I have to credit respected forum member claytonemery for planting the seed that eventually grew into a Doc Savage custom in my brain. If it wasn't for his own inspiring custom work on the series, I probably would have never started researching the character. The funny thing is, I never planned on doing a Doc Savage custom, but as I was rooting around for parts to make my Lone Ranger and Tonto customs, it literally jumped out at me that, "Hey! I bet I could piece together a pretty decent Doc Savage custom outta this!" And so the gauntlet was thrown and it had to be done.
Doc Savage Magazine was printed from 1933 to 1949. In all, 181 issues were published, so this character has an extensive history. He became reanimated when Bantam Books began reprinting the series as novels in 1964, featuring iconic cover art by the amazing artist James Bama. Doc Savage is a physician, surgeon, scientist, adventurer, inventor, explorer, researcher, and musician. A team of scientists assembled by his father deliberately trained his mind and body to near-superhuman abilities almost from birth, giving him great strength and endurance, a photographic memory, a mastery of the martial arts, and vast knowledge of the sciences. Doc is also a master of disguise and an excellent imitator of voices. Surprisingly, in some of his earlier novels, he is also a bloodthirsty killing machine, particularly in The Land Of Terror (April 1933). Doc himself personally murders well over a dozen thugs in this story and not exactly in self-defense as they are mostly trying hysterically to get away from him. The man of bronze breaks the necks of two gangsters with a sharp twist, yanks another one by the neck and throws him out a window to screeching death, flings a long steel pike into a thug's head and hurls a cutlass right through another one, then shoves a table across a room so hard that it crushes a man against a wall and smashes the table! This is not even counting the other gangsters that Doc simply shoots through the head, including a group of thugs he mows down with a machine gun ("Dying men toppled over the hatch rim, to fall into the hold like ripe fruit"). In the climax of this story Doc and his team travel to an island inhabited by dinosaurs! So, this series is really a template for guys like Indiana Jones.
Anyway, Doc Savage was made using a RAH Hawk Abernathy head (with a sculpted exaggerated widows peak), POC Destro upper legs and knees, Major Blood lower legs, RAH Wild Bill hands, RAH Spirit forearms, and Serpentor upper arms. His shoulder joints were co-opted from a movie Stormshadow to combat paint rub. The torso is from an Indiana Jones figure, but it was one of the funky ones with a lame whipping "action feature," so the inside of the torso was all gummed up with the mechanism that provided the aforementioned action feature. It took some heavy modding to bring the torso back from the abyss so that it would be compatible with the Serpentor arms. Also the Indy waist was spliced and fused onto the Destro crotch so that he maintains waist articulation, which also required extra work due to navigating around the whipping mechanism feature. Thank you Jin Saotome for the tutorial on how to fuse Joes and Raiders. Finally, the tattered sleeves were cut off of a Lizard figure's soft rubber lab coat. They work quite well and do not hamper the arm articulation at all.
Whew! Thanks for checking it out, hope you dig the Doc!