Word: docs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Everything about Doc is superlative. To begin with, he is the richest man in the world. He is also the handsomest. His eyes are "hypnotic whirlpools of flake gold" and his "perfect features display a power of character seldom seen." Best of all, Doc is really built. His "giant" body, "kilned by tropical suns and arctic winds" to a permanent bronze, possesses "a strength superhuman." He can dodge a bullet, crawl up a wall like a human fly, stay under water for eight minutes, smash through an inch-thick steel door with one punch, and take...
...idea that Doc is just a jock, though. He is also the world's greatest surgeon, the greatest chemist, the greatest inventor. He had Polaroid, television and the shotgun mike at least a decade before the public did, and if you don't watch out, he'll "teleport" you atom by atom to his mysterious laboratory near the North Pole. Like James Bond, Doc is gadget-gaga. Dozens of tiny martial devices-gas bombs, sedative darts, ultraviolet flashlights-are concealed in his clothing. His cars are rolling fire bases that can "go like Barney Oldfield" and crash...
...other characters in Dent's stories are understandably something of a letdown. The Fabulous Five, Doc's "companions in adventure and excitement," are said to be "the five greatest brains ever assembled in one group," but they talk ("Holy Cow! That's plumb ding-y!") like the Beaver Patrol on an overnight hike. Dent's villains are far zingier. They have names like Ull, Ark, Var, Zoro, Rama Tura, "The Sinister Count Ramadanoff" and "The Horrible Humpback"-whose hump, by the way, is packed with nefarious electronic gear. One of his nastiest creations is an Eskimo...
...tell the truth. Doc has a few little problems of his own. The big galoot can literally knock out a 12-ft. shark, but he is scared of girls-in one book he turns to a Mayan maid who is made lor him and stoutly "vouchsafes" the following: "Monja, you've been a brick." But not all of Doc's quirks are endearing. Billed as a paragon of fair play, he nevertheless tends to characterize non-Nordic types as "a low specimen of the Central American half-breed" or as "ratty, dark-skinned" people. In his books black...
...fair. Doc did a lot of good in his time. He thinned out the werewolves in northern California, established a Brontosaurus preserve at the center of the earth and prevented an evil maharajah from hypnotizing the entire world. Too bad he could not have done more for the man who actually created him. Author Dent, who died in 1959, never got more than $750 for a Doc Savage novel. His widow, who lives in La Plata, Mo., has no contractual rights to the stories. Of the millions made by the Bantam reprints she will not get a penny...