Category Archives: Doc Savage

February 13, 2026 · 4:32 pm

The camel’s hump is an ugly lump

(Title taken from Rudyard Kipling. I’ve used it before).

Wednesday is, as we all know, hump day — once we pass it, we’re on the downhill slide toward the weekend. Lately, however, I seem to be having trouble getting over the hump. My Wednesday is a slog.

Part of that this Wednesday was Plush Dudley (seen in an older photo while he was still on cage rest). Usually he sleeps most of the afternoon. For whatever reason, he was lively. Bark. Whine. Try to get my attention. Licking my feet. A lot. I finally had to give up getting work done for the last couple of hours, though I wasn’t able to read or relax much either.

He’s still my boy.

Even before that, I was struggling to write. I had a relatively simple article to write on Carrboro’s budget discussions but it turned into a plodding exercise, though I think the results were good. Reflecting on it, I realized one problem is Monday and Tuesday evenings. Monday I work into the evening to make up for us taking the dogs to PT during the day; Tuesday I often have my Zoom writer’s group. After I finish, it’s typically another hour to take care of the dogs. I end up going to sleep later than usual and I don’t usually make it up in the morning. This Wednesday that left me tired; I also woke up late (compensating for Tuesday’s late night) which always throws me off my game. Mentally that left me behind the eight-ball.

Monday and Tuesday were productive though. I worked on Savage Adventures, went through all the books where my manuscript was unclear (why did Doc Savage do X? What exactly was the villain’s plan?) and made the corrections. This draft is done!!!!!

Next up: rereading some of my Doc Savage reference books for anything worth adding, working on the bibliography, then printing the manuscript out and proofing it. Then the writing is done and I can look at indexing (sigh), finding a cover and I’ll be ready to rock.

Thursday I put in more time writing for The Local Reporter. I got in one good story about Chapel Hill’s budget decisions — they have $3 million left over from fiscal year 2025 to spend — but nothing else. Nobody returned my calls. Annoying. However I already have the materials for one, possibly two stories for next week, and there’s a Carrboro Council meeting. So I’ll be in good shape.

Over at Atomic Junk Shop I blogged about mondegreens, the death of the Green Goblin and comic book writers as psychics.

And this blog is still getting lots more hits than average. Hi there, whoever you are. I hope you stick around. If nothing else, the pet photos are adorable.

Doc Savage cover by James Bama, all rights to images remain with current holders.

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February 6, 2026 · 4:28 pm

Not much writing done this week, but I anticipated that

Thursday I only worked a half-day because the housekeepers were here. Sitting in the spare bedroom with all the pets to keep them out of the way (and make sure Snowdrop and Wisp don’t run out) does not inspire creative work. For the first time in a few months, they showed up late enough I could have made a full work day out of it; by the time I realized that I’d turned my brain off.

And Tuesday I took one of my days off to devote to TYG and my “death document” — instructions about our finances, ordering dog drugs, when to give dog drugs, plans for our bodies. Because contrary to this Nick Cardy cover, death can come at any time. We’d like to be as much help to each other as we can.

I’ve been slack about updating the stuff I know but it turns out not much has changed since the last time I checked — Trixie has one added med, little things like that. Still it’s good to keep everything current and good to know that it is.

With Friday devoted to stuff like blogging and catching up on email, that left two days. I got another chunk of Savage Adventures rewritten, though not as much as I’d like. Then I had my work for The Local Reporter: a story on the snowfall and how local towns dealt with it (not up yet), one on how Carrboro is scoring its performance and one on what the former Chapel Hill Weekly was reporting when it started publishing in 1923 (“On the whole, Chapel Hill is ultra-conservative in the matter of hats.”).

As I mentioned a while back, they recently lost one of their government reporters so I’m doing more work. Which is good — more money — but it’s frustrating how much work I have to do to find enough stuff to write about (it consumes a surprising amount of time). The reporting and writing is relatively simple. But such is life.

I anticipate being way more productive next week.

One thing that did surprise me about this week — this blog has racked up 1,500 views the past two days. While there are times I can explain a rush in traffic, like my posts about Taylor Swift a couple of years back, I have no idea what triggered it. None of my specific posts have received a huge hit either. I’m not complaining of course and if any of y’all are reading this, thanks for visiting.

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January 18, 2026 · 5:15 am

Women superheroes of WW II, psychic teens of 1970: books

LIBERTY GIRL by Barry Reese was a fun novella based on the same-name indy comic book about the eponymous Wonder Woman-like superhero vanishing in WW II and returning in the present a la Captain America (but with more thought to the gulf between Then and Now). Fun, though hardly groundbreaking; what made it work for me is that the golden-eyed, bronze-skinned protagonist is Doc Savage’s daughter (though as with my own The Savage Year they can’t spell it out). I might take a look at the comic some time, though it appears it’s only available in single issues rather than a trade paperback.

The sixth volume of BOMBSHELLS, War Stories (cover by Ant Lucia) has Amanda Waller’s new Sucide Squad stop Nazi ally Edward Nigma from unleashing the worst of the Tenebrae while large numbers of supernaturals and superhumans gather at the Siege of Leningrad where Kryptonian Faora Hu-Ul reveals her master plan for Earth. As usual this was fun, though it also feels a little too sprawling, with characters we’ve never met (like Faora) showing up at the end and other plotlines apparently vanishing (this is the final volume but perhaps there’s some resolution in the spinoff Bombshells: United).

NINETEEN SEVENTY: The Seven Book One by Sarah M. Cradit is the first in a prequel series to a mythos (the House of Crimson and Clover) that I’ve never read. Here we see the future heads of the witch clan (though like many fictional witches they seem more psionic) as teens in 1970 variously coping with first love, periods of hedonism, Duty Vs. Love, Finishing School vs. Saving the World etc. This was better than most Buy This Book In The Series Cheap offers on Kindle, enough I might pick up more in the series later. However it’s both a prequel and an installment (there are several more 1970s set books) which is a little frustrating, and suffers from repeated anachronisms such as “trophy wife” and “chill pill” as phrases. I still enjoyed it.

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July 25, 2025 · 4:22 pm

I didn’t think this would work …

Some time back I conceded the increasing demands of pet care were cutting into my time to the point working seven hour days made more sense than trying to put in eight hours. Though of course, they’re worth it.

The thing is, the last hour of the “work” day, from 4 to 5 PM, never seemed to work after that. I couldn’t quite relax but couldn’t think of anything that really filled the hour either. Well, this week I tried working all the way up to 5 … and strangely enough, that works better. I quit at 5 PM much more comfortably than at 4 PM — has the concept of “9 to 5” been that burned into me over the years? Still, I’m not complaining; getting more writing done is a good thing.

And I managed to get a lot done, even though Trixie got me up around midnight Sunday and Monday to go out and squirtle (worse, she didn’t quite make it outside). Fortunately whatever brought that on, it stopped after that.

I got some work on Savage Adventures done for the first time in a while, bringing the finished book almost up to 1939. My Local Reporter work included one story on Vimala’s Curryblossom Café, which is helping feed the victims of Tropical Storm Chantal, and a more general one on local recovery efforts. At Atomic Junk Shop I blogged about the start of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Pellucidar series, then a second post on the rest of the series.

I got a lot of work done on Jekyll and Hyde. Rewriting some of the book (I need to become much more organized and systematic), reading the section on Jerry Lewis’ Nutty Professor to the writing group, and watching a couple of movies I only just stumbled across.

I’m almost done with watching the movies, though there’s a lot of TV to get through too. But given I have until the end of the year, I’m confident things will go smoothly barring some unforeseen catastrophe (and those are always possible). Fingers crossed.

Oh, and I’ve been remiss in posting about Con-Tinual online convention. I’m on a couple of panels about breaking writer’s block and one on best and worst comics adaptations.

Also one on Lovecraftian horror —

— and superheroes and mutants. All of these will show up on Con-Tinual’s YouTube channel eventually.

Cover by Frank Frazetta. All rights to images remain with current holders.

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May 7, 2025 · 5:15 am

I don’t hate the game but I don’t play it.

I picked up THE SAVAGE DYARIES: The Collected Doc Savage Essays of Dafydd Neal Dyar, Volume One, to read his article on the Doc Savage novel Land of Long Juju. I knew from a reference elsewhere that Dyar had discovered that it was originally set in Latin America, which explains things like African tribes who speak Mayan and shrink heads — Donovan changed the setting but not the details (so I’m sure the dreadful racism would have been equally dreadful in the original).

The essay didn’t provide any information why it got switched but I was still glad to read it. There are also other interesting stuff — a detailed discussion on the disappeared airship that inspired part of The Lost Oasis, speculation whether the Mayans giving Doc jade wouldn’t make more sense than gold and an article about what Pat Savage really thought about her cousin (it includes the interesting reveal that Dent would have had her running a detective firm before his editor pushed for a beauty salon). This stuff is definitely useful for writing Savage Adventures.

There are also a number of essays built around the premise that Doc is a real person whose exploits were fictionalized in Doc Savage. Two interviews with Doc in the style of Philip José Farmer. Doc revealing he deliberately influenced Warner Brothers to make the 1975 movie campy. Discussing the hypothetical backstory of Doc’s mother.

I have no objection to this approach (which Rick Lai’s chronology also uses) though it’s not the path I’m taking. In Savage Adventures I assume Doc is “real” in the world of the series but not our own; reading Dyar makes me realize the two approaches sometimes lead to different places.

Lai’s chronology, for instance, involves a lot of figuring out which real countries Doc was adventuring in during Dust of Death, Golden Peril and other stories. I can simply assume fictional countries such as Hidalgo and Santa Amoza exist in Doc’s secondary reality and not worry about it. Farmer has to explain how Doc can have offices on the 86th floor of the Empire State Building when it’s an observation deck; I can note the discrepancy and move on.

Or consider World’s Fair Goblin. Set at the New York World’s Fair, it came out the same month the fair opened. Obviously if it happened then, Lester Dent wouldn’t have had time to write it up, nor his editors to go over it, then get it on the stands. Farmer declares it’s a fiction Dent wrote to cash in on a big event; Lai suggests it took place before the official opening. I can assume it happened just as Dent wrote it.

That doesn’t mean their approach is wrong. It’s the same one Sherlockians have been using to write about Holmes for years, and it’s equally legitimate for other fictional characters. Reading Dyar just made me aware how the two paths end up in different places.

Covers by James Bama. All rights to images remain with current holders.

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April 18, 2025 · 4:02 pm

This week I was trapped, tangled and in total trouble!

No, wait, that’s the guy on Sal Trapani’s cover. My week wasn’t quite that bad.

When I talked about successfully fighting off a cold last week, I was optimistic. I have kept the usual bronchial infection at arm’s length but stuff like this usually requires a day of rest to shake off and I hadn’t given myself one. Nor have I gotten one since. So I’m still feeling wiped out (a couple of bad nights of sleep didn’t help) and still coughing a little. If it persists into next week I’ll visit the doctor.

Still I did get plenty done. Work on Savage Adventures, some movies watched for Jekyll and Hyde, and two articles for The Local Reporter. One on Carrboro’s plans to protect residents in the current political climate, one on the budget for the coming fiscal year. Over at Atomic Junk Shop I blogged about Green Lantern #76, considered one of the books that launched the Bronze Age.

I’m not a fan of Denny O’Neil’s writing here — I rarely am — but that is one hell of a cool Neil Adams cover!

I also finished the taxes which proved more work than I’d anticipated. On the plus side I found enough savings that we’re entitled to refunds at the state and federal level. I mailed them off Tuesday. I’d like to say “next year I’ll handle them much more efficiently” but like so many Americans I’ve said that too many years to believe it.

This weekend I do hope to turn Sunday into a lazy, layabout day. We’ll see if it happens. In any case, have a great weekend everyone!

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April 11, 2025 · 4:20 pm

A week of dodging bullets. Yes, that’s a good thing.

First up, I spent today proofing our income taxes. I spotted several errors and when I crunched all the numbers our bill went from $500 in to maybe $100. Whoot! My brain is shot but all I have to do now is print out the forms and send them in.

Second, it was Plush Dudley’s eye checkup this week. He’s had glaucoma for a year and the pet optometrist told us that’s usually the point at which the drugs stop working. Nope, his eye pressure is still excellent. That’s really good news.

Third, TYG went to a social event last weekend and developed a hacking cough a couple of days later. Then I started to hack and cough. No, that’s not good news but it’s very good news that it’s largely cleared up for both of us. Normally she has a hard time fighting off these things and I’ve had multiple infected throats intensify into laryngitis. Doesn’t seem to be happening.

And last but definitely not least, Wednesday morning my iPhone stopped charging. Bad news, obviously, but when I took it to the Apple Store right after lunch, the young woman at the Genius Bar solved the problem — debris in the charging port — and cleared it out easily. I’m impressed and relieved.

Work was … okay, partly because I had to spend the whole day working on the taxes. I’d thought it would be smoother but I made more errors than I thought, and kept thinking “Oh no, that makes us pay out more” followed by “oh, but this error cancels that one out and then some.” Trust me, not as exciting as it sounds.

I didn’t watch anything for Jekyll and Hyde but did work on the section covering Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde. Reading some of the reviews and analysis of the film, I found it more interesting (not necessarily more entertaining) than my review at the link.

I proofed another dozen or so entries in Savage Adventures including yes, The Mental Wizard. I wound up writing two articles for The Local Reporter, one of which they’re holding for next week. They printed one article on the local Chamber Orchestra of the Triangle and one held over from last week on Carrboro’s commitment to Vision Zero, a program for eliminating pedestrian deaths due to traffic.

Over at Atomic Junk Shop we’re suffering an ongoing problem: our tech/admin person is AWOL (valid personal reasons), the site won’t let us load photos a lot of the time, and the hosting company isn’t answering my emails. In hindsight having one person handle the admin with nobody designated as backup was a mistake but this was always meant to be a fun project so none of us thought about that. TYG, skilled IT pro that she is, would have known better.

Still I managed to get some stuff up: reprinting an old post about the choice between buying old vs. new comics, one on what makes a good antihero and one on Timothy Dalton’s debut as Bond in The Living Daylights (Maryam D’Abo, below, plays the Bond Girl)

And the taxes are done! That’s a load off my mind, as is the smaller tax bill.

Doc Savage cover by James Bama; rights to all images remain with current holders.

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February 16, 2025 · 5:19 am

Pulp heroes and superheroes: this week’s reading

SIX WHITE HORSES: The Complete Adventures of the Gadget Man, Volume 3, by Lester Dent (V1 review here, V2 here) wraps up the series with inventor Clickel Rush getting into his usual jams — an inheritance from an uncle who doesn’t exist, becoming custodian of a foul-mouthed parrot, murder by feeding a man a poisoned pigeon — which lead to him doing Bufa’s dirty work and investigating. In the previous volume Bufa was completely manipulating Click; in this one Click’s spent a lot of his pay on unsuccessful startups to market his inventions so he’s got added incentive to crack the case. And may I say that getting a $10,000 bill for his work (they really hd those back in the 1930s) is way cooler than depositing the same amount in PayPal.

Regrettably this was the last of the series. Doc Savage expert Will Murray thinks Dent got PO’d when the publisher used Dent’s Doc Savage byline — Kenneth Robeson — on one of the stories. We’ll never know for sure.

THE MIGHTY CRUSADERS by Ian Flynn and Kelsey Shannon (who did the cover) is a sequel to Flynn’s The New Crusaders which I read a decade ago. The premise of the previous volume was that Archie Comics’ superheroes from the Golden and Silver Age have aged in real time and their kids are now stepping up as legacy heroes.

In this volume, the kids are still struggling to become an effective team. The new Shield keeps wanting to do it all herself; Golden Age hero Steel Sterling is becoming rigid metal; the Jaguar’s patron spirit keeps making her go crazy; and some of the team think they should be leader. When the villains show up, can the Crusaders rise to the task?

This is probably my favorite of the heroes’ many revivals since the Silver Age (if you’re curious, The MLJ Companion covers them from the 1940s through the end of the 20th century), though like the others it didn’t take — I think this volume was the last. Flynn does a good job cherry picking elements from previous versions, such as the female Jaguar from the 1990s DC !mpact line and a couple of villains from the 1980s Red Circle version.

Four years ago I picked up The Terrifics: Meet the Terrifics, in which Plastic Man, Mr. Terrific, Metamorpho and Phantom Girl join forces to become a DC version of the Fantastic Four. I don’t know when I’d have gotten back to the series but as I subscribe to the DC app for my Silver Age Reread at Atomic Junk Shop, I eventually worked through the rest of THE TERRIFICS, written by Jeff Lemire, then Gene Luen Yuang, with various artists (the cover is by Emanuela Lupacchino). In various stories the team gets trapped in a computer, battle Bizarro across time, meet their evil counterparts the Deplorables, meet Ms. Terrific (Mr. Terrific’s dead wife, but from a world where he died and she became the hero) and meet Simon Stagg’s evil son.

Do I miss getting these in hard copy? Not really. The series is fun, but not so much that I want to own it again. I was happy to learn the team is still active rather than forgotten once the series ended, as I’d anticipated. However it’s a little irksome that we now have this version of Metamorpho, one in Mark Waid’s World’s Finest and a third one in Al Ewing’s Metamorpho. I get that out-of-continuity books can be good but I’m not sure, which is in continuity, or if any of them are.

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January 26, 2025 · 5:19 am

Two books of TV horror, two pulps: recent reading

THE TELEVISION HORRORS OF DAN CURTIS: Dark Shadows, The Night Stalker and Other Productions by Jeff Thompson is an exhaustive look at Curtis’ career from his early days selling syndicated shows to local stations (Thompson speculates his awareness of syndication is one reason he made sure we had a complete run of DARK SHADOWS) to producing golf shows to Dark Shadows, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (the reason I bought this—movie review soon), adaptations of other horror classics (The Turn of the Screw, Frankenstein, Dracula) and non-horror work such as The Winds of War, based on Herman Wouk’s epic novel of America before Pearl Harbor. Even as a Dan Curtis fan I learned a lot here.

I kept watching Peacock’s Teacup partly because I like Robert McCammon’s horror novels and I knew it was based on his book STINGER. If I’d known how little the series kept of the book — alien refugee in child’s body, alien hunter, everyone trapped inside a force field, nothing else — I doubt I’d have made it to the flaccid finish. The much more entertaining 1980s novel has a lot in common with the decade’s TV miniseries like Winds of War — a huge, sprawling cast, epic action, and unlike the TV show, solid entertainment.

The book takes place in Inferno, a southwestern town slowly wasting away, which doesn’t stop the remaining populace from engaging in personal feuds, power struggles and occasionally love. Then a refugee from a crashed spaceship transplants her consciousness into a child until she can find a spaceship to go home (she’s shocked we don’t have any); worse, a scorpion-like alien bounty-hunter shows up looking for her and he doesn’t care how many humans die if it gets him what he wants. Worse, as Stinger kills people, he resurrects the corpses as cyborg agents so the numbers rapidly shift in his favor. If nothing else, at least Teacup prompted me to read this.

Now, the pulps: CRIMSON STREETS: The Devil Inside is the last of the six Crimson Street anthologies I got from the publishers and a good one to go out on. Mostly hardboiled mysteries or crime dramas without much of a fantasy element, but with that caveat it’s a solid set of stories. A beautiful dame doublecrosses her gang. A PI becomes a wraith. A beautiful dame assures readers her encounter with this shamus will follow the tropes they expect. And more. Good neo-pulp stuff.

I enjoyed Talking Toad, the first volume of Lester Dent’s Gadget Man series, but not as much as I’d expected. To my surprise I had more fun with THE DEVILS SMELL NICE: The Complete Adventures of the Gadget Man, Vol.2, probably because I know what I’m getting: low-key adventures with a strong comic element, much more down to Earth than Doc Savage.

In the first book, the mysterious Bufa hired inventor Clickell Rush to use his crimefighting gadgets (he hoped to sell them to the police and get rich. The police laughed) and take down the crooks Bufa pointed him towards. With a $10,000 bill for each mission accomplished, Clickell can afford to take it easy and stop putting his life on the line. Bufa, however, keeps pushing him into more crime-solving peril. If only Click could figure out who he is …

In the second volume, Rush discovers Bufa pays various PI firms to tip him off to impossible crimes (one of the firms, the Continental Detective Agency, comes from Dashiell Hammett’s stories — Dent was a huge fan). Surely he can work back through the agency to find Bufa. Instead he finds a strange egg containing a hairless animal, an innocent man facing the electric chair and killers who smell really good. The screwball stories that follow the opening hook are fun, though as with V1, the women are interchangeable eye candy, much less impressive than the women characters who show up in Doc Savage’s adventures.

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October 20, 2024 · 5:15 am

From a spellshop to the valley of the kings: books

As I enjoyed Sarah Beth Durst’s The Bone Maker, I tried her fantasy cozy, THE SPELLSHOP, but ended up putting down unfinished.

The protagonist, Kiera, flees the imperial library when revolutionaries burn the capital. Accompanied by her pet spider-plant, she takes some of the surviving spellbooks back to the isolated island village her parents came from. She needs a found family, though she doesn’t know it yet; the dying village needs a shot in the arm. Hmm, this might work out well.

Durst said she wanted this book to be comforting, like a mug of hot chocolate, and she succeeded. However like a lot of stories about returning to your family’s small town it’s got the same worldview as the 1939 Wizard of Oz, that there’s no point in looking for happiness beyond your own backyard, and that really isn’t a perspective I can identify with. So it’s a no-go.

(Yep, another post where I’m throwing in random pet photos for eye candy)

In 1936, Lester Dent took a break from writing Doc Savage and among other writing sold two novellas, HADES AND HOCUS POCUS to the top magazine Argosy. In Hades, a med student whose education has ended early winds up helping out a movie producer who believes he’s uncovered a gateway to Hell — and something from Hell has followed him back. In Hocus Pocus, an unemployed stage magician takes a job investigating an evangelical fellowship’s alleged mind-reading powers and discovers the church has more sinister goings on than he anticipated.

The first has a fun cast, including the protagonist’s sidekick Haw (he laughs at his own, very bad jokes) and a professional strongwoman. However the plot feels too much like countless Doc Savage stories about elaborate supernatural fakes — I imagine Dent would have recycled this for the last novel in the series, Up from Earth’s Center, if his editor hadn’t insisted on a real supernatural threat. Hocus Pocus has less memorable characters but it’s a much stronger story.

EIGHT FANTASMS AND MAGICS is a mixed bag of shorts by Jack Vance. Three of them I’ve read before (two of the rereads are from The Dying Earth and Eyes of the Overworld), some are meh but the two best are very very good — the solution in “Telek” to the mutants vs. humans problem is really good. Overall, though, only fair for Vance.

WOMEN IN THE VALLEY OF KINGS: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age by Kathleen Sheppard is a mixed bag. It’s a good look at 19th and early 20th century Egyptology with a particular emphasis on the women who were involved and largely eclipsed — excavators, authors, teachers, women who underwrote expeditions, artists who captured temples and tombs on paper (the best non-invasive way to record discoveries as photography would have captured things in black and white). And yes, Sheppard is fully aware of the colonialist/cultural appropriation side of what European archeologists did and doesn’t hide from it. Unfortunately a lot of the book bogs down in inside-baseball stuff — lists of famous names (often nobody I’ve heard of), schools and books. Still worth a read though.

#SFWAPro. Cover by Jack Gaughan, all rights to images remain with current holders.


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