not Dent, because......

The location is "a western state". Dent is almost always very precise
on his geography, but here we just have it vaguely out west.

DOC flies in one of his cars. Or drives there from New York. We
never find out how he got there with the car. But he has one of his
special cars out west, and I never recall this happening in any other
adventure. My guess is that it was an afterthought, to get out of a
plot jam.

DOC talks. Usually he is "the silent bronze nemesis." But in this
one, he's almost cracking wise before he clobbers the crooks. Lots of
dialogue.

Both pets are always there, and they do nothing.

No Crime College. No mention of it. DOC hands bad guys over to the
cops. No two hour exercise routine either.

Way too many plot threads whipping around. You get that feeling about
two-thirds of the way through that this isn't going to be a great
mystery, but rather a very ordinary mystery, with lay upon layer of
implausible cover-up to make it seem mysterious.

On Aug 6, 1:32 pm, Dave bellsouth.net> wrote:

In article <1186425918.328585.149520@g4g2000hsf.googlegroups.com>,
chuck hotmail.com> wrote:

I've heard lots of different stories about how the covers happened (all
anecdotal).

The classic is where the artist comes in with a painting and the editor asks all
the writers who are hanging around "Can someone here give me 6 pages to go with
this picture?"

In article news.supernews.com>,
Kent Allard hearts_of_men.net> wrote:

I think it is canonical that Jack Vance wrote the story "Sail 25" to match
a cover.

Ted

My intutition about the original Doc covers is that "market research"
was so embryonic at that time, the decision for the covers was mostly
left to a few, or one person. So you could have a good cover, or
stupid cover, on a relatively arbitrary whim of one person, and if
they didn't care much for the pulp, you got a cover that was good or
bad by how good the artist was feeling that day. Or to extend this,
the pay rate was so low, that one artist might do a cover in just half
a day or less, so he wasn't really to into it either.

Compare this disregard to comic book covers, say since the late 50s.
Editor comes up with concept, artist draws concept, meeting, changes,
revisions, second revisions, final product. You can bet this didn't
happen with the Doc covers.

lokkeheiss@yahoo.com wrote:

In article <13c0tjbsm3o7299@corp.supernews.com>,
Phantom21 mindspring.com> wrote:

Good point; they probably did the opposite of what they should have done
-- do great covers to attract sales.

But if you disagree, why do you then make an argument for what I was
(trying?) to say? I wasn't saying that people weren't paying attention
to the covers, I was saying it wasn't a scientific group consensus
kind of thing. Instead, it was a close to 100%% decision by one person.
Steiger, for example, sounds like someone who payed a lot of attention
to it. Others didn't. So you could get great covers or really
mediocre ones. I wonder when the first scientific (that is, done with
surveys, questionaires and such) was done for mag covers?

They understood in the 1930s, but it is just that the pulps were at
the bottom of the talent pool, both editorially and artistically
speaking.

Over at the SATURDAY EVENING POST, they knew what covers meant to
sales, which is why they were top of the line. Those Normal Rockwell
covers were money in the bank.

Compare that with the art director for a pulp group -- probably in
charge of multiple titles, working with numerous artists, trying to
coordinate stuff in an era where not everyone had a telephone, even.
What amazes me about the DOC SAVAGE pulp is how many really bad covers
there were over the years. Compare with THE SPIDER, where obviously
they had very strong art direction.

And yeah, once the digest-size hit, circulation started plummeting,
and the crappy covers were just part of the magazine's death spiral.

The Bama covers probably made the DOC series