Doc Savage #5 - Marvel

One of my favorite Doc Savage covers--you've got Doc in a fight to the death with some weird supervillain type guy, and if he survives that, he's got the Loch Ness Monster to contend with! And I'm sure that spooky castle is going to come into play at some point. You don't see a lot of green on comic covers, which makes this stand out that much more to me. Nice job by Ken Barr.

There's a Doc Savage inside cover by Neal Adams, then a letter's page(Mail of Bronze), ansd then we're right into "The Earth-Wreckers" by Doug Moench and Tony DeZuniga.

Starting in Australia, we find a masked man kicking some serious ass as he finds his way to a safe, which he then explodes open. The masked man is revealed to be...Doc Savage!

Cut to: Antarctica, where we see Doc looking for another mysterious object, then again in Africa, then again in Eurasia. Then we cut to Manhattan, and Doc's team of adventurers are opening huge crates of stuff Doc has mailed to himself.

Soon we find the items Doc has been searching out are large-size geographic replicas of various continents, with odd machinery attached to the back. The pieces are put together to form a giant, 30-ft high replica of the Earth itself. Only one piece is missing. As Monk says "Good old North America..."

Turns out every government in the world has been receving anonymous threats, saying a "super bomb" will go off unless a ransom is paid. The governments got together and of course called Doc Savage to figure this out. He has determined that the pieces of this model globe were the detonators for the bombs, and now that he has them all together...Monk accidentally triggers a security field and all the pieces burn up. Gee, thanks, Monk.

Anyway, turns out this wacky plot is by your typical Marvel-style masked madman named "Iron Mask", who calls his underlings "idiotic fools!" and makes them all dress like him, and has a hidden underground fortress. He's right out of Marvel Central Casting.

All this craziness leads to Doc and the gang, plus his cutie-pie cousin Pat Savage(no, really) to Loch Ness, where they believe the Iron Mask's hideout is. While on their way there, they just happen to run into the Loch Ness Monster. At some point I expected a kitchen sink to waft by...

They break in, make mince-meat of Iron Mask's underappreciated goons, but its Pat Savage who gets close enough to Iron Mask(where we see the reason he's so touchy about his mask) to force him to try to escape. It doesn't work--the story ends with a bang, and then a laugh as Monk tries one last time to sexually harass Pat Savage. The end.

Extra features involve a Doc pin-up by Marshall Rogers, a text feature about Doc's pulp roots, and an interview with Mrs.Lester Dent.

While "Earth-Wreckers" is definitely a fun tale, full of crazy gags, globe-hopping, and wild adventure, Iron Mask is so stock a villain that he inspires giggles when you see him rather than feeling any sort of threat. I mean, come, on, the guy is chased away by Pat Savage, for Pete's Sake.

But hey--I found most of these Doc Savage stories by Moench to be wonderfully fun, he can't hit it out of the park every time. I will say that Tony DeZuniga does a nice job, and his renderings of Pat Savage are actually quite sexy, something I didn't really expect. Nice job, Mr.D!