Review of "Doc Savage Sunlight Rising," Four part comic series

 Review of

Doc Savage Sunlight Rising, Four part comic series

Five out of five stars

Doc and group against a ruthless foe

This review covers all four issues in the story.

 No Doc Savage tale is solid without there being a powerful and extremely dangerous adversary. For without that, no strong hero will be challenged enough to make the story interesting. In this case, the villain is John Sunlight, a man that was so skilled that he was able to penetrate into Doc’s Fortress of Solitude and steal some of the most powerful weapons that Doc ever created. Sunlight hid the weapons so well that Doc was never able to find them and Sunlight died before Doc could capture him.

 It is decades later, and Sunlight’s wrapped body is being worshipped by an isolated group on the border between Afghanistan and Tibet. A ruthless criminal discovers Sunlight’s body and kills everyone in the village in order to acquire it. Doc has perfected a technique to reanimate the dead and his plan is to resuscitate his recently deceased wife Monja.

 A criminal cabal is determined to acquire the means to reanimate the dead and use it to bring Sunlight back to life. They are successful in this and in the last caption of the first issue, Sunlight is once again alive. This is the first step in an ongoing battle for what is nothing less than control of the Earth. Doc brings his old band back together and Sunlight is aided by a powerful criminal gang, the son of the head of a major corporation and the brutal dictator of a country.

 The battle takes place in many places on Earth as well as in space. By deploying a weapon in space, Sunlight is able to lock most of the sunlight in an attempt to blackmail Earth into making him absolute ruler of humanity. The battle is joined and when things look both literally and figuratively the darkest, Doc and his band manage to destroy the weapon and save the Earth.

 This is a great story, while it keeps with the traditions of the early Doc Savage stories, it is modernized to reflect new technologies such as space travel. It would make a great book.