Detective skills for super-heroes

[dr_hermes.insanejournal.com]

See, this sequence is the sort of thing I would like to see Batman stories emphasise more. Observation and deduction are skills essential to solving mysteries and catching criminals. You don't see much of this lately, partly because it's harder for the writer to come up with than fight scenes and gore, but also because CSI-type gadgetry and doubletalk has taken over. One great aspect of the Doc Savage pulps was that (having been trained since infancy by experts),he was a multi-skilled genius with Olympic-level physical prowess ("Sherlock Holmes in the body of Hercules"). In one story, he ran up stairs with a full-grown man under each arm, then glanced into a ransacked room and could tell it had been searched twice-- because spilled liquids which dry at different rates were equally gelled. (This is one reason his fans say, "Doc Savage: adventure hero or THE adventure hero?").

This sequence is from Marvel's black & white DOC SAVAGE magazine, second issue from October 1975. Story by Doug Moench, art by Tony DeZuniga. Most of the story is a wild yarn about a huge cavern civilization of Reptilian people, a Mad Viking, lost treasure, that sort of thing. But to learn about this, the Man of Bronze casually shows some impressive detective ability. It's exactly the sort of engimatic clue that Lester Dent used to toss around in the pulps. What is that strange coin?

Comments

[volksjager.insanejournal.com]

The more I look through the Marvel Black and white mags the more buried treasure I find. They really need to look into reprinting them.

[dr_hermes.insanejournal.com]

I think some of those black & whites had licensed characters (like, PLANET OF THE APES, Doc and Fu Manchu in the Shang-Chi stories), so Marvel is not likely to want to reprint them. Any profit would cut into by royalty fees.

SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN and the Solomon Kane stories are available in bookstores. I'm surprised that the other black & whites like DRACULA LIVES! aren't already available. But I haven't been to a comic store in ages.

[cricharddavies.insanejournal.com]

Actually, thirteen issues of Dracula Lives! have been reprinted in the fourth volume of Essential Tomb of Dracula, per Amazon.com at least. Were there more than that?

[dr_hermes.insanejournal.com]

No, I'd think that would be it. Except for the Conan title, most of Marvel's black & whites had fairly short runs. DEADLY HANDS OF KUNG FU got mileage out of then-current movies like TRIAL OF BILLY JACK and THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN.

Marvel also published several issues of MONSTERS TO LAUGH WITH, pictures from old Universal horror movies with the insane Stan Lee word balloons. I only looked through them once, but I'd like another chance to see if they were funny or I was easily amused those days.

[volksjager.insanejournal.com]

Yes, that's the same thing preventing a really good re-issue of the Michael Golden Miconaunts. A shame really.

[jlroberson.insanejournal.com]

But there are always torrents, and I've been finding that CBRs are in some ways preferable to physical comics. It's something the comic companies really should using more.

And the Micronauts torrent is lovely. The reason it would be hard is that it really needs the color--an essential volume, especially considering all the color holds they used in the book, just wouldn't work; Golden very much designed it to work with color. So, expense, legal issues, things like that prevent it.

[thandrak.insanejournal.com]

They did manage to reprint Godzilla.