‘Pulp Power: The Shadow, Doc Savage, and the Art of the Street & Smith Universe’

I recently picked up a new coffee table artbook from Abrams titled Pulp Power: The Shadow, Doc Savage, and the Art of the Street & Smith Universe.

This 350-page hardcover by Neil McGinness has a lot of artwork from many of Street & Smith’s pulp heroes, along with sections on their comics, movies, and paperback reprints. It’s an overall nice package that is sadly mared by some strange absenses and flubs.

I wonder after all these years what made Condé Nast do this volume, other than to perhaps help their new novels featuring The Shadow and Doc Savage from James Patterson? The problem is that neither of them are true to what we see in this book. You almost think (or hope) that readers of those two books that get this one will be puzzled by what they read here.

So what do we get? A forward by Frank Miller and six chapters. The first one is on The Shadow, of course.

We start with Street & Smith, of course, and will learn of their origin of publishing dime novels that replaced, more or less, the earlier story papers. Then move into the radio show that used “The Shadow” as a narrator, then to Walter Gibson creating The Shadow as a pulp-magazine hero. The Shadow was the first pulp hero who got his own self-titled magazine (though there were many serialized heroes in the pulps before him).

We get a lot of basics about the real pulp Shadow, along with plenty of cover and interior artwork. And there’s a little about George Rozen, the artist who created the distinctive look for The Shadow. We hear about The Shadow radio show and Margot Lane, but not much about all his other agents.

We then get a section on The Shadow Comics from the 1940s with lots of covers but no interior work. The end of The Shadow section is covers, and what happened to Street & Smith. I was puzzled by the section on an auction for a copy of The Shadow #1 titled “The Shadow’s Rebirth: 2021.” Uh, what about all the times he was brought back in prose, comics, and movies after the end of S&S? The chapter wraps up with a section on various items about The Shadow: advertisements, games, other publications from the S&S era. We have used up 40 percent of the book at this point.

Chapter 2 is about Doc Savage. We get the creation of Doc, even to including Lester Dent‘s master plot outline, along with lots of cover and interior artwork. Instead of delving into the stories or providing info on his aides, we instead get stuff criticizing his Crime College and Doc himself. At this point, we are 65 percent done.

Chapter 3 goes into some of the others of Street & Smith’s pulp heroes who followed The Shadow and Doc, but I thought some of the choices were strange. There are lots of covers here, of course.

We first get Nick Carter, delving into his original as a dime-novel hero. Overlooked is his earlier revival in Detective Story Magazine, instead the book looks at his revival as a hard-boiled detective in his own pulp.

Next is The Whisperer, with mention of the two periods of his magazine. Then The Skipper. And then The Avenger. I would have liked more space devoted to all The Avenger’s aides, though they do mention Josh and Rosabel Newton. A lot of the text space reprints his origin story from the first novel.

Finally, the book looks at Supersnipe, who wasn’t in the pulps but in Street & Smith’s comics. Why? I have no idea. There’s no mention of Pete Rice, Bill Barnes, or the many characters created for Crime Busters. And of all the original characters in their comics, why Supersnipe?

Chapter 4 goes into the paperback revival. Mention is made of several of them, including Belmont’s The Shadow series and the Nick Carter Killmaster series. But the focus is on James Bama and his Doc covers, Jim Steranko and his Shadow covers, and George Gross and his Avenger and Nick Carter covers. No mention is made of Sandy Kossen‘s Shadow covers, or more glaring Peter Caras who started the Avenger covers. And there is no mention of model Steve Holland, either.

Chapter 5 is the comic revival(s). While they first start talking about the more recent DC revival of Doc, they soon give us more info on Street & Smith’s comics, reprinting interior pages, showing how some were inspired by certain pulp stories. Brief mention is made of The Shadow newspaper strip. And we even get a few pages of a Carrie Cashin comic, though nothing to explain who this is or where she came from. We learn of The Shadow-Batman connection, and see panels from DC’s Justice Inc. comic of the 1970s, and Marvel’s color and black-&-white Doc comics. While mention is made of DC’s classic The Shadow comic of the 1970s, no artwork by Mike Kaluta (who is not even mentioned) is included. There is a section about Bill Sienkiewicz‘s Shadow work. Very little is said of Howard Chaykin‘s work on The Shadow, though we get one panel of artwork.

And Chapter 6 is on “A New Future,” which seems to focus on some of Dynamite‘s recent Shadow comics, which I find strange as it’s been several years and we’ve seen nothing new from them. And, of course, there’s Patterson’s new stuff. What, they couldn’t mention Will Murray’s excellent new prose Doc and Shadow novels from the last few years?

So while the overall package is good, I’d have to give it four out of five stars. There are too many omissions and flubs to rate it higher.

One of the first goofs is on page 9 with a horrible reproduction of James Bama’s cover from “The Fortress of Solitude.” And I have pointed out several omissions I thought were poor. Couldn’t they have devoted a page or two on Pete Rice or some of the major characters from Crime Busters like Norgil the Magician, Click Rush, or Carrie Cashin?

The omission of artwork by Kaluta, who has done a lot of The Shadow artwork, or Peter Caras is also pretty bad. And not mentioning Will Murray’s excellent new Doc and Shadow novels is also bad.

I guess Condé Nast wants to push Patterson’s horrible new versions instead. Frankly, all the stuff toward the end using artwork from the recent The Shadow/Batman mini could have been dropped for some of the stuff I mentioned.

And an index of names, subjects, and artwork would have been nice as well. At least to know where the covers came from as many of the pulp covers were reprinted either without text or with the Sanctum Books dress on them.

This is worth getting, just understand the problems with it.