Real Name:
Clark Savage Junior
Doc Savage
Real Name:
Clark Savage Junior
Identity/Class: "Normal" human
Occupation: Adventurer
Affiliations: (original novels) Ham,
Long Tom, Renny,
Monk, Johnny,
Pat;
(DC Comics only) Chip, Shoshanna, Bo, Ivanovitch;
(both DC and Dark Horse comics) The Shadow
Enemies: John Sunlight
Known Relatives: Clark Savage Senior (father, deceased); Pat Savage (cousin); Clark Savage the Third (son, deceased, DC Comics only); Clark "Chip" Savage IV (grandson, DC Comics only)
Aliases: The Man of Bronze
Base of Operations: Penthouse Apartment, 86th Floor, Empire State Building, New York
First Appearance: The Man of Bronze (March 1933)
Powers/Abilities: Incredible strength and intellect.
History: Dr. Clark Savage Jr. was raised from birth to be a man of superhuman strength and protean genius. With his five scrappy aides - the greatest brains ever assembled in one group - and a vast Mayan wealth at his disposal, he has dedicated his life to the destruction of evil doers the world over!
Clark Savage, Jr. as described by Lester Dent "This looked like the head and shoulders of a man, sculptured in hard bronze. It was a startling sight, that bronze bust. The lines of the features, the unusually high forehead, the mobile and muscular, but not too-full mouth, the lean cheeks, denoted a power of character seldom seen. The bronze of the hair was a little darker than the bronze of the features. The hair was straight, and lay down tightly as a metal skullcap. A genius at sculpture might have made it. Most marvelous of all were the eyes. They glittered like pools of flake gold when little lights from the table lamp played on them. Even from that distance they seemed to exert a hypnotic influence through the powerful binocular lenses, a quality that would cause the most rash individual to hesitate. The bronze man showed wide, very strong-looking teeth, in yawning. Seated there by the immense desk, he did not seem to be a large man. An onlooker would have doubted his six feet height - and would have been astounded to learn he weighed every ounce of two hundred pounds. The big bronze man was so well put together that the impression was not of size, but of power. The bulk of his great body was forgotten in the smooth symmetry of a build incredibly powerful. This man was Clark Savage, Jr.
Clark Savage,
Jr., had been reared from the cradle to become the supreme adventurer. Hardly
had Doc learned to walk, when his father started him taking the routine of
exercises to which he still adhered. Two hours each day, Doc exercised
intensively all his muscles, senses, and his brain. As a result of these
exercises, Doc possessed a strength superhuman. There was no magic about
it, though. Doc had simply built up muscle intensively all his life. Doc's
mental training had started with medicine and surgery. It had branched out
to include all arts and sciences. Just as Doc could easily overpower the
gorilla-like Monk in spite of his great strength, so did Doc know more about
chemistry. And that applied to Renny, the engineer; Long Tom, the electrical
wizard; Johnny, the geologist and archaeologist; and Ham, the lawyer.
And then a new sound was heard. It was a low, mellow, trilling sound, like the song of some strange bird of the jungle, or the sound of the wind filtering through a jungled forest. It was melodious, though it had no tune; and it was inspiring, though it was not awesome. The amazing sound had the peculiar quality of seeming to come from everywhere within the room rather than from a definite spot, as though permeated with an eerie essence of ventriloquism. A purposeful calm settled over Doc Savage's five men as they heard that sound. Their breathing became less rapid, their brains more alert. For this weird sound was part of Doc - a small, unconscious thing which he did in moments of utter concentration. To his friends it was both the cry of battle and the song of triumph. It would come upon his lips when a plan of action was being arranged, precoursing a master stroke which made all things certain. It would come again in the midst of some struggle, when the odds were all against his men, when everything seemed lost. And with the sound, new strength would come to all, and the tide would always turn. And again, it might come when some beleaguered member of the group, alone and attacked, had almost given up all hope of survival. Then that sound would filter through, some way, and the victim knew that help was at hand. The whistling sound was a sign of Doc, and of safety, of victory.
Whew!" snorted Renny. "That's a job for a drill and cold chisels." Saying nothing, merely as if he wanted to see if the bullet was stuck as tightly as Renny said, Doc reached into the safe. Great muscles popping up along his arm suddenly split his coat sleeve wide open. He glanced at the ruined sleeve ruefully, and brought his arm out of the safe. The bullet lay loosely in his palm. Renny could not have looked more astounded had a spike-tailed devil hopped out of the safe. The expression on his puritanical face was ludicrous.
Doc weighed the bullet in his palm. The lids were drawn over his golden eyes. He seemed to be giving his marvelous brain every chance to work - and he was. He was guessing the weight of that bullet within a few grains, almost as accurately as a chemist's scale could weigh it. "Seven hundred and fifty grains," he decided, "That makes it a .577 caliber Nitro-Express rifle. Probably the gun that fired that shot was a double-barreled rifle."
Rain sheeted against Doc's strong, bronzed face, and his straight, close-lying bronze hair. An unusual fact was at once evident. Doc's bronze skin and bronze hair had the strange quality of seeming impervious to water. They didn't get appreciably wet; he shed water like the proverbial duck's back."
Doc Savage
and his friends traveled the world helping the weak, righting wrongs, and
saving nations.
"An institution which Doc maintained in upstate New York- a place where Doc sent all the criminals he captured. There, the lawbreakers underwent an amazing treatment in which their brains were operated upon and all memory of their past wiped out. Then they received training which turned them into useful citizens. This unusual institution was Doc's own idea. He never sent a criminal to prison. They all went to the institution, to be operated upon by specialists whom Doc had trained. They were turned loose entirely reformed men- they didn't know they had ever been crooks."
Comments: Lester Dent created Doc Savage. He was the hero of 181 novels which ran in his own pulp magazine from 1933 to 1949, and were reprinted as paperback books from 1964 to 1990. Nine new novels were officially added to the canon after this point, the first of them written by Philip Jose Farmer and detailing Doc's first meeting with his fellow adventurers, when they are all locked up together in the WWI prison camp known as Loki.
Walter Baumhofer was the first artist to portray Doc Savage.
Doc's friends and helpers
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