Heroic Halloween Hospital Horror GIANT-SIZE DOC SAVAGE "The Man of Bronze" Conclusion

When Last We Left Our Hero(s)...

Art by John and Sal Buscema

Learning of his father's death due to a rare disease, adventurer/scientist Doc Savage returns to his headquarters in New York City, where he is greeted by his five associates, each an expert in a different science or discipline.
Suspecting foul play, they are about to read the elder Savage's personal papers to ascertain clues, when an assassination attempt is made on Doc.
The group (except for lawyer Ham, sent on another assignment) now goes in pursuit of the gunman...

To Be Continued...Next Friday!

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The Man of Bronze
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Heroic Halloween Hospital Horror GIANT-SIZE DOC SAVAGE "The Man of Bronze" Part One

 Who's the superhero whose origin is tied to deadly disease?

And, ironically, he's one of the few superheroes who's also a practicing MD!

Doc and his buddies go in pursuit of the would-be assassin...
Next Friday!

In the early 1970s, bolstered by the success of Conan the Barbarian, both DC and Marvel attempted to launch other pulp characters who had successful papaerback reprint series as comic book titles!

Hoping that the audiences for them would carry over just as Conan's had, Marvel acquired the rights to Doc Savage, while DC snagged both The Shadow and The Avenger.

The Doc title lasted only eight issues from 1972-73, but the license remained in Marvel's hands when the Groege Pal-produced movie came along, and Marvel invoked their right to do a comic based on the film!

Compare with page 7 above.

Since the flick was an adaptation of the premiere novel "The Man of Bronze", which Marvel had already used as the basis for the first two issues of their 1972-74 comic, it was decided to repackage that existing material as a double-sized one-shot to tie in with the movie's release!

The art was modified to match Doc's appearance in the movie, substituting an open-collared shirt for his Marvel-created blue vest and a buzz-cut for the James Bama/Bantam paperback "skullcap" (see left).

(I always wondered why Marvel didn't go with the torn-shirt look of the Bantam paperback covers on the comics.

Maybe they didn't want people confusing Doc with their resident torn-shirt aficionado, Nick Fury, who still appeared in both his WWII Sgt Fury incarnation and his present-day Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. version!

Thankfully, Marvel returned to the torn shirt "look" on the 1975-77 b/w magazine covers by Ken Barr.)

The original two-issue comic adaptation of "Man of Bronze" had updated the 1933 novel to the then-present 1970s.

The Giant-Size Doc Savage "re-mastering" retro-fitted the technology back to 1930s levels, except the adaptation's replacing of the Mayan assassin's elephant gun with a laser rifle, which remained!

They also re-colored Monk's hair from the incorrect black-with-blue-highlights to the red color it had in the pulp stories (and the remainder of the Marvel run).

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The Man of Bronze
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This Sunday: Doc Savage: the MD of Bronze

UnCut! WideScreen! Hi-Def!

The only (to date) movie/tv production featuring the first pulp/comic character who's nom-de-guerre and civilian names are both "Doc"!

Adapting the premiere novel, The Man of Bronze, which involves Dr Clark Savage Jr investigating his father's death from a rare disease, the film isn't a perfect re-telling of the tale.
Whether Warner Bros execs pressured him to camp it up, or producer George (War of the Worlds) Pal was unduly-influenced by the then-recent Batman TV series, it's definitely not a classic on the level of Superman the Movie (1978), but it is a fun "Saturday matinee" flick.
Ex-Tarzan Ron Ely was an excellent physical match for the role, and does his best with the character as written.
Unfortunately, the lead villain (created for the film), Captain Seas, is a moustache-twirling over-the-top fiend who chews the scenery and spits toothpicks.
Doc solves the medical mystery, produces a cure, and (of course), saves the day!
It airs Sunday morning at 8am ET on Turner Classic Movies.without commercial interruption.
Check out the TCM page HERE and the IMDB page HERE.
Trivia: This was not the first time the character was proposed for a feature film!
In 1966, during the peak of both Bat-Mania & Bond-Mania, when the paperback reprints of Doc Savage's pulp adventures were flying off bookshelves and racks to eager readers on a monthly basis, another studio wanted to create an ongoing multi-film franchise!
The details of what happened (and more importantly didn't happen) can be found HERE at our "brother" RetroBlog Secret Sanctum of Captain Video!
And wait'll you see who was cast as Doc!
Finally, for October, instead of the usual Halloween Hospital Horrors, we're presenting the complete (non-campy) Marvel Comics adaptation of The Man of Bronze by Steve Englehart and Ross Andru!

No, wait...that's not right!
We're presenting the complete "remastered", never-reprinted version Marvel published in 1975, in conjunction with the feature film's release!

Confused?

Be Here Next Friday, and we promise it'll all make sense!
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Manga Medicine BLACK JACK "Is There a Doctor?" Conclusion

We Have Already Seen...

...after the spoiled-rotten son of one of the world's richest men crashes his car and lies near death, the oligarch hires the greatest surgeon in the world, Black Jack, to save the kid's life.

However, the kid needs numerous replacements for damaged organs and limbs.

So the oligarch arranges for an innocent to be convicted and sentenced to death, so his limbs and organs can be harvested!

Note: to understand this Japanese comic, you must read right-to-left instead of the usual left-to-right (like the way you're reading this text)!

Besides being a talented writer/artist, Black Jack creator Osamu Tezuka was also a licensed physician, though he stopped practicing after he became a full-time manga creator.

Black Jack has been called Tezuka's alter ego, the kind of doctor he wished he could have been.

Since this premiere appearance in Weekly Shonen Champion (Nov. 19, 1973), he's appeared in hundreds of manga tales, and (in animated form) in several TV series and feature films, plus one direct-to-video mini-series.

Unlike most other manga characters, he's never appeared in live-action form.

However, the iconoclastic sawbones did appear (in animated form) in 2010 opposite Hugh Laurie's live-action Dr House (as it's called in Japan) in magazine ads and a commercial on Japanese TV to promote the release of the 4th season of the House M.D. TV series on DVD in Japan...while plugging his own OVA mini-series!

(Both series were distributed in Japan by the same company, Geneon/Universal!)

To paraphrase the phrase used at the end of the James Bond films...

Black Jack Will Return!

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CoronaVirus Comics CRACKED "O'Meagre Man"

Much like Blacula, The Omega Man is one of the few 1950s-1970s genre films...

...that didn't have a "straight" comics adaptation!

For those under-40s who don't "get" the dated punchline, the final reveal shows the leader to be the primary character of the politically-incorrect 1970s TV series All in the Family.

Illustrated by John Severin (with an assist on likenesses by his sister, master caricaturist Marie Severin), this story from Major Publications' Cracked #100 (1972) is the only adaptation and only spoof of the movie, which itself is the second movie adaptation of Richard Matheson's novelette I Am Legend!

(The first was 1964's Last Man on Earth, starring Vincent Price!)

All three versions specify that a virus kills most of the human population and mutates almost all the survivors into creatures (ghouls/vampires/zombies depending on which version you're watching)!

Note: two of the three cinema versions specify that the disease is man-made!

(The original novella indicates it's a natural mutation of rabies and carried by animals!)

In the Will Smith movie, it's called the "Krippen Virus" and was intended to destroy cancer cells.

In the Charlton Heston flick, it's nameless biological weapons used by Red China and the USSR in a border conflict which gets out of control!

In the Vincent Price movie, the plague's cause is unspecified.

Plus, the lead character in all three movies is an MD!

Last Man on Earth: Dr Robert Morgan (Vincent Price)

Omega Man: Dr Robert Neville (Charlton Heston)

I Am Legend: Dr Robert Neville (Will Smith)

BTW, Heston's character, Robert Neville, is a US Army MD, who creates a serum from his own blood, which Dutch (one of the unaffected young survivors who's also a medical student) can utilize to keep the others from "turning"!
Trivia: The Simpsons did their own satire of the 1970s movie as part of the annual Halloween "Treehouse of Horror" series...

OK, it's more "inspired" than an actual satire, but it is funny!

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I Am Legend/Omega Man

Which features both the recent Will Smith version and the 1970s Charlton Heston version!

(But not the 1960s Vincent Price adaptation.

That one, you can get here...)

Last Man on Earth