
LEGENDARY HEROES #37 THE AVENGER In the late 1930s Street & Smith publishers were experiencing a downturn in readership and had to cancel a bunch of their pulp magazine titles. These titles simply didn't capture the loyalty among readers that their two most popular creations enjoyed, The Shadow and Doc Savage. So the publishers set out to create a new hero that would combine elements of their two bestselling pulps. They sought the advice of Lester Dent, who wrote the Doc Savage stories under the name Kenneth Robeson, and Walter B. Gibson, who wrote The Shadow under the name Maxwell Grant. Paul Ernst was hired to write The Avenger, the new hero, and he met with Dent and Gibson who gave him their advice, with Dent concentrating on character development and Gibson on story plotting. Paul Ernst would write The Avenger stories under the house pseudonym of Kenneth Robeson, hoping to give the impression that the successful author of Doc Savage was also ...