than Krypto, had exactly zero appearances after 1969). The Lieutenant Marvels only appeared once total in the entire Golden Age, and were only brought back in the 80s because superfan Roy Thomas remembered them.

The four amigos came about in a period in the Street & Smith hero pulps that saw the introduction of several new supporting cast members to once unshakably reliable, glacially unchanging mags. Heck, the cast of Grey's Anatomy changed more times in 7 years than either the Shadow OR Doc Savage did in the same time.

The most successful and enduring introduction in that period of experimentation was the Shadow's girlfriend, Margo Lane, brought into the pulps only a year after the Gold Ogre. Margo Lane might have been the first ever "continuity immigrant," like Harley Quinn: she was originally on the radio show, created because it was believed a male voice wouldn't be enough to contrast against the Shadow.

Notice that not a single one of the Four Golden Boys was a girl, though. Jeez, as if the world of Doc Savage wasn't a big enough sausage fest!



John Thunden from Fear Cay

John Thunden is a hearty 137 year old man who once punched Doc Savage in the face.

Of all the supreme scrappers set up from the get-go as a physical match for Doc Savage (Bruze, aka the Sargasso Ogre comes to mind), John Thunden might be the most unlikely.

The source of his tremendous vigor? He devoted himself to regular exercise and to eating syliphium, a plant that, in the Roman world, was used to treat impotence. Thankfully, we were spared the image of a 137 year old man going to the bone zone. The story leads us to believe that Syliphium might be the source of eternal life, but as this is a Doc Savage story, in the end it turns out Syliphium is just a vitamin rich superfood that kept Dan Thunden vigorous into his old age, and is as much a source of eternal life as yogurt and spinach are.

Giving a supporting cast member tremendous vigor due to the Roman world's equivalent of Viagra was an especially bizarre decision, but I strongly suspect they were silently hoping you didn't look it up for yourself. Doc Savage stories were well researched enough to be believable, but judging by moments like when Doc speaks the "native language" of Trinidad (which is ENGLISH), a lot of these stories work by Stephen Colbert's "truthiness." If something sounds right, it's more important than if it is right.

Also, John Thunden has an attractive daughter (of course he does). Though you'd imagine the daughter of a 137 year old man would be 100+ years old, you'd be wrong.

As awesome as Thunden would be in a feature film, I somehow doubt they'll go in that direction.



Lea Aster

Lea Aster is homely monkey-like chemist Monk's sexy secretary, taken prisoner back in "Land of Terror," and never mentioned ever again.

Monk brags about her as being a "honey," and a "real peach," which I'm guessing is Old Person for smokin'.

It's easy to imagine her leaving Monk's service after Land of Terror. Even if she didn't work for a horny monkeyman trying to play a game of grab-ass, she still is in danger of being attacked by ancient Mayans, archers dressed up in silver, trained panthers, and assorted Thousand-Headed Men.

Of all the characters on this list, I can see Lea Aster showing up in the movies more than the others (though the chances are still remote), simply because she gives the single most interesting of Doc's allies an inner life and a supporting cast independent of being Doc's buddy.

Well…kind of a harass-y inner life, left over from the Mad Men days when Americans still had balls and sexual harassment was rampant, seen as hilarious, and assumed to be built into the fabric of boss-secretary relationships. Just look at every 60s Playboy magazine humor cartoon.

Interestingly, Monk isn't the only hero to have a secretary who gets involved in the action. That would also include the sinister Atlantis-seeking Doc Savage clone Sun Koh, published in Nazi Germany. One of his allies was a badass old lady who had children who died in the Great War, and who kept a loaded machine gun under her desk.

You know, I have to get around to reviewing Land of Terror, because it was full of many attempts to give the aides inner personal lives independent of their work with Doc. The best example would be electronic expert Long Tom's tricked out supercar, which had an electrical antibug field several years before "bug zappers" became widespread. Long Tom always seemed like an interesting guy who was relegated to the background, much like many Star Wars characters who got an action figure: in "The Phantom City," we hear he had a personal museum of electronic gadgets taken from numerous battles.