Here's my rather battered copy of Doc Savage - His Apocalyptic Life from 1981 by Philip Jose Farmer. It has a beautiful cover illustration by Ken Barr who, I think, also provided some covers for Marvel's Black and White Rampaging Hulk Magazine back in the late 1970's (I haven't thought about that for a while - anybody remember Bereet and the Krylorians? I seemed to spend a lot of time reading those stories at the time). I started reading Doc Savage with the Sargasso Ogre in probably about 1975 and around the same time the British Marvel Superheroes Weekly was reprinting the US Marvel Doc Savage stories in installments. The George Pal movie of Doc was disappointing (though Ron Ely was well cast) and I recall seeing it on a birthday party outing as a double-bill with the Doug McClure movie Warlords of Atlantis. Doc Savage played first and my fellow kids were excruciatingly bored...knowing I was a fan...one whispered to me "Is this story almost over?" about a quarter of the way through (conversely my son whispered to me last week during the Captain America movie, "This isn't the end is it, Dad? I don't want this ever to end!").
So, it seems like I've always been a Doc fan and I guess I always will. Right now I'm reading World's Fair Goblin in the Nostalgia Ventures version (the Bantam edition has somehow always eluded me). Nostalgia Ventures can be hard to come by in the UK and are hellishly expensive to import but I managed to pick up this one at a local comic fair.
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