Expanded reading stack

I’m all jazzed up, for several reasons. We just had a fantastic Doc Con on Saturday, with 15 attendees. (That was the largest yet for an Arizona Doc Con. See previous entry.) And I picked up several terrific new pulp publications. As Courtney Rogers pointed out during the con, we’ve got an abundance of new pulp-related books in print right now.

I left Doc Con with a full Pulp.Stuff totebag. Among the goodies now in my to-read stack:

• The paperback version of How I Discovered Doc Savage, by Jay Ryan and Courtney. It’s 196 pages of stories from more than 90 Doc Savage fans recalling their first encounters with the Man of Bronze. Among those included are the Arizona Doc Con crew, as well as James Bama, Philip Jose Farmer, Ron Ely, Will Murray, Scott Cranford, Dave Taggart, Howard Hopkins … and the list goes on and on.

• Three new Nostalgia Ventures reprints: The second Doc Savage reprint (the pulp cover and the Bama cover).

• And High Adventure #72, which reprinted the original Wildcat edition features Ron Fortier’s excellent rewritten version. I was curious just how bad the original story was (plot holes, character names changing, etc.). By the way, Ron’s all-new Hazzard story, The Citadel of Fear, is available now.

• Asylum of Fear, an all-new Doc Savage adventure written by Howard Wright. (It’s a terrific-looking paperback that mimics the original Bantam editions. It was also one of the freebie gifts at Doc Con. Thanks!)

• And a 1942 Doc Savage pulp with the story, The Devil’s Black Rock.

In addition to reading material, I bought a 2006 edition Doc Con T-shirt and one of the inaugural La Plata Doc Con T-shirts.

Now, to attack my reading stack…

– William