Doc Savage and The Shadow Pulp Reprints
Boomstick > December 17th, 2023, 01:20 AM
Pardon my rambling here, but this is something I've kept circling back to in my mind over the past few years. I continue to be amazed by the lack of modern reprints, either print or digital, for classic pulp magazines. Especially Doc Savage and The Shadow. If you're interested in reading these stories, you're looking for 90 year old originals, 50-60 year old reprints, or the more recent post-2006 ones.
Even the latest reprints (Sanctum Books/Nostalgia Ventures) were cheaply printed, featured two stories in each 'book,' and went for $12.95 each when they were new. Which may not seem too bad, until you consider you'd be looking at 151 volumes for The Shadow, and 87 volumes for Doc Savage. Assuming you stuck with them as they released these things at a snail's pace over 15 years, and got them all at cover price, you'd be into it for over $3000. Trying to track them all down now would be two or three times that much, as most of them go for much more than the cover price.
To further put this in to perspective: Almost every Robert E. Howard story ever written has been collected in various high-quality paperbacks. Hopping on Amazon right now, you could own all of Robert E. Howard's professional work for under $200. And they've been in print for nearly 20 years. Yes, there's a higher page count on either Doc Savage or The Shadow if you add it all up, but the quality of Howard's work is on another planet, certainly compared to Doc Savage.
Why does this matter? If I understand it correctly, both these properties will begin coming into the public domain by the end of the decade. While public domain law isn't as simple as it's often assumed to be, it still matters. Condé Nast Publications owns these characters, and you'd think they'd be interested in making as much money as they can while they still have a complete legal grasp on them.
There were several new novels by Will Murray over the past few years, but even these were done without much backing and didn't make waves outside the 'community.' Basically high end fan-fiction. More recently they've used James Patterson to release a pair of novels that re-imagine the characters. While the Amazon reviews look positive, it seems to be from people that are Patterson fans, rather than Doc Savage/The Shadow fans. I've not heard much positive about them from longtime fans of the characters.
At a time where it would be relatively simple to re-release all this material digitally, it's astounding to me that they don't. I would happily pay a fair price for the ability to own these. While I'd love to have it in nice quality paperbacks, I'd be equally happy to have it digitally. My hope is that they had an exclusive deal for the previous reprints (which seem to have ended in 2020 with the final Shadow books), and we'll see new reprints soon. I kind of doubt it, though. I suspect Condé Nast would prefer to license any reprints out to a third party, so that there's a buffer of sorts between them and the material. These stories are the better part of 100 years old in some cases, and what passed without raising eyebrows back then does not now.