Comic Book Synopsis / Plot
A massive earthquake has struck South
America; at the corporate headquarters of Doc Savage, his cousin Pat
coordinates relief and rescue efforts. Several teams are on the scene
struggling to minimize the trauma as best they can, while back at HQ,
Happy is puzzled as to why his seismic algorithm failed to predict
this quake. As the Man of Bronze himself rescues children from a
wrecked bus, he spies a dead man in a tree, hanging by a parachute.
Back at the lab, Doc examines the device the as-yet-unidentified man
was carrying and recognizes it from a case in his past….
Flashbacks show us the case called “The
Melting Man.” A police officer was found dead, his body literally
melted in his clothes; Doc discovered a small mechanical device in
the goop which was an oscillator powerful enough to liquefy a man. A
similar vibration destroyed a downtown lab which set the team racing
to prevent the destruction of Boulder Dam by German agents. Doc
traced the deadly device to its inventor, industrialist Conrad
Livingston Weaver who had hired Germans to destroy the dam with the
oscillator, to convince the US government that Hitler had one in his
possession, leading to big sales to the American military. Weaver
tried to kill Doc with it but the device was damaged and it backfired
on the villain, gruesomely. Doc confiscated the prototypes and
destroyed the patents so that the device could never be recreated;
the only thing the Man of Bronze didn’t know was that Weaver’s
young son Peter witnessed his father’s grisly death….
Now someone has rediscovered the deadly
oscillator and improved it enough to create an earthquake. Doc and
his team swing into action to prevent any more disasters….