When it comes to the cover artists for the Bantam Doc Savage novels, my favorite is James Bama.
After he did 62 covers, other artists did covers. I know some like the artwork of Fred Pfeiffer who followed and did over a dozen covers. My first Doc had a Pfeiffer cover. Some may like Boris Vallejo, who did several, but I prefer him on other things.
No, for me my second favorite is Bob Larkin. I remember vividly when I got his first Doc cover, Magic Island, and was buying it at K-Mart (back in the days when K-Mart had a pretty good book section). I kept looking at that cover while standing in line and not being able to figure out if it was a painting or a photograph; it was that good. While his subsequent covers were great, they never quite equaled that first one in its photorealism.
I’m not sure how many covers Larkin did, but he did the last of the single novels, then moved to the doubles and some of the Omnibus editions, and a few special Doc covers since.
The only work I know that highlights his cover work is The Savage Art of Bob Larkin from SQP in 2009. It’s still in print. It reprints a lot of his cover artwork for various publications and works. There are magazine and book covers, posters, and more. Often with notes by Larkin.
We get several of his Doc covers, including two pieces that never saw print, but where intended for a further double Doc book. It didn’t happen as instead Bantam went to the Omnibus volumes. Frustratingly, none of his early Doc single covers were included.
Now, this volume was marked as “Volume 1,” and would love to see a second volume that could reprint the rest of his Doc covers and related work. I’m not sure what other pieces he has done that were left out in this volume.
The only other book focused on his work is the sketchbook volume from Fantom Press in 2013, referred to as Speculative Adventures in Bronze. It features Doc with a variety of characters from fiction in kind of “fantasy cover” mode. There are a few with him and The Shadow, and one with The Shadow and The Avenger. It was a limited edition of 500, and copies are still available.
It would be nice if Fantom could do a volume collecting all of Larkin’s Doc covers. But in the meantime, get these two.
