The Crushing Weight of Canon

At my book club this past Tuesday, we discussed Andy Weir’s new novel, ARTEMIS. Generally, we all liked it. The grades for all five of us averaged out to somewhere in the B range. One of our fellows—the one who gave it the lowest grade—said this about the book: without the nifty descriptions of the workings of Artemis, the only city on the moon, the book and plot are quite slight.  Another person asked what has become, perhaps, an obvious question in this modern day and age: Did we think ARTEMIS had any connection or lived in the same universe as Weir’s other novel, THE MARTIAN?
The question led us down a rabbit trail of observations. ARTEMIS is a slim book and it achieved a good blend of world building without pages and pages of backstory and exposition. The talk quickly went back to the classic SF novels of the 1950s through the 1970s when major classics like RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA were not very thick. More importantly with RAMA, not all questions were answered. Why? One possibility was that Arthur. C. Clarke wanted readers to think, to wonder, and, perhaps, to finish the book each in their own way.

Cut to modern times. For this mental exercise, I’m landing more or less at 1980. In the past four decades, we have seen the rise of thicker and thicker genre novels with tons of world building. Some readers are cool with that. I am, too, but only to a degree. In addition, there was the rise of role playing game source books, with every minute detail laid out for the players to pore over, memorize, and internalize. More and more media products—books, comics, movies, TV, games—all began to have their own internal source bibles, a canon. The original sixty Sherlock Holmes stories are called “The Canon.” Serialized TV shows began to have an overarching “mythology” and writers of all stripes were steered back into the canonized boundaries.

That’s all well and good and I frankly love it when a later-season episode of The X-Files refers back to something I remembered from season 1. I’m a fan. I dig it. Ditto for Batman comics and Marvel movies and even modern-day Doc Savage novels. Speaking of Savage, when Philip Jose Farmer went to craft his "biography" of Doc, Farmer said he had the devil of a time because he was having to codify—Canonize—the work of a dozen authors over 181 novels all to meet a deadline.

But along the way, The Canon (and here, I use it in a general sense for any given property) begins to weigh down imagination. The most recent Star Wars movie, The Last Jedi, was, I think, burdened with the crushing weight of Canonized Star Wars. Force projection? That can’t be done. Force Space Flying? That can’t be done. Ships jumping to light speed against and through another ship? That can’t be done.

Why? Because canon dictated it.

Well, so what?

On the one hand, director and writer Rian Johnson probably butted up against established canon and had someone tell him ‘no.’ On the other hand, his decision was to burst the bubble of canon and tell a story outside the canon. Granted, he has now made new canon and has expanded the boundaries of what can be done with Star Wars, but that’s kind of what I’m talking about. The boundaries of certain properties get so rigid that someone needs to come along and just blow them up and reform them anew. Give writers a chance to expand a canon while still respecting it. More often than not, the breath of fresh air given a property will satisfy.

Oh, and we all agreed that ARTEMIS and THE MARTIAN are likely not in the same universe. We all agreed that it was a good thing. Two stories, well told, and each could be enjoyed on their own.

Eighty-five Years of Doc Savage

Eighty-five years ago today, Doc Savage landed on magazine shelves for the first time and, one might argue, helped change popular culture all the way up to the present day.

The brainchild of Street and Smith publisher, Henry Ralston and editor John Nanovic, Doc Savage was the brighter answer to the magazine’s other runaway bestseller, The Shadow. But where the Knight of Darkness fought crime at night and in the, um, shadows, The Man of Bronze was a different type of hero. He strove “every moment of my life to make myself better and better, to the best of my ability, that all may profit by it. Let me think of the right and lend all my assistance to those who need it, with no regard for anything but justice. Let me take what comes with a smile, without loss of courage. Let me be considerate of my country, of my fellow citizens and my associates in everything I say and do. Let me do right to all, and wrong no man.” He was a paragon of virtue, the kind of person kids could look up to and revere.

Clark Savage, Jr. appeared in 181 adventures from 1933 to 1949, mostly written by a single author, Lester Dent. In nearly all of them, he was accompanied by his five stalwart brothers in arms: Monk Mayfair, Ham Brooks, John Renwick, Long Tom Roberts, and William Littlejohn. Each man of the Fabulous Five was an expert in his chosen discipline, but Doc bested each. Doc had trained his mind and body since birth to be a superman. He even had a Fortress of Solitude where he would retire from time to time to study. Invariably he would emerge from his seclusion with some new invention, knowledge, or something else to benefit humankind. His headquarters on the 86th Floor of the unnamed building in New York (but we all knew was the Empire State Building) was a palace of gadgets, technology, and books where Doc and his comrades planned their adventures. And his villains were trying to take over the world long before Lex Luther or Blofeld.

If you’ve read this far, I think you will recognize some names and terms. The obvious descendant is Superman himself. Extrapolate, if you will, what Superman wrought: Batman, DC Comics, other superheroes, Marvel Comics, novels, toys, merchandise, movie serials, major motion pictures with superheroes, and many other things that shape large chunks of popular culture. In fact, the biggest superhero movie to date, The Avengers: Infinity War, can trace its roots all the way back to a pulp magazine character that debuted eight-five years ago today.

I am woefully deficient in my Doc Savage reading, but then just imagine reading one novel a month at the pace Lester Dent and a handful of other co-writers drafted the books. You would finish in 2034! But these stories are fantastic to dip into from time to time for the breathless sense of adventure and wonder.

Generations of readers grew up on the original pulp magazines while other generations were raised on the Bantam reprints of the 1960s and 1970s, with Frank Bama's depiction of Doc with a widow's peak and a tattered shirt.

Nostalgia Ventures reprinted the entire run, adding historical commentary. And Will Murray has been using abandoned outlines from Dent’s personal papers to write new adventures, including one in which Doc teams up with The Shadow, bringing the entire saga full circle.

Now, in this 85th year of Doc Savage, I plan to read a few more adventures, including the black-and-white comics from the mid 70s as published by Marvel Comics. I'll be reviewing these yarns as I get to them, beginning with The Polar Treasure next week. 

What are your favorite Doc Savage stories? How about a Top 10 list?

The Charm of The Bronze Gazette

I am way too young to have been a Doc Savage fan back in the 1930s, but reading The Bronze Gazette is like being a kid again.

The Bronze Gazette is a fanzine focusing on the life and adventures of Doc Savage, Man of Bronze. Doc was the larger-than-life creation of Lester Dent back in 1933. For 181 issues—most of them monthly—Doc and his Fabulous Five took on bad guys the world over with high adventure, keen gadgets, and overall derring-do. Doc is the precursor to many things, including Superman, Batman, James Bond, the Fantastic Four, CSI, and every other ‘team’ on TV and movies. He is the “Superman” to the Shadow’s “Batman”: good-hearted, courageous, and a dozen other adjectives.

Doc’s fandom grew almost instantly in the 1930s and carried on through World War II. But, as is so often the case, the Doc Savage magazine was eventually cancelled. Doc lay dormant for a few years before Bantam began publishing the stories again in the 1960s. Here, instead of the original painted covers by Walter Baumhofer, Bantam commissioned new art from James Bama. This is the Doc many people think of if they think of Doc: big, buff, sporting a widow’s peak, and with a shirt always ripped to shreds.

Fandom of Doc kicked into another gear as a new generation of readers fell in love with Doc’s adventures. Enter The Bronze Gazette. Frankly, I have never seen an issue before the most recent one, No. 76. For 75 issues, dating back over 25 years, Howard Wright founded, published, and kept the Bronze Gazette going. With issue 76, a new team has come on board to carry the baton going forward.

I got my first issue today, and boy is it stellar! I’ll be honest: when I think of ‘fanzine,’ my first thoughts are of xeroxed pages, stapled together, with black-and-white hand drawn illustrations. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The Bronze Gazette is a professionally bound journal with a great cover and color pictures scattered throughout. There are over a dozen articles including a couple by Will Murray, the preeminent Doc scholar and author of The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage, the new novels being published.

I was already thrilled to receive my first fanzine and first Bronze Gazette, but there was one thing that put a huge goofy grin on my face. There is a code inside. It’s a Mayan alphabet with a symbol for each English letter. And it’s up to you to decipher it.

Come on! With the attention to detail like this, the charm of this, I hope the Bronze Gazette continues for many years to come. I know I’ll be buying every issue.

Thanks to Chuck Welch (editor), Kez Wilson (art director), and Terry Allen (publisher) for keeping the fire of Doc Savage going into the 21st Century.

Forgotten Books: Doc Savage #2: The Land of Terror

Doc Savage and dinosaurs. Do you need any other enticement to read this book?

The Land of Terror was the second Doc Savage novel, published in April 1933, a mere month after Doc’s debut in print. It’s an interesting time to have a new superhero to follow. The Great Depression was in full swing, America had a new president, and pulp novels and stories were in great demand.

Never one to waste time, author Lester Dent (writing under the house name Kenneth Robeson), launches the story in a single paragraph. Jerome Coffern, chemist and friend of Doc, is murdered by a poison gas dubbed the Smoke of Eternity. This isn’t some supernatural creature; this is a weapon shot from a gun. The end result of a Smoke of Eternity strike is the body completely dissolving save for a forearm that extended outside the cloud. Doc, of course, was waiting for Coffern and chases the thugs who killed his friend. After a scuffle, Clark Savage, Jr., determines the men worked for a criminal mastermind (is there any other kind?) nicknamed Kar. He is responsible for creating this death cloud and weaponizing it.

Now, judging by the cover image posted above (from the Bantam edition), you’d be expecting Doc and his Fabulous Five Friends to get to wherever the dinosaurs are as soon as possible. Oddly, you don’t. More than half the book is spent with Doc investigating clues to discover more truths about Kar, why he wanted to kill Coffern, and all sorts of other dastardly deeds. Along the way, the team picks up Oliver Wording Bittman, a taxidermist who saved Doc’s father sometime before. Together, all seven men fly across the continent and land on a South Pacific island named Thunder Island. It’s the source for the chemicals used to make the Smoke of Eternity. Oh, and there are dinosaurs.

Doc saves the day and constantly saves his friends, too. Hey! I didn’t give anything away. There are still 179 more books to read, okay. How he does it never fails to impress and entertain. There’s a big plot twist my 2010-era brain saw coming miles away but it’s still fun to see it play out.

The body count in this novel is higher than in the debut novel. Doc gets mad and kills the criminals—usually in self-defense—but he also kills some of the dinosaurs. I’ve read elsewhere that Lester Dent toned down the violence in subsequent books. I was okay with the violence here, especially given the era in which it was written. Things were bleak in early 1933. Sometimes, our entertainment merely mirrors what’s already in the world. That would include some of the cultural biases of white folks against native Pacific islanders. I don’t hold that against Dent. It was the time, after all.

This book is quick, escapist, adventure-filled fun. You don’t need a lot of brain cells to enjoy this stuff. Just sit back and enjoy the ride. Adventure House publishes two novels in a single volume. They also include historical essays and background information on Dent, Doc Savage, or other pertinent subjects. Plus, you get the black-and-white illustrations to boot. I’ll easily be reading more adventures in the coming months and years.

Batman/Doc Savage - First Wave

I'm a newcomer to Doc Savage. I've only read the first story, "The Man of Bronze," (my review) and I'm reading the second story, "The Land of Terror," right now. Me and Bats go back a long way.

Still, this pairing has got me drooling. And check out the writer for this one-shot: Brian Azzarello. Yeah, it just got better.

Head on out to your nearest comic shop. I am...