His Name Is . . . Savage!

AUTHOR: Franklin, Robert (pseudonym of Archie Goodwin)

ARTIST: Gil Kane (illustrator); Robert Foster (cover artist)

PUBLISHER: Adventure House Press

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 1968

Publication History

His Name Is…Savage! was a project initiated by Gil Kane. Archie Goodwin wrote the text, under the pseudonym Robert Franklin, and comic artists Larry Koster and Manny Stallman helped with the production. Adventure House Press, the publisher for His Name Is…Savage!, was Kane’s own imprint. However, Kane had difficulty producing and distributing the magazine, as its content and format were comparatively unusual for the time. After experiencing difficulty in finding a printer—apparently some printers were wary of the story’s content—it was distributed somewhat unevenly to newsstands by the Kable News Company. After many years out of print, the story was reprinted by Fantagraphics in 1982, as Gil Kane’s Savage, with a new cover drawn by Kane, an introduction by R. C. Harvey, and interviews with Kane.

Plot

The plot of His Name Is…Savage! is clearly influenced by the James Bond films that had been highly popular since 1962. It opens with two divers boarding a boat and killing a man with a harpoon. Just before the boat is destroyed the dying man sends a message: “Mace will strike the President’s UN address.” At a vast underground headquarters the divers report to General Simon Mace, whose face is half disfigured flesh and half metal. Because the divers failed to stop the message being sent, the general uses his metal arm to crush the hand of one of the men, and then he strangles the other.

Meanwhile Savage, an espionage agent and assassin working for an organization known as “The Committee,” is in prison, about to be executed for murder. The sadistic head guard, Captain Bayard, has received release papers but has his guards beat Savage to make him crawl for the papers. Savage grabs Bayard’s gun and smashes it into the captain’s mouth; he forces him to take him to the warden to confirm his release.

Savage then makes his way to the Manhattan headquarters of the Committee, which is a top-secret espionage organization answerable only to the president of the United States. There, the shadowy figures of the Committee tell Savage of Mace’s plot to kill the president. A flashback reveals that Savage was part of a special assault group under General Mace during World War II, and after the war, he worked as a mercenary for Mace. In love with Mace’s daughter, Sheila, Savage stayed with the increasingly unbalanced general until he felt he had to try to take over Mace’s organization. After failing, Savage had to flee. Savage caused Mace’s injuries by detonating a hand grenade as he escaped.

Savage visits a former associate of Mace, Keely, an antiques dealer, to discover Mace’s whereabouts. Savage is persuading Keely to talk by gradually destroying his valuable inventory when an assassin shoots Keely in the head. Although wounded, Savage kills two assassins; then he goes to the hotel where the assassins had been staying, scaling the wall to break in.

At the hotel, he meets Sheila, who agrees to help him. Savage fights off two guards, one of whom is a large bald Asian man in the mold of a Bond villain’s henchman. Savage defeats him by using karate and then ambushes and kills three more guards; however, Sheila is shot and killed in the escape.

Savage confronts the Committee, as he believes one of the members is a traitor who has set him up. He demands to see the president of the United States; when he does so, he realizes that the figure, who looks like U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson, is actually Mace in disguise. Savage attacks him but is knocked unconscious by Secret Service agents.

Awakening, Savage finds himself in a car with two of Mace’s men. He escapes, only to find “Johnson” has declared war on Soviet Russia while at the United Nations. Savage rips the disguise from Mace’s face but cannot prevent him from escaping in a speedboat. Savage commandeers a helicopter and follows Mace to his base. Joined by troops, Savage storms the base. He finds the president on an operating table, where a surgeon is about to transmogrify the Johnson face, which would allow Mace to continue his impersonation. Savage knocks out the surgeon and attacks Mace. They engage in a monumental fistfight (which lasts five pages). Losing the vicious fight, Savage throws acid into Mace’s face, and the general is electrocuted by his metal arm. Savage drags the president to safety, and though seriously wounded, he survives.

Characters

•Savage is defined by his name: He is clearly capable of brutal violence. His short, cropped hair and heavy build mark him as a character to be feared. Although a trained killer, he is capable of love (for the doomed Sheila). Also, despite his use of extreme violence, he has a moral compass, particularly after his split from General Mace. He is brave and also selfless: At the end, when surrounded by massive destruction, he tells troops, “Forget me…Get the President.”

•General Simon Mace is mainly seen as a violent cyborg, and his human form is glimpsed only in flashback, in which he is forceful and dynamic. However, he does not speak, and therefore cannot explain his character. The text implies that he has gradually become more unbalanced. Once he becomes a cyborg, he can be seen as a Bond villain: Although he is not foreign, he is disfigured and power crazed.

•Sheila Mace is something of a cipher and is physically reminiscent of Kane’s rendition of Carol Ferris, the Green Lantern’s girlfriend in the 1960’s. Her one major scene lasts for six pages, and by the end of it, she is dead. This scene does establish, however, that she still has feelings for Savage and that she has stayed with her megalomaniac father only because of her fear of him.

Artistic Style

At the time of the production of His Name Is…Savage! Kane was a well-established comic book artist, probably most famous for his artwork on DC Comics’ revamp of Green Lantern between 1959 and 1970, although he worked on a huge range of comics and many other major characters for both DC and Marvel, including Superman and Spider-Man.

Kane’s style uses a particularly clear and precise line that allows the delineation of great detail, not only in key figures but also in weaponry and architecture. This careful style makes the moments of violence even more horrific, as when teeth fragments and blood are shown flying from the mouth of Bayard’s mouth. Even when the image is slightly less explicit, as when Savage escapes from the car, the text emphasizes the results of violence: “Carl’s head shot backward with a violent snap, leaving a trail of blood and shattered teeth in the air.”

Most pages have between five and nine panels, with full-page panels used only twice (on the first page and in the climactic fight scene). The more dense pages tend to use multiple panels to control reading pace and tension. For example, on page 33, a five-panel sequence in a row across the bottom of the page shows Savage setting down a cigarette. In the second panel it falls from the ashtray, and in the third, it rolls across the desk. We see it rest against the hand of the fake president, who does not flinch. The final panel shows the hand with Savage looking on, his face showing that he realizes he is talking to Mace in disguise.

There are several design features that make the black-and-white interior pages look unlike traditional comics. The illustrative and text panels in the story do not have drawn borders, which gives the page layout a more fluid feel. Text is also typed in a plain sans serif face, with squared-off word balloons, which also makes the pages look less like traditional comics. Some pages have dense text over every panel, between three and seven lines long. The artwork also uses a huge amount of tone effects, which help to give the pages a dark, filmic look. The opening splash page is reminiscent of the work of Will Eisner, in that the title of the comic is shown within the panel as a huge stone underwater structure, with a diver swimming past it.

Themes

Although it is clearly a James Bond-style action adventure, His Name Is . . . Savage! takes place against the background of the Cold War, and the intention of the villain is not to assassinate the president of the United States but to start World War III. Savage is extremely violent, and, thus, more like the early James Bond figure of the Ian Fleming novels than the Bond of the later gadget-heavy films. Indeed, in the scenes in which Savage breaks Keely’s antiques or smashes a gun into Captain Bayard’s mouth, he is more reminiscent of Mickey Spillane’s Cold War detective antihero, Mike Hammer.

The villain in the story, and indeed the eponymous hero, are both shown to have been scarred by war. They were both trained by the U.S. Army to be killers, and after the war their construction as killing machines leads them to use their lethal skills in a series of increasingly dubious activities. Although their plot and its long-term impact are tied into World War II, the comic was published at the height of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War (1965-1975). There is no explicit mention of Vietnam in the story, but the plot, featuring President Johnson, with its combination of military excess and a possible war with Russia, is inevitably influenced by the war during which it was written.

The story also attempts to deal with a modern version of the lone hero, an archetype that Clint Eastwood embodied in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns and Dirty Harry films. Indeed, the cover of the book has a painted image that is recognizable as actor Lee Marvin, who had just starred as a violent antihero in John Boorman’s film Point Blank (1967). Several key elements in the book also appear in the film; not only the casual violence of the hero, but also an important prison scene and an audacious raid on a heavily guarded hotel.

Most of these heroes, or protagonists, raise the issue of how much unregulated violence can be tolerated in a civilized society in order to defeat the forces of evil. Some critics have perceived the book, like the Dirty Harry films that preceded it, as a fascist response, whereby “might is seen as right.” The comic has also been seen as hyperviolent, and there are some key panels of extreme violence; by modern standards, however, the level of violence is not as shocking as it might have been in 1968.

Impact

Although the cover of His Name Is…Savage! is headed, “Beginning: A New Comics Tradition” and the book is numbered as issue 1, there were no further issues. The magazine format, with black-and-white interior artwork, had been popularized by James Warren’s Creepy magazine in 1964. However, only that comic and other horror comics, such as Warren’s companion titles Eerie and Vampirella (which were edited by the author of His Name Is…Savage!, Goodwin), were commercially successful for an extended period of time. The impact of His Name Is . . . Savage! was therefore quite limited at the time, and some critics have argued that it has not worn well, partially because of what they see as Goodwin’s overblown and verbose text. Others have seen this writing style as a deliberate parody of spy novels of the period. Nevertheless, His Name Is . . . Savage! was an experiment of which many industry professionals were aware, and it is still widely admired.

Further Reading

Kane, Gil. Blackmark (1971).

Kirby, Jack. In the Days of the Mob (1971).

Lee, Stan, and Jack Kirby. The Silver Surfer (1978).

Bibliography

Herman, Daniel. Gil Kane: Art and Interviews. Neshannock, Pa.: Hermes Press, ,2002.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Gil Kane: The Art of the Comics. Neshannock, Pa.: Hermes Press, 2001.

Kane, Gil. “Gil Kane and Denny O’Neil on Comics Writing.” The Comics Journal 64 (July, 1981): 61-79.

Scholz, Carter. “Kane’s Progress.” The Comics Journal 74 (August, 1982): 35-39.