Conan the Uncorrupted: Pure Robert E. Howard, Belatedly

Two books came in the mail today: The Conan Chronicles volumes I and II by Robert E. Howard. Originally published in the UK in the early 2000s, I must have missed their debut. I still can't figure out if there ever were counterpart editions in the United States, but if there were, they have evaded me.

Another Roadside Attraction and the Popular Cover-Up Genre

I am currently reading Another Roadside Attraction for a second time, more than forty years after reading as a virginal senior in high school. Recommended to me by Nikki Robertson, the quintessential daughter of fortune-telling free spirits who attended the Livonia Career Center, the book had a profound effect on me, and as I'm reading it again, I remember almost every bit of it.

Apocalypse Aborted: Philip José Farmer's Literary Plea

Dynamite’s Doc Savage #8 is now out, completing the series. I have blogged about this twice before; rather than reiterating those remarks, let me just say that the story’s ending offers no further introspection into the ideology of its protagonist, who vows “to abide by the court’s decisions” in the wake of certain scandalous revelations concerning his methods, and merely sets the stage for new stories set in the twenty-first century present. Update accomplished. Since most mainstream comics over the past generation or more seem afflicted with an emphasis on continuity over storytelling, resulting in mere dry tabulations of events rather than full-blooded storytelling, it would have been a false hope to expect an adaptation of this venerable property to buck the trend. Still, as the inspiration of such diverse and durable pop culture franchises as Superman and James Bond, I was rooting for Doc. But my basic judgment stands: this was an ambitious project that would have been better treated as a prose text, and a creditable first outing for newcomer artist Bilquis Evely, who was confronted with the arduous task of reconciling the Baumhofer and Bama versions of Doc while evoking nearly a century of eras from World War II to the present. But the Dynamite Doc reads more like a dry run for a movie bid and a slightly plodding exercise in revamping. One only hopes that a collection of this series into a graphic novel package will allow author Chris Roberson to add some textual background for the reader to flesh out some of the conceptual material he had in mind.

If this series will be remembered for anything, I suspect it will largely be for its enshrinement of certain concepts belonging to Philip José Farmer into the official Savage canon. For, what is not extrapolated from Lester Dent’s original pulp series is derived almost entirely from Farmer’s Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life and Farmer’s other original Savage adventures. These texts are mined for such concepts as Doc’s alleged immortality serum, which accounts for Doc not aging past fifty and Pat Savage aging more slowly, as Monk, Ham, and the other Fabulous Five grow old and fade away; and for the ethical qualms, such as they are, over the Crime College and other practices deployed by Doc. It is unfortunate that Farmer’s distillation of the pulp ethos, “to tell a rattling good story,” was not equally taken to heart, nor his speculation that the only suitable mates for cousins Doc and Pat were each other (Farmer also points out incestuous themes in the later Lensman novels of E.E. Smith, although I never made it that far with the other Doc). But the latter probably was not possible under the constraints of a licensing agreement.

But unfortunately, Farmer’s influence on most comics and fiction fans has always been his penchant for arcane continuity (in line with industry obsessions) more than his ribald sense of humor. Farmer’s followers have always taken his “fabulous family tree of Doc Savage,” which they have dubbed the “Wold-Newton Universe,” far more seriously and reverently than Farmer himself. To be sure, Farmer’s schematization, not only of Doc’s 181 “supersagas,” but a vast wealth of popular literature besides (including most of the oeuvre of Edgar Rice Burroughs among others) is done with a great deal of affection if not obsession and, as Win Scott Eckert points out, without the benefit of spreadsheet or database technology. The interrelation of adventure characters such as Doc Savage, Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, and myriad others has inspired such projects as Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentleman (and will no doubt subtend Dynamite’s Doc Savage team-up with the Shadow and The Avenger). Indeed, Farmer’s penchant for tying everything together neatly has contributed not only to the comic book industry’s mania for continuity, but extended to TV and movie franchises as well, becoming a general cultural obsession.

Farmer, not as talented a writer as Burroughs or even Dent, was at least clever enough to realize if he made the sexual drives underlying the pulps more explicit in the manner of writers such as Henry Miller, William S. Burroughs, and Norman Mailer, among others, he could unleash more of the sublimated energy of the genre. Farmer succeeded, not only with the intentionally perverse and satirical Doc Caliban series (most notably in the homoerotic A Feast Unknown), but eventually striking gold with his best-selling Riverworld series, which for a brief moment in the late 1970s dominated the fledging paperback bookstore market (it was said that the backbone of chains like B. Dalton and Little Professor, forerunners to juggernauts Borders and Barnes and Noble, was paperback science fiction, primarily Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings and James Blish’s workmanlike adaptations of the original Star Trek TV series).

The cover of The Return of Megaton Man #2 (Kitchen Sink Press, August 1988), featuring Doc, Pat, Ham and Monk (or their parodic approximations). © Don Simpson 1988, all rights reserved.

While I confess an early fascination with Farmer’s Savage family tree, which has played a role in my own work (most notably Bizarre Heroes in the 1990s), I have always valued Farmer’s Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life primarily for reasons other than those valued by the Wold-Newtonians. Having read some fifteen or twenty of the Bantam reprints by 1975, I was at first perplexed by that white-covered Bantam paperback, purporting to tell the true “life story” of this purportedly fictional adventure character. It was probably an overcast, wintry day in suburban Detroit when I purchased this odd little book, but to paraphrase Farmer, I will always remember it as a golden afternoon. I have read parts of His Apocalyptic Life too many times to recall, particularly its opening chapters.

Megaton Man visits his Fortitude of Solemness, where he meets Philip José, the kindly caretaker. Spread of pp. 2-3, from The Return of Megaton Man #2 (Kitchen Sink Press, August 1988) © Don Simpson 1988, all rights reserved.

Farmer begins Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life with a mixture of nostalgic sentiment, provocative literary polemic, and a discursus on the apocalyptic aspect of the Savage supersagas, all of which are quite moving. Apart from the emotional recollections of his youthful readings, and the terse litany of plotlines paraphrased from the adventures themselves, Farmer has a serious point to make on behalf of the “ungreat literature” of the pulps. Following a long harangue against academic snobbery, Farmer concludes, “I am convinced that poplit, despite its massive flaws, is worth a serious study.”

However, Farmer declines to develop this argument any further, sensing perhaps that a literary defense of the pulps is perhaps unsustainable, least of all by him—he would have had to have read more Joseph Campbell than Sigmund Freud. Instead, in the very next sentence he intimates his personal uncovering of several “biographies of so-called fictional characters,” introducing the fanciful idea that pulp literature is based on factual accounts of the exploits of living persons. At first, this seems almost a perverse throw-away joke, but it will soon emerge as a dominant theme for much of the remainder of the book. This is sad, because Farmer’s critical plea is serious and heartfelt, and worth far greater development. But Farmer gives up, as if to say that the only way to take the pulps seriously is to literally pretend that they are real, to double down on the credulity of childhood.

It is worth quoting passages at length to examine how Farmer presents, and then aborts, his argument. Farmer begins the book with a moving recollection of his youth and the magazine rack of pulp imagination awaiting him at Smitty’s drugstore. “It was truly a vessel for me,” he recalled,

one which I boarded for many a fabulous voyage down the Mississippi of a boy’s mind. […] It was here that I dipped my line into the waters and brought up the fabulous Argosy magazine once a week. […] Those were golden days. At least, they had their golden moments, and these are what I’ve treasured up in my memory.

After a stint in the service and college on the G.I. Bill, Farmer developes more grown up tastes in literature. “In my young manhood and beginning of middle age, between 1949 and October 1964, I rarely thought of Doc Savage. Such childish things were behind me.” Instead he read a litany of serious authors and critics, until “Bantam Books resurrected the buried fifteen-year-old” with the reprinting of the Doc Savage series. 

 I was just beginning to turn back to the “classics” of my childhood and the pop lit of my youth. And as the Bantams came out, starting with The Man of Bronze, I re-experienced the delights of my juvenile days. This nostalgic joy was tempered by a recognition of literary faults which I’d not noticed during the original readings. However, by then I had gotten over my snobbishness. I knew that much of the “great” literature of the world had, along with the great virtues that made them classics, great flaws.  Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Melville, and Twain are splendid examples of this. Examples in poetry are Shakespeare, Milton, and Blake.

Farmer continues,

There is a fifteen-year-old in my brain, and he loves Doc. There is also a seven-year-old who still loves Billy Whiskers, a nine-year-old who still loves Oz and the heroes of ancient Troy and Achaea, a ten-year-old who still loves John Carter of Mars, Tarzan, Rudolf Rassendyll, King Arthur, Og, Son of Fire, Umslopogaas and Galazl, the Ancient Mariner, Captain Nemo, Captain Gulliver, Tom Sawyer, Hiawatha, Jim Hawkins, and Sherlock Holmes.

It is then that Farmer proceeds into his most forceful polemic.

The “ungreat” literature, the poplit (mystery, romance, adventure, gothic) was put down or ignored by most of the literary critics (and, hence, the intellectuals) on the grounds that they had no merit whatsoever. This is just not so, and perception of this has begun to filter into the academic community. […] There are elements in poplit other than just entertainment. […] It was Jung who pointed out that there was more to be learned about the archetypes and symbols of the unconscious from H. Rider Haggard than from any hundred of self-consciously psychological artistes. And Henry Miller seconds this.

Just so, there is much to be learned from the works of the poplit writers, past and present. And the reader, even the Ph.D., can enjoy himself, if he puts himself into the proper frame of approach. First, he has to be able to enjoy the art of telling a rattling good story. Second, on rereading, he has to be able to abstract the elements that make them psychologically valuable. This requires a somewhat schizophrenic mind, but most scholars have this. Third, he has to be able to fuse one and two if he is going to emerge with the pearl of great price from the depths.

Why is it that A. Conan Doyle and Edgar Rice Burroughs, mere romance adventure writers, are so vastly read today, while hundreds of their contemporary colleagues, so lauded by the critics, have dropped into oblivion? Why is it that these two, along with Haggard, will continue to attract larger and larger audiences, while so many so highly praised today will be forgotten? What are the ingredients of their appeal? Why is it that Burroughs, for one, has had a larger readership, and far more influence on literature, than has Henry James, a hyperconscious “psychological” writer?  This latter statement will drive the literati far up the wall (where they should stay), but an objective study would confirm it. This judgment, by the way, comes from Robert Bloch, a mystery-horror writer, author of Psycho, and a keen literary critic. He is widely read, knows the classic psychologists well, but brings up his stories from his personal psyche, which has an umbilical attached firmly to the collective unconscious.

Whether my argument is valid or not, I am convinced that poplit, despite its massive flaws, is worth a serious study.

It is at this point that Farmer’s polemic takes an abrupt nosedive. From this point forward, the conceit that the Savage supersagas are real, and the “family tree” theme, will progressively take over the book, filling two entire addenda. In the meantime Farmer will compellingly compare Dent, the “revelator from Missouri, to Henry Miller, E.E. “Doc” Smith, and William S. Burroughs, and rattle off a breathtaking synopsis of the supersagas in support of his contention that they are apocalyptic literature. But he will no longer argue for the literary merit of poplit in literary-critical terms.

Philip José recounts the fabulous exploits (and fucked up sexuality) of Doc, Patsy, and his sidekicks. Spread of pp. 4-5, from The Return of Megaton Man #2 (Kitchen Sink Press, August 1988) © Don Simpson 1988, all rights reserved.

This is disturbing, among other reasons, for what it implies about the creative literary impulse itself. For, in order to take the Wold-Newton concept seriously, we have to posit a world in which mainstream journalism and publishing completely ignore the world-saving exploits of adventure characters, who nonetheless grant permission to pulp and adventure publishers to chronicle their exploits in rushed and sloppy hackwork. Lester Dent, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and other fabulist writers are reduced to mere reporters of actual facts. Indeed, whenever Farmer comes across a moment in the Doc Savage mythos which is either too absurd or irreconcilable with the continuity he is establishing, he consistently chalks it up to writers relying on their feeble imaginations to fill in gaps in the factual account. Of one Savage installment he finds particularly implausible, Farmer asserts,

the ridiculous and badly written Yellow Cloud read[s] as if plotted and typed in one day and sent out by midnight messenger directly to a drunken printer with literary aspirations.

In other words, the best pulp writing is when the writer sticks to the facts, and the worst is when the writer is just making stuff up—certainly a paradoxical way to praise the literary merits of creative material.

Philip José lays out the fabulous family tree of Megaton Man. Spread of pp. 6-7, from The Return of Megaton Man #2 (Kitchen Sink Press, August 1988) © Don Simpson 1988, all rights reserved.

Perhaps the popularity of the Wold-Newton Universe, and the mania for continuity in comics and other popular media that has gripped our culture at large, is indicative of some innate self-loathing expressed by Farmer in His Apocalyptic Life. In any case, it would be preferable if creative artists and writers were to keep in mind Farmer’s visionary if not apocalyptic postulations, and embrace the sheer love of “the art of telling a rattling good story.”

Quotations are excerpted without permission from Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life (Bantam, 1975), from Chapter 1 and 2, “The Fourfold Vision,” and “Lester Dent, the Revelator from Missourri,” pp. 1-25. A “Definitive Edition,” edited by Win Scott Eckert, complete with a heavily “Wold-Newtonian” introduction, was published in 2013 by Altus Press; the ebook version was consulted in preparation for this post. © 1973, 2013 by the Philip J. Farmer Family Trust. All rights reserved. Images from The Return of Megaton Man #2 are © Don Simpson 1988, all rights reserved.

Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Afterlife (and Somewhat Problematic Comic Book)

This continuous traveling through a Savage land enabled me to see what I might otherwise have missed. The Savage supersagas are apocalyptic.

Philip José Farmer, Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life

I have already commented on the first two issues of Dynamite’s Doc Savage adaptation by Chris Roberson and Bilquis Evely, in which I questioned whether the property could be adapted to any other medium; now I have seven of the eight issues in hand, and I will comment on this particular effort as constructively as I can. I will start with the covers by Alex Ross, which emulate those of James Bama, one of the great paperback illustrators of all time, whose covers graced most of the Doc Savage covers through the late 70s, as well as countless westerns, and at least the first memorable James Blish Star Trek adaptation. I will then proceed to the story and interior art.

For the most part, Ross’s Bamaesque painted covers hew to the James Bama formula for the Bantam paperbacks of the 60s and 70s. Stylistically, they are all recognizably rendered in Ross’s Ross’s trademark watercolor technique, which comes as close as humanly possible to mimicking Bama’s oils (perhaps a 9 out of 10); had they been reduced to paperback size the effect might have been greater still. As it is, however, at comic book size there is a certain roughness and sharpness to the technique that cannot be overcome (watercolor demands a certain spontaneity that cannot be overworked), and so they look like watercolors trying to be oil paintings. Compositionally, the better covers (that is to say, those that most effectively emulate Bama) show the single figure of Doc facing some seemingly insurmountable menace.

Among the weaker covers, from the standpoint of evoking Bama, are covers #1 and #8, which compress time in a mosaic of images, or depart from the Bama formula in some other way. The second cover, one of the stronger ones, completely fetishizes Doc’s trademark torn shirt, transforming it into a swirling, flame-like maelstrom. Here Ross is at his most insightful, as he makes explicit in almost parodically the underlying metaphorical function it served in so many Bama covers, not as a literal shredded garment, utterly superfluous in its failure to protect or to conceal, but as a motif of lightning-like energy clinging to a superbly well-developed physique. The third cover shows a nuclear explosion, an apocalyptic situation about which Doc can do little, and therefore a bit more fatalistic than the Bama formula would ever allow. The fourth shows Doc carrying a young Brit punk to safety from a burning field of oil wells while splashing through puddles of spilt crude, the generational juxtaposition presumably providing the interest, but coming off more like a typical Don Pendleton Executioner cover. The fifth cover features Doc in a Sterankoesque pose as a Skylab-like orbiting satellite destroys the earth as if it were Krypton (again, like the nuke cover, a theme that would have been a little too fatalistic for a Bama cover). The seventh cover successfully evokes the cool color schemes often done to such success by Bama, but features a rather a weak crowd composition that is reminiscent of some of the weaker covers that graced the Bantam paperbacks by either Bama or other artists.

The sixth cover, however, is clearly the most iconic of the Dynamite series, and perhaps one of the most arresting Doc Savage images ever created by any artist. It certainly ranks as the most memorable of any outside the Bama canon, and outdoes a number of Bama Savage covers as well. It is a metaphoric contemplation of Doc Savage facing a situation clearly distilled from 9/11, showing one horrific aspect of that event as nine airliners nosedive out of the skies at once, Doc powerless to save them. Fatalistic, yes, but not completely apocalyptic, and perhaps summing up the theme of the entire series.

 

Alex Ross, cover to Doc Savage #6, perhaps the most iconic image of the adventurer ever created.

[The alternate covers, most of which presumably are intended to evoke the various comic book iterations of the property, are not as successful, in my humble estimation. I haven’t purchased any of them and I won’t comment on them any further. Sorry to be so dismissive, but them’s the breaks.]

As for the story itself, in contradistinction to the covers, ironically Doc is almost never alone to face or solve a problem by himself. From the beginning, the emphasis is on the team. Just as The West Wing served as a narrative antidote to all those presidential histories in which one lone figure is the main protagonist, this Doc Savage seems bent on showing how reliant Clark Savage, Jr. is on his teams of experts, from the original Fabulous Five to the progressively younger and more racially, ethnically, culturally, and genderally diverse and numerous aides that replace them as they age, wear out, and (off stage, as it were) quietly pass away. As things progress, even these nominally-individualized characters (each is given a suitably corny nickname in the tradition of Monk, Ham, Long Tom, et al, but only perhaps the young Brit punk is more that one-dimensional) give way to impersonal cubicled call centers with 1-800 numbers and armies of anonymous analysts and coders, and finally to an automated smart-phone network susceptible to meddling. In fact, the general theme of the story would seem to be little more than a demonstration of how the world has become a more complicated place since the Street and Smith pulps came to an end, and more explicitly about how the scientific and technological systems put in place by Doc, as well as his moral philosophy, can by hi-jacked when put on auto-pilot.

This conception seems to owe something to Alan Moore’s Watchmen, which featured a Doc-like Ozymandias depicted as a bureaucratic capitalist presiding over an international corporation, who loses his moral perspective as the business structures he has built ostensibly to solve the world’s problems become more complex and unmanageable. In fact, Chris Roberson’s Doc only seems to appear in scenes in which he can moralize and defend his questionable practices, such as the secret Crime College, where criminals are medically “cured” of criminality through a deft brain incision, and Doc’s general practice of working on his scientific breakthroughs in secret and keeping them to himself. In other words, even as Doc’s security network becomes more corporate and bureaucratic, his intellectual property becomes increasingly proprietary, with disastrous results. A major plot element concerns the secret serum that Doc perfects that essentially makes him immortal, but is lost before it can benefit the world.

It is worth pointing out that both the immortality serum and the moral implications of the Crime College are ideas borrowed from Philip José Farmer, who suggests them in his pseudo-biography of Doc, Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life. Thus Roberson to a great extent is elaborating on a universe outlined by Farmer as much or more than Kenneth Robeson, the original architect of Doc’s adventures.

It is perhaps less useful to point out that such ambitious themes as Roberson seems to have in mind might have been better explored in prose than in comic book form, and perhaps more freely in a satire such as Farmer did on several occasions with his more obsessively sexualized Doc Caliban (particularly in A Feast Unknown), or as Moore does rather succinctly with Ozymandias. In fact, given the “quick-read” mode of the day compared to more densely-packed comics of past eras, the entire series so far reads rather like a series of truncated scenes from one of the supersagas (Farmer’s term) than one of the supersagas themselves, and not even particularly pulse-pounding highlights from an average one. The pulp form, after all, is nothing if not one break-neck cliff-hangar after another that in retrospect bears little logical scrutiny, while the informational and action through-put of comics these days is little more than a smoke signal. While the series maintains readerly interest, little of the visceral, no-holds-barred pulp spirit of the original stories is in evidence. If one can imagine Doc’s hypothetical career since 1949 as being even half as rich as his monthly exploits of the 30s and 40s, one could certainly imagine distilling a richer and more exciting comic book therefrom. Instead, the Dynamite Doc Savage is a rather plodding, often slowly-paced, and above all a hyper-conscious cerebral exercise that reads more like a rather dry storyboard for what could be a more interesting feature film, than a comic book. One might wish at least for a text page per issue musing at length on some of these themes, and at least some historical background on the property to serve as introduction for new readers and reminder to some of us old-timers who may not have read an actual Savage in quite awhile.

What Roberson seems to have in mind instead is a meta-narrative of sorts that not so much adds onto or adapts the Doc Savage supersagas as takes a step back from it to contemplate the more philosophical aspects of the superman-in-the-modern-metropolis theme, whose own hallowed belief in inexorable progress becomes the ultimate evil and whose adversaries are less and less freelance madmen bent on taking over the world and increasingly former aides who lose faith in Doc and his principles and turn traitor. Doc’s righteous crusade instead of bringing the world to salvation instead promulgates a self-fulfilling prophecy and induces a self-inflicted apocalypse (although we’ll have to wait for the final issue for the outcome). Again, these are great themes that could be better explored in prose, but given the problematics of licensing the Doc Savage property and the marketing prospects of publishing further text novels in that series, it is likely that such a philosophically-tinged prose project would be unfeasible, and a comic book adaptation that wants to suggest a movie treatment is the best we can hope for.

Finally, the art of Bilquis Evely, which I commented on previously and which seems more progressively likeable. I have sympathy for the task she faces, evoking several periods of style and architecture, from 1933 to the present. Her Doc paradoxically never rips his shirt, although he looks as though he’s about to burst out of his suit on several occasions, particularly when he addresses JFK’s cabinet. One gets the impression that she would rather draw strapping, mostly-naked superheroes (as would we all) rather than pedestrian fashions, quotidian props, and faithful portraits of famous buildings. Many of her panel and page compositions seem static, owing to the eye-level camera angles and vertical postures of most of her figures, and she would do well to revisit John Buscema’s How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way (the visual codification of the break-neck pulp prose style). Her Doc is hardly dynamic let alone apocalyptic, but as a first professional effort as this reportedly is, the Dynamite Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze is a respectable accomplishment.