Talk:Doc Savage (magazine)

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Doc Savage (magazine) is a featured article; it (or a previous version of it) has been identified as one of the best articles produced by the Wikipedia community. Even so, if you can update or improve it, please do so.

This article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page as Today's featured article on August 17, 2023.

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Date	Process	Result
February 16, 2023	Featured article candidate	Promoted

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Bundle of issues[edit]

Some issues for Mike Christie and any other interested parties. Andrew🐉(talk) 08:25, 17 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Picture[edit]

I was attracted to this article by the discussion at WP:ERRORS about the image to be used when it appeared on the main page. It's disappointing that it has been run without any image at all.

I looked for an image myself and found a French one (pictured). This gives a nice feel for the physical qualities of the works but I'm not sure how close it is to the original US run.

Unfortunately those are paperbacks, published much later. Since the article is about the magazine, not the whole Doc Savage franchise, I don't think this is usable. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 12:23, 17 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Dimensions[edit]

The article doesn't give any physical dimensions for the magazine and readers can't now be expected to understand jargon like pulp and digest format from personal experience. There's some details here which indicate that there were size changes and it was 7 x 10 inches at its largest.

I've added a footnote giving the sizes of both pulp and digest magazines. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 12:36, 17 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Content[edit]

Having read through the article, I still don't have a good understanding of how the material was presented. Some questions:

Was there front matter, contents page, a colophon and the like?
Was there an editorial, letters page and regular features such as one found in the SF magazines? A History of the Doc Savage Adventures indicates that there were regular columns or articles such as "The Doc Savage Method of Self-Development" and the "Doc Savage Club".
Was the main novel serialised, as often happened in the SF magazines?

Perhaps the exact breakdown of a typical issue could be listed as an example.

Andrew🐉(talk) 08:25, 17 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I think the existence of a contents page and so on is so universal as not to be worth comment, and in any case we'd need a source that talks about those things. The main novel was never serialized -- this was intended to be conveyed by "lead novel", but I can see it might be helpful to clarify it, so I've done that. I'll have a look in the sources to see what can be said about other features -- the only thing I can recall offhand is that Doc Savage's exercise routine was printed in the magazine because readers asked about it; if I can find suitable sourcing for that I'll add it. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 12:51, 17 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Contents pages are not universal as novels don't usually have them and the emphasis in the article is on the novel. So, I looked around and found an image of the contents page for issue 12, which is quite illuminating. That's the Canadian edition but I suppose that was similar to the US equivalent. Andrew🐉(talk) 14:51, 18 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]