His Name is...Savage

His Name Is... Savage
His Name Is... Savage #1. Cover art by Robert Foster
Date	June 1968
Page count	40 pages
Publisher	Adventure House Press (1968) Fantagraphics (1982 reprint)
Creative team
Creator	Gil Kane Archie Goodwin

His Name Is... Savage is a 40-page, magazine-format comics novel released in 1968 as a precursor to the modern graphic novel. Created by the veteran American comic book artist Gil Kane, who conceived, plotted and illustrated the project, and writer Archie Goodwin, who scripted under the pseudonym Robert Franklin, the black-and-white magazine was published by Kane's Adventure House Press, and distributed to newsstands.

His Name Is... Savage #1 (June 1968), the sole issue published, was the first full-length comics story in a non-comic book format since 1950, when St. John Publications issued the digest-sized hardboiled detective novellas It Rhymes with Lust and The Case of the Winking Buddha. Like them, Savage was also sold on newsstands rather than in book stores. Marvel Comics, shortly after Savage appeared, published the first of a two-issue comics magazine, The Spectacular Spider-Man, starring that titular superhero. Like the similar, anthological comics magazines of the time, such as Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella, both His Name Is... Savage and The Spectacular Spider-Man cost 35¢, whereas a typical comic book cost 12¢ and double-size issues 25¢.

Gil Kane in the 1960s was a well-established comic-book artist who had co-created the modern versions of the DC Comics superheroes Green Lantern and the Atom. He was additionally an early and outspoken advocate of creators' rights in an industry that at the time did not offer character ownership or royalties. Circa 1963, Kane set up a studio on East 63rd Street in Manhattan, New York City, New York, and for five years worked sporadically on both His Name Is... Savage and a project that would become the paperback comics novel Blackmark. Kane in 1996 said the actual drawing of Savage "was done, from beginning to end, in 30 days. That last page was inked at the printer while they were getting the book ready".