Having written about a bad Doc Savage pastiche Monday, I thought I’d follow up with a good pastiche (also edited from an old post on my own blog), from the 1970s Weird Heroes neo-pulp series.
Greg Hatcher has blogged about Weird Heroes, an attempt to mix the old pulp adventure style with a modern sensibility. That sensibility, editor Byron Preiss said in the first volume, was in opposition to the kind of killing sprees you got in some contemporary paperback adventures such as Don Pendleton’s Executioner series (later ripped off by some character called the Punisher — you ever hear of him?). Preiss’s Weird Heroes valued life.
Ted White’s Doc Phoenix appeared in a short story in the second Weird Heroes anthology, then got a full-length novel in Volume Five, The Oz Encounter. The endnotes say White couldn’t finish the book so Marv Wolfman — then known for Tomb of Dracula and Nova rather than New Teen Titans — stepped in.
Like Doc Savage, Doc Phoenix is a formidable fighter, a super-genius and a millionaire. He achieved his wealth by applying his genius to investing, then taking his profits and making even more money by gambling. Phoenix took his fortune and spent it building supercomputers that enable him to enter other people’s minds. Like Roger Zelazny’s Dream Master, he materializes in a fantasy land symbolically shaped by his subject’s mental or emotional issues (the John Ostrander/Tom Mandrake Spectre used the idea too).
Phoenix’s original plan for his tech resembled Doc Savage’s crime college: by finding and treating the flaws in criminal minds that turned them bad, he could eliminate crime. It turns out nobody but Phoenix can use the equipment safely so a mass program of criminal reform isn’t in the cards. Instead Doc uses his system to treat trauma victims and the like, entering their mind to confront their nightmares. His assistants in his work are Moose (the counterpart to Doc Savage’s Monk), a computer whiz, Steffan (the Ham counterpart) and Linda, a Chinese-American freelance spy who tried to kill Phoenix in the first story. He survived and used his system to restore Linda’s sense of morality.
The Oz Encounter begins with Wentworth, a rising politician and former lawyer for “the Syndicate” (a common term for organized crime back then, as Italian-Americans protested when the media went with “mafia”) hiring Doc Phoenix to treat his daughter Patricia. The girl has become comatose from an emotional trauma; Wentworth wants Phoenix to cure her trauma and restore her to normal. Richard Wentworth was the Spider and Patricia Savage was Doc Savage’s cousin, though I don’t know if the names were meant as Easter eggs.
Entering Patricia’s mindscape, Phoenix discovers it’s is a twisted version of Oz. In L. Frank Baum’s Road to Oz, the lovable hobo the Shaggy Man carried a magical love magnet that made everyone he met into his friend. The Shaggy Man in Patricia’s head is using the magnet to turn everyone in Oz into his fawning slaves, and now turns it on Phoenix. Doc Phoenix escapes, barely, after which the story forgets about the love magnet — a screw-up due to the change of writers, maybe?
When Doc returns to Patricia’s mind, she meets him as Dorothy Gale. Along with “Dorothy” Phoenix sets out to find out what’s keeping her hiding in her coma and why the Shaggy Man is turning Oz into a desolate waste. Complicating things, the Shaggy Man shows up in the real world determined to stop Patricia from returning to consciousness, even if that requires killing Phoenix.
The end result is fun, fast-moving and action-packed. White or Wolfman get a lot of Oz details wrong — Dorothy doesn’t move permanently to Oz at the end of Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, for instance — but I can rationalize that as Patricia misremembering (I like Oz Encounter enough I’m willing to rationalize that stuff away). There are some good illustration by Stephen Fabian to boot.
The collapse of Weird Heroes a few volumes later meant we never got a follow-up. Unlike Ron Goulart’s Gypsy series, though (I’m aware the term is objectionable but it was the protagonist’s name) Oz Encounters doesn’t leave a lot of loose ends behind. There’s one small one I imagine White or Wolfman would have followed up on in the next installment but it’s small enough I can live with it.
#SFWApro. Cover by Katherine Jeffrey Jones, Oz cover by John R. Neill.
I had the whole series, but didn’t get around to reading this volume, before I purged a bunch of books. Collected too many books, at one time and then went to work for a bookseller and the “to read” pile just got overwhelming. I read the initial Doc Phoenix story but was only mildly entertained by it. That was kind of my experience with most of the Weird Heroes stories; okay, some good moments, but they didn’t pull me in enough to want to keep reading, which is part of why I never read the rest of the series. When I purged books, I got rid of anything that wasn’t grabbing me enough early on to stick with it and those fell into that category.
The thing was, I generally found that the old pulp writers didn’t waste a lot of time trying to show their literary chops and got down to the story, while several of the WH writers were trying to show off, before getting into the plot. Probably why a lot of them never really made it as prose writers, especially the comic book guys.
There’s some truth to that assessment, though I like the results better than you.
I thought Dorothy moved to Oz in one of the later books? Or is Dorothy and the Wizard In Oz a distinct later book to The Wizard of Oz?
Either way, since it’s not supposed to be the ‘real’ Oz but a dreamed-up version of it, I can’t blame them for getting the details ‘wrong’.
(I don’t really know the Oz books well, though, so I don’t expect to be right.)
Yes, DOROTHY AND THE WIZARD IN OZ is the fourth book in the series, not the same book as THE WIZARD OF OZ, and features the return of the Wizard. Ironically, given the title, most of the story doesn’t take place in Oz at all, but in an underground realm. At the end of the story, the Wizard moves to Oz permanently and begins to learn actual magic, under the tutelage of Glinda the Good. However, Dorothy didn’t personally move to Oz permanently until a couple of books later (THE EMERALD CITY OF OZ).
Thanks – that explains everything.
The Oz Encounter is a pretty solid entry in the Weird Heroes series; not my favorite, but still a pretty good read. And yeah, I would not have minded some follow-up Doc Phoenix stories by either White or Wolfman, but that’s something I can say about several of the characters introduced in Weird Heroes (esp. Nightshade and Adam Stalker).
I loved Goodwin’s “Stalker” — which for those who don’t know, involves a Vietnam veteran and Oklahoman fighting a crooked consortium of oil companies, the Darkstar League. It’s particularly amusing to see the Tulsa and Oklahoma City factions scheming against each other like Cobra Commander and Destro (Goodwin was Oklahoma-born and it shows).