Doc Savage

Time is strange. It doesn’t feel as if almost 20 years passed after Millennium Productions’ fine Doc Savage comics story The Monarch of Armageddon, before the character of John Sunlight would appear anywhere again. And yet it was 2010 that DC Comics (who had held the comic book rights to produce Doc stories in the late 1980’s) once again acquired those rights.

DC had featured John Sunlight in a memorable story arc in the ’80’s, but opted not to pick up the threads of their own series, instead essentially ignoring its existence. They had ambitious plans this second time around, building an “alternate universe” which they called First Wave, which would re-conceptualize numerous characters from their own publishing history alongside pulp and other (sometimes rather obscure, sometimes major headliners) heroes.

There was some controversy about this right out of the gate…First Wave author Brian Azzarello, in an interview…