Pulped

 It's the end but the moment has been prepared for...
My first, proper school holiday, since I began teaching, ends today. (Last year doesn't count since a lot of it was spent sorting out my move to Elgin!). It's been a real binge of nostalgia for this Bronze Age Boy: revisiting Port William after 30 years; reading G-S Conan (The Conqueror) and 100 page super-spectaculars; Tom Baker's Doctor on dvd...
 This time I'm going to talk about two Bronze Age Marvel publications in long-gone formats. The first-from ebay- is a Treasury Edition, The Savage Fists of Kung Fu. This book reprinted strips from the Marvel magazine Deadly Hands of Kung Fu in colour for the first time and had thrilling covers by Marvel mainstay Gil Kane (which is largely why I bought it.)

Shang-Chi, as depicted by Marvel's Pop Kozmic masters, Englehart and Starlin, was the son of Fu Manchu, tapping into both the crazes for the martial arts and pulp novels, which were popular in the Seventies. Dastardly super-villain Fu may very well have been familiar to UK kids from the Sixties movies starring Christopher Lee; I can't find any info so far on when they were first broadcast on BBC1, although my recollection was early-to-mid-70s.Like most Bronze age boys, I'd followed David Carradine's tv adventures in Kung Fu ( and later, The Water Margin) and I knew Bruce Lee had played Kato on The Green Hornet.  In any event, Shang-Chi's UK debut in the pages of the Avengers was quite momentous as the strip was the first contemporary reprint and there was an edge of sadism and violence that hadn't been seen in British Marvel. I wonder if later UK comics like Action and 2000 AD would have been so transgressive without Shang-Chi?

March 1974

The series really excelled when film fan Paul Gulacy drew several "Bondian" story arcs, using the likenesses of David Niven, Marlene Dietrich, Connery and Brando. These were also complex stories of betrayal, infidelity and dysfunctional relationships. Occasionally, I found Moench's melodramatic, character-driven writing overwrought- but not nearly as flowery as "dour Scotsman" Don McGregor. Aside from the Gulacy issues of Master of Kung Fu, my favourite martial arts strip was Iron Fist, who made his debut in a powerful story of revenge that borrowed heavily from Lost Horizon. The strip meandered for a while until it fell to fellows named Claremont and Byrne.
Claremont always the most theatrical of Marvel writers in the 70s. He did gender quality far better than most of his contemporaries (far better than Conway, the voice of the strident feminists Ms.Marvel and Power Girl ) and he shared Englehart's enthusiasm for the Thomas/Adams Avengers and X-Men. He also brought a Sci-fi writer's technological sensibility to alien worlds. Under his auspices, Iron Fist became an honest-to- Irving superhero title, blending sorcery and science-fantasy, tough but sensitive heroines and exotic locations.

 The Treasury also features the Sons of the Tiger, a multi-culutral trio "inspired" by Enter The Dragon. The artwork is often excellent-especially in Giordano and Conway's introductory tale of the Tiger Sons. There's also work on display by Starlin, Mike Vosburg and Herb Trimpe, at the height of his powers.Unfortunately, there's an unappealing strip by Alan Weiss but the treasury's an intriguing snapshot of the early days of Marvel's Martial Arts heroes.

Staying with the theme of Seventy-Five and pulp fiction, Doc Savage is currently a DC property and, although I never read the recent "First Wave" series, both the 70s colour and b/w titles originally licensed and produced by Marvel have now been reprinted by the other "Big Company".
It's just a little over a year since I read the collected colour series, one windy afternoon in what turned out to be a notorious Ayrshire "dogging" hotspot! I first became aware of Doc from the Bullpen Bulletins page in early 70s Marvels and in Foom Magazine. I never saw a single issue of that short-lived comic in Scotland because,with the launch of the UK reprints, Thorpe and Porter (or whoever they really were)seemingly stopped sending the colour mags to newsagents and bookstalls. I was aware of the Ron "Tarzan" Ely movie in 1975, however and caught a glimpse of this "biography" (published July of that year) in the ferry terminal at Rothesay during our family holiday there.

 I found out today Tarzan means "white skin"!

Promotional clips, in which Doc fought against The Green Death (where have I heard that before?) looked exciting but, seen on tv many years later, the movie was revealed to be tongue-in-cheek camp, right from the start with the Sousa march -theme song. Of course, nostalgia for the 20s and 30s and camp were two major strands of US culture in the Seventies and we can see how pervasive they were even four years later in the first Superman movie, which shares a similar approach in depicting Doc's spiritual son.
 Back in the 70s, my first real exposure to Marvel-Doc came a little later that summer  in the pages of the anthology title The Super Heroes. It's that serialized Silver Ziggurat story that opens the Showcase edition.

 My first colour Doc appearance was in Morecambe, 1978,  in a forgettable 2-years-old team-up. In any case, I preferred The Avenger, as drawn by Kirby in Justice Inc. (even when written by the overrated and campy Dennis O'Neil)

The second Marvel series of Doc's adventures was released a month or so ago as a "phonebook" edition. I have fond memories of the one issue I got in Baird's in Strathaven, so I turned to Amazon...
I'm not sure why Marvel thought a Doc magazine would be a wise marketing move, in the movie's wake, unless it was to draw an older audience who were familiar with the reprinted pulp novels. Unlike the b/w Savage Sword of Conan, there's virtually no implied sexuality and no gore like the horror line.

 The first couple of issues by John "Conan" Buscema and Tony deZuniga look gritty and muscular with their flourishes of Art Deco and barbarism. Doug Moench's melodramatic portmanteaus  (e.g. "Hell-Reapers at the Heart of Paradise") feel suitably pulpy. It's also amusing to watch him lift sequences from Bond movies. Much of the action in the Renny-centric "Inferno Scheme" is remisicent of On Her Majesty's Secret Service.
Unfortunately the plots of the "super-sagas" are repetitive: A megalomaniac super-villain using technology inspired by ancient religions is overcome by Doc in an exotic locale. Long Tom and Johnny serve very little purpose (although Tom is grievously wounded in one tale). Like the colour mags, Doc has no personality- he's an infallible superman and grating "comedy relief" is supplied by the feud between the simian Monk and the dandyish Ham. Stan Lee used this gimmick for the Thing and the Torch; Ben Grimm and Monk share many similarities as do Monk and The Beast, who quickly adopted Johhny's habitual polysyllabic circumlocution.

Another Kirby riff on the Fabulous Five.

It's interesting to conjecture what would have happened at DC if the Kirby "Speak-Out Series", In the Days of the Mob and Spirit World had been widely distributed. A Batman magazine, maybe, by Marshall Rogers and Giordano? Swamp Thing? The Warlord? We can only dream...

Next time: two more Bronze Age Conan collections 

The Legal Bit: all images are presumed copyright of their respecyive owners or I'll be superamalgamated.