All of that is exactly the case for how I ended up with today's book: Dr. Kildare #3. I've never seen the show. My mom might have been a fan; I just don't rightly recall. I know star Richard Chamberlain right well from his starring in miniseries like Shogun and The Thornbirds. Yet upon a recent trip to a used bookstore, I found a copy of Dell's adaption of the young surgeon who often finds love with his patients or their loved ones, for less than $2! And since I had trade credit, I just couldn't pass it up.
This issue is from 1962, during a time where America is riding a high wave of positivism. The Kennedy Camelot is in full swing. Vietnam is a distant blip down the road. And though dark days are ahead, an economic boom is making Americans feel euphoric and invulnerable right now. But that's not the case for Dr. James Kildare.
A shortage of doctors has Kildare working double shifts. Managing a few hours of sleep, the young surgeon is called back into the hospital to care for a young woman injured in a gruesome car wreck. The surgery is intense. But it's the drama outside the operating room that is boiling over.
The girl's father doesn't approve of her boyfriend, a struggling playwright. Complicating matters is that the patient's injuries aren't properly healing. With Kildare needing to go back in to do some complicated skin grafts, can the doctor also heal the rift between his patient's loved ones?
As a secondary plot, Kildare's mentor, Dr. Gillespie, must amputate the leg of a very young boy. An act which really rattles the elder physician and Kildare uses as a learning opportunity.
Having watched the TV show Emergency! a ton of times with my wife, I am not very surprised at how technical the medical dramas of the 60s and 70s were. But I am surprised how detailed a 1962 comic book aimed at young readers was. In the first 1-2 pages, Kildare works on a gunshot patient. That in itself probably isn't too controversial for the time period. But the GSW was a head wound with a very gruesome wound. Even more surprising is that this book doesn't have a Comics Codes label on the cover!
Adding to the medical jargon that fills this story are 3 educational one-page comics that fill the inside covers and the back outside cover. Two of them are about doctors and their influence in military history and aviation lore. The third strip is about how researchers develop vaccines. The story is basically about Dr. Jonas Salk and one of the sketches is clearly that of the polio vaccine developer. But I'm stumped as to why they don't acknowledge Salk and his achievement in that segment...
The artwork was a pretty good representation of star Richard Chamberlain. Unlike with my experience with the Car 54... Where Are You? comics, it doesn't appear that the artist kept reusing the same 5 or 6 head sketches of each main character. But I am sure I'd need to see other issues of the series to know that for sure.
As for the appearances of other characters in this book, I have no idea if they look like the actors they're meant to resemble or not. I'm just not that familar with them or the show. I do wish that whoever colored this book would have got Kildare's hair color right. He was not a man with raven colored locks.
I also thought that the plot was a bit too full. Dell was guilty of this a lot. They'd build up this really engaging story that was complex and rather intelligent. Then- BAM! They'd run out of pages and everything is sloppily wrapped up in 2 pages. We don't really find out what happened to the kid amputee and that might be Dr. Kildare in the last panel. It just doesn't look like him and it's not mentioned.
I tend to be a little kind to these abrupt endings like when I reviewed that batch of John Wayne movie adaptations from Dell. But there's no excuse here. I understand that according to US Postal regulations, the publisher had to include a prose story in order to maintain their first class postage. So no complaints for that. But there was a very clunky 4 page story about a pair of doctors operating in the African bush that could have been set aside for a future publication in order to devote a little more time and energy to the main story.
For the price I paid for a 60 year old comic from a publisher I hold dear in my heart and memories, I don't regret my purchase. It was very entertaining. But it wasn't perfect. You can still like things that have flaws to them. If only the rest of the world could be a lot less like the dad in this book and overlook the blemishes in others.
Worth Consuming!
Rating: 7 out of 10 stars.
No comments:
Post a Comment