I'm a little worried about Doc Savage, folks.

For those of you who haven't encountered him, Clark "Doc" Savage, Jr., is a mysterious figure known as "the Man of Bronze." He's a huge, perfectly muscled guy with bronze skin, close-cropped (slightly darker) bronze hair, and eyes that are invariably described as "gold-flake" in color. He's a genius as well as an intimidating physical specimen, the greatest practical scientist in the world, gifted in fields as diverse as medicine, aeronautics, chemistry, criminology, and engineering. Women want him, men want to be him, and his shirt seems to be ripped to shreds with an alarming degree of frequency.

He is aided by five unusual gentlemen who are experts in their own fields: Brigadier General Theodore Marley Brooks, a/k/a Ham, is both a Harvard-educated lawyer and one of the globe's snappiest dressers. Colonel John "Renny" Renwick is a skilled engineer who enjoys knocking the panels out of doors with his fists for cheap laughs. Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett Mayfair, a/k/a Monk, is a simian-looking brawler who happens to be one of the world's leading chemists. Major Thomas J. Roberts ("Long Tom") is a pale, sickly-looking electrical engineer of unsurpassed ability. And William Harper "Johnny" Littlejohn is an emaciated specialist in geology and archaeology whose hobby is using obscure words. All are brilliant, bold, and dangerous in a fight.

Did I mention that they're fictional?

Doc and his assistants appeared in a series of pulp novels created by Lester Dent in the 1930s. Dent, who wrote under the name Kenneth Robeson, was clearly onto something, since his creation's trappings were liberally borrowed by later writers, including Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who not only gave their comic-book ubermensch a Fortress of Solitude just like Doc's, but even the civilian name "Clark." Dent wrote thirty-one short novels, starting with The Man of Bronze, before Will Murray took over the Robeson name and continued Doc's adventures through another sixty-odd titles.

I discovered Doc thanks to Marvel Comics, which adapted several of his stories (including The Man of Bronze, Death in Silver, and The Monsters) in a short-lived comics series in the mid-70s. Bantam Books was at the same time releasing paperbacks of Doc's adventures, and at the age of 11, I was transfixed by the sight of Doc's muscles bursting through his ripped shirt on the cover of The Derrick Devil. I read the book, loved it, and started on more: The South Pole Terror, The Majii, The Freckled Shark, The Motion Menace, Spook Hole, The Seven Agate Devils, you name it.

Most of the Doc books I read and loved, I later discovered, were written by Will Murray. More recently, however, I've read several Murray-penned books and come away deeply disappointed. The big, broad characters just clunk; the taut plots have seemingly come unstrung; and the pseudoscientific gimmicks that tread the edge of plausibility have leaped fully into the realm of "Oh, come on!" I've come away from Murray's The Magic Island, World's Fair Goblin, The Red Spider, and Merchants of Disaster with a feeling that Doc and his cohorts, a stalwart band whose adventures will always have a special place in my heart, right next to those of the Legion of Super-Heroes, are suffering from a severe case of Bad Writing.

And the horrible fear I'm unable to shake is this: what if they were suffering from it all along?
12:32 PM

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