The Uneducation of J.K. Rowling

 In late December, 2019, I became aware of J.K. Rowling's bizarre "Sleep with any consenting adult who'll have you" Tweet, which marked, for me at least, the beginning of the Harry Potter author's rebranding as an irrational transphobe and hatemonger. In the annals of fandom, there had never been a case of an author so completely contradicting the core ethos and popular appeal of her work (i.e., don't listen to the grown-ups who want you to conform and tell you that you are a freak and should be ashamed; what is special about you is the source of your power, a power that just might save the world) in such few words.

Tri-Wizarding Transphobic Triennial: Three Years of J.K. Rowling, TERF Cult Leader

“J.K. Rowling has become toxic to the [Harry Potter] brand…”—casual reference on NPR’s All Things Considered this afternoon, December 16, 2022 (3:26 into the story on video games).

The Beginning of the End of J.K. Rowling

Warner CEO David Zaslav’s November 3 earnings call with investors has been widely heralded as great news for author J.K. Rowling, with headlines trumpeting “Warner’s Exec Doubles Down on Rowling,” and similar tripe.

This is completely erroneous.

Edie Ledwell Deserves a Better-Led Creator

In her new “Robert Galbraith” Cormoran Strike novel, J.K. Rowling reportedly savages her critics as a “woke Twitter mob” motivated by “cancel culture” and the sheer jealousy of a successful woman.

The Three Rs: Rat, Race, Writing

In a 2000 interview, Doris Piserchia (1928-2021) makes a number of quite revealing statements about the life of a mid-century, mostly straight-to-paperback SF and fantasy author:

Byron Starkwinter: Alan Moore's Self-Fulfilling Prochecy?

Shortly after I drew "In Pictopia" in1986, Fantagraphics forwarded a plot synopsis from the same author to consider illustrating. Unfortunately, Anything Goes, the fund-raising series for which it was intended, came to an end.

Fantastic Beasts and Other Unwritten Big, Fat Books

Some thoughts on the eve of one of the most ambivalent, if not pre-hated, movie releases in recent memory. Revised with a couple of elaborating paragraphs inserted on May 3, 2022.

The biggest problem with the Fantastic Beasts film franchise, and it has been the biggest problem from the start, is that the films lack big, fat J.K. Rowling books to precede each film.*

J.K. Rowling: The King Lear of Kiddie Lit

It’s been nearly a year since I’ve blogged about She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named-But-Must-Be-Obeyed (even if one is a conscientious objector in the editorial and design department handling her work at Hachette), and it’s been a quiet year at that.

Everyone’s Entitled to be a Muggle: The Aunt Petunia Defense of J.K. Rowling

Defenses made on behalf of J.K. Rowling break down into three basic arguments (or non-arguments, as the case may be). They are:

Fans Didn’t Enable Rowling; Success, Ego, and Power Did That.

I watched part of a YouTube video last night in which a longtime Potter fan basically laid out a thesis that fans have progressively enabled Rowling to become a bigot. This is an interest thesis, with some very small, partial truth to it; but it’s naïve—fannishly so, imagining a closer relationship and more influence on the author than fans actually have.

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.

Joanne, Jo, J.K. or Robert: Somebody Help Me Out Here...

This is the second of two parts. Read part one.

It’s okay for Joanne Rowling to write novels under the pseudonym “Robert Galbraith”; it’s okay for her to obscure her gender using the made-up initials “J.K.” (she has no middle name); it’s okay for her to prefer the masculine-sounding nickname “Jo” over her feminine given name.

“Who'll Have You, Freak?!”: J.K. Rowling and the Curse of Transphobia

“Who’ll have you” is a hateful putdown the author has used twice in the mouth of one of her most beloved characters and once in her own voice, the last cruelly directed at transgendered persons in the abstract.

by Don Simpson

Last December (2019), just before Christmas, I became aware of a Tweet posted by J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, and the brouhaha surrounding it, that has now become famous:

“Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you. Live your best life in peace and security. But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real?”

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.

Ms. Meg Must-Read: Critical Rave for Clarissa!

This is an unsolicited comment from my colleague who is proofing and Beta-reading my Ms. Megaton Man Maxi-Series manuscript (you can read the same chapters right now online): 

"Finished chapters 1-7 of Clarissa James' memoirs. Really enjoying it. From what I've read, I wouldn’t change a thing. There's the right balance of exposition and movement, and I find Clarissa's voice to be a perfect fit for the story. Keep it coming and I look forward to catching up on chapters 8-10!"

Bleak House, Part II

I finally finished Bleak House - although much of the final third was rough slog. As warm, direct, and unassuming as I found Esther Summerson's first-person narrative, I found Dicken's objective, cynical, sardonic present-tense narrator at times impenetrable. The syntax was garbled, not so because of the present tense so much as Dickens trying too hard to be cynical and sardonic.

The only function of this narrator seemed to be to tell portions of the story that Esther herself could not have witnessed - also to remind the reader, heavy-handedly, that Dickens is after all a satirist. These passages would have been better had Dickens not tried so hard to overdo it. (This objective narrator is at his best at such times as when, late in the book, the steel manufacturer,  Rouncewell, converses with his long-lost trooper brother, George.)

Esther Summerson as narrator, for all her warmth, is every bit as penetrating and insightful - of such characters as Skimpole, Mrs. Jellyby, and Mr. Turveydrop - as is Dicken's presumably "objective" narrator, without the bite, and without seeming to be aware of her often sarcastic and critical transcriptions. The characterization of the seemingly roundabout but in fact relentless Columbo-like Inspector Bucket, for example, is completely consistent between the two narrators, offering no difference in point of view. Bleak House would have been a better book if told completely from Esther's generous (but not unflinching, as it turns out) perspective, rather than being shared with the intrusive and too-snarky "objective" narrator.

Still, the book finishes strong, and is quite moving, particularly in the reunion of the two brothers and Esther's corrected matrimony to the philanthropic Dr. Allan Woodcourt. In many respects, Bleak House is every bit as panoramic as Vanity Fair, albeit with a forced taciturn quality in the former that pulls in the negative direction as much as the latter pulls in a faux-comic upbeat direction.

Bleak House is not a novel to begin when I did (in 1985, at the age of 23), but it is a novel to read when you're almost 57. It is a middle-age novel, when one can appreciate the passing of time, look back with some objectivity over foolish life choices, and can appreciate the wisdom of experience.
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Vanity Fair and Bleak House, Part I.

Vanity Fair and Bleak House: A Tale of Two Victorian Novels

One of my favorite classes in high school (after music and French) was Classic Novels with Mrs. White, a plump, white-haired old lady who looked like she had rolled out of a classic novel herself. Among the books I read that semester were Jane Eyre, Great Expectation, Candide, Siddhartha, and Oliver Twist (I did a second Dickens as an elective).

'S Prose, Not Superheroes: Recently Read Real Books

I'm going through my second childhood--only this time, I'm reading prose fiction instead of wasting my time with dumbed-down ol' comic books!

Here's a snooty selection of what I've read over the past year or so, in no apparent order:

Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling--I read all seven books and watched all eight DVDs in eight weeks in the summer of 2015. I'm a late adopter--having worked at Border's in the early 2000s and probably handled (conservatively) some 10,000 individual copies of the various HP editions through the end of 2005 as a part-time bookseller. I never read a single sentence at the time, being exclusively interested in non-fiction (which lead to me returning to college for a decade-long stint). But I've read pp. 317-421 of The Prisoner of Azkaban (the Shrieking Shack sequence) a total of eight times--it's the most brilliantly orchestrated piece of storytelling I am aware of in any media.

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.

Can Doc Savage be Adapted to Comics? Or to Anything?

I've been looking forward to Dynamite Entertainment's new comic book adaptation of Doc Savage ever since I heard about it through Comic Shop News last fall. Not because I was particularly impressed with any of the preview art, or even the Alex Ross faux-James Bama covers, but because of this very question: Can Doc Savage be adapted to comics? Or to anything?

I was first exposed to Doc Savage with Marvel Comics' Doc Savage #1 with the cover date of October, 1972. This was the second month for me as a Marvel reader (the September 1972 cover date, probably June or July in reality, still holding a nigh-cosmic significance in my life experience), and the first #1 issue of a comic book series I ever bought, thus an unforgettable milestone. It was a weird experience: a crimefighter who was not a super-powered costumed character, set in the Depression era, and adapted from another medium, books. I immediately latched onto several of the Bantam Books paperbacks, themselves reprints of something from the past called pulps, and within months had also sent away for Steranko's History of Comics volume I, which included a chapter called "The Bloody Pulps," positing the even stranger thesis that the comic book artform had evolved out of pulp fiction (still problematic in my mind), with a lengthy passage on Lester Dent's (the real name of the pseduonymous author Kenneth Robeson) Doc Savage adventures. Later, I bought Bantam's 1976 edition of Philip José Farmer's Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, an even weirder experience. (This mind-blowing tome suggested, among other things, that Doc Savage, The Shadow, Tarzan, and Sherlock Holmes, among others, were all real and in fact related to one another through something called the Wold-Newton family tree.) Lastly, I recall Marvel's Doc Savage magazine by Doug Moench, John Buscema, and Tony DeZuniga, perhaps the best adaptation of Doc Savage ever done (peremptorily answering my own question on one level, that yes, Doc Savage can be adapted to comics, at least in longer-format chunks), in any case more satisfying than the Steve Englehart and Ross Andru version of 1972.

To make a long story short, I was nearly as much a Doc Savage fan, for a certain portion of my teenage years, as I was a Marvel fan, and at least as much as I was a fan of Jeff Rice's Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Pierre Boulle's Planet of the Apes, and Martin Caidin's The Six-Million Dollar Man. While I can't say that I've read more than twenty of the 181 "supersagas," I've read Farmer's Gnostic history of The Man of Bronze at least a dozen times, and pondered the impracticalities (to say nothing of the social implications) of the Wold-Newton Universe.

To make a short story even shorter, I don't think the new Dynamite version is very good. Let me be clear that my purpose is not to pick on writer Chris Roberson (who after all boasts three editions of Farmer's Apocalyptic Life in his library) or newcomer artist Bilquis Evely, for whom this is clearly a labor of love. Let me further state that I could never imagine performing the research on all the Art Deco necessary to pull off an even passable period adaptation of Doc Savage.

In any case, the first two issues are far from satisfying. I can't imagine anyone other than a diehard Savage fan being at all interested in this project. In each, a complete, original "supersaga" is presented, telescoped into something barely as long as your average movie trailer. The Savage supersagas were known for there outlandishly improbably and inexhaustible twists and turns, if not intellectual complexity; here they are simplified into brief glimpses of icon Savage locales: the Empire State Building, the Fortress of Solitude, the Crime College. In these two installments, the nemeses turns out to a be lone nut jobs with ham radios who are easily dispensed with a few punches, hardly the Johnny Sunlight-caliber evil-doers who could keep Doc and his fabulous five at bay for at least a hundred prose pages. Further, it is often difficult to tell Doc apart from his fabulous five aides, since this adaptation has forgone the dark bronze complexion, has chosen to integrate both the Clark Gable loose hair and James Bama widow's peak, and not even shown him in a torn shirt (except for the Ross covers), or even the 1972 Marvel blue vest.

On the other hand, I will say that there does come across, even in these absurdly truncated exploits, a certain egalitarian camaraderie among Doc and his five aides that is quite enjoyable, reminiscent perhaps more of Buckaroo Banzai than the Doc stories proper, or of any of Doc's artistic progeny (James Bond, Indiana Jones, Jor El -- all of whom I at least tend to think of as loners). And Ms. Evely's art, although indecisive when it comes to depicting the male characters (they all wear suits and are about the same stature, with even Monk blending into the crowd), her art really comes alive when she is drawing that butch-femme dynamo Pat Savage. Pat, Doc's proto-feminist metrosexual sister, is seen in jodhurs and unbuttoned safari shirt that, while not torn to shreds, recalls the iconography of the Bama covers associated with Doc more vividly and convincingly than even the Ross covers (the first of which fetishize the shreds into a kind of swirling whirlwind of flames--a kind of divine transfiguration). One is tempted to say just to forget the traced skyscrapers and cardboard male characters altogether, and let Evely draw Pat kicking ass for 17 pages an issue. And let the shirt get torn to shreds. I would buy it.*

"Do these jodhpurs make my thighs look fat?" More problematic is the shirt, clearly made of more durable fabric than those of her clothing-optional cousin. Bilquis Evely's art comes (Tarzan!) alive when she draws Pat Savage, from the Dynamite adaptation.

It is too soon to tell where Roberson (not to say Robeson) is going with his multi-decade story arc (if you can call these fleeting episodes stories at all). It seems clear that Doc and Pat are the only ones who will not age (although whether this is the result of Doc's pharmacological ingenuity or of immortal chromosomes mutated by the Wold-Newton meteor remain to be seen), while Monk, Ham, and the other three (who were never very discernible anyway) are slated to die off, to be replaced by next-gen whiz kids. Frankly, I would prefer to see the comics adapters attempt a "rattling good story" faithful to the original time period rather than a meta-discursus on the post-Street and Smith narrative (with its obsession of integrating the various hair-eras of Doc with Farmer's Gnostic history of pulplit). Needless to say, the only creative idea that Marvel and DC have been able to come up with these past few decades have been these kinds of Talmudic exegesis on continuity rather than creative storylines, and this is hardly in the spirit of the American comic book. Neither is it in the spirit of Doc or the pulps.

On the other hand, it just may be that Doc is too plainclothes, too cerebral (after a fashion), too literary a property to be properly adapted to such a visual medium as comics (the George Pal and Ron Ely film version not offering much a rebuttal on behalf of film). I have always felt, since the time I was enjoying various entertainment in media in my teen years, that certain ideas lent themselves to certain artforms better than other, and that adaptation for the sake of spin-off licensing always involved either radical alteration or sheer loss of the charm and magic of the idea in its native form. Doc Savage was best in prose; Planet of the Apes (as it was transformed by Rod Serling and others) best in film; superheroes (prior to big-budget special effects in the late 1970s and cgi since) in comics, and so on. Since Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter, however, we've all gotten used to the idea that properties that can be more than just merchandising bonanzas but actually artistically successful on multiple platforms while at the same time faithful to their original conceptions. But I'm still not convinced this is now a universal law, hence my continued interest in the Dynamite Doc Savage as it unfolds. Can Doc Savage be adapted to comics? Or to anything? To my mind, the jury is still out.

More art from the Dynamite adaptation and an interview with Chris Roberson @ Between the Covers.

___
* Let's be honest, I would draw it. Jenny Woodlore, the female protagonist from my series Border Worlds, had her origins in an eroticized drawing I made in high school of a brunette in a Bamaesque torn shirt and jodhpurs--not exactly Pat Savage, but close enough. Such is the power of that curious motif over one young (now middle-aged) male imagination.