The Man of Bronze & His Fabulous Five

I've posted links to this slideshow elsewhere, but I figured I'd share it here as well, just for kicks. It's my collection of Doc Savage paperbacks. Check them out:



I love Doc Savage. I'm not even sure why, but there's just something awesome about that dude that captivates me. He's a mixture of brains, brawn and bizarre. He's concentrated rad. Doc, along with his pulp hero brethren, are the bridge between stuff like H.G. Welles' sci-fi, Bram Sroker's horror and Arthur Conan Doyles' mysteries and the brightly-colored superheroes that would eventually put them out of business. (For some great meta-commentary on this, pick up Warren Ellis' fantastic Planetary series, which has recently wrapped up and is totally mega-cool. Also, for a look at an attempt to revitalize this type of hero, check out the cult classic The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, which fills me with the same sense of excitement and giddiness when I think about it. Additionally, Philip Jose Farmer's Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life - a fictional biography - is a really great, fun ride. It's the start of his Wold Newton Universe, which manages to tie all of these strains of fantastic fiction together into a cohesive whole.)

And those covers! These books are worth the price I pay for them for the stories those covers conjure. Land of Always-Night? He Could Stop the World? Quest of the Spider? Daaaang. That's some heavy-duty stuff there. Plus the O.C.D. completist inside of me sees those numbers on the covers and wonders, "Can I get them all? I bet I can." I even made a chart in the back of my pocket notebook of which ones I have and which ones I need. I know, I know; I'm nuts. I have a sickness.

I lucked out and found a used bookstore here in Vegas who had a cache of these and wiped them out over the last month or so, worried the whole time that somebody would get to them first because, you know, there's a market our there for decades-old pulp paperbacks? Man, I'm crazy. Hopefully this score should sate my appetite for the next little bit, but uh, if you stumble on any of them while you're out and about (they're usually racked with Sci-Fi, authored by Kenneth Robeson), well, let me know.

Anyway, that's Doc Savage and why I think he's cool.