THE EVERLASTING FIRST: The Shadow
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?
THE SHADOW knows!
The laughter that follows seems threatening, sinister. Its implied menace is daunting and intimidating, but only the wicked need ever fear it. The innocent will be protected. The guilty will be punished. Vengeance is swift and just. The Shadow knows.
My peripheral introduction to The Shadow came via the most incongruous means: Mad magazine and a comic book based on a television sitcom. Yeah, I'd say my path to The Shadow was unique. More conventional exposure would follow soon enough.
The great cartoonist Sergio Aragones was a regular contributor to Mad magazine. One of Aragones's recurring features in Mad was called "The Shadow Knows," a series of single-panel gags imagining the comic results if a person's shadow could reveal the unchecked impulses of his or her id. Mad's "The Shadow Knows" had nothing whatsoever to do with the pulp and radio hero that inspired its title, but it did nick its tag line from that inspiration: "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? THE SHADOW KNOWS."
And that was my outta-left-field, second-hand introduction to The Shadow.
It was probably in the very early '70s. I don't remember if I was reading an issue of Mad or thumbing through one of the many Mad paperback collections. It may have even been The Ridiculously Expensive Mad, a hardcover anthology that I received as a gift from my parents (who inscribed it, "Happy Birthday, Carl E. Neuman." My parents were pretty cool).
THE SHADOW knows!
The laughter that follows seems threatening, sinister. Its implied menace is daunting and intimidating, but only the wicked need ever fear it. The innocent will be protected. The guilty will be punished. Vengeance is swift and just. The Shadow knows.
My peripheral introduction to The Shadow came via the most incongruous means: Mad magazine and a comic book based on a television sitcom. Yeah, I'd say my path to The Shadow was unique. More conventional exposure would follow soon enough.
The great cartoonist Sergio Aragones was a regular contributor to Mad magazine. One of Aragones's recurring features in Mad was called "The Shadow Knows," a series of single-panel gags imagining the comic results if a person's shadow could reveal the unchecked impulses of his or her id. Mad's "The Shadow Knows" had nothing whatsoever to do with the pulp and radio hero that inspired its title, but it did nick its tag line from that inspiration: "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? THE SHADOW KNOWS."
And that was my outta-left-field, second-hand introduction to The Shadow.
It was probably in the very early '70s. I don't remember if I was reading an issue of Mad or thumbing through one of the many Mad paperback collections. It may have even been The Ridiculously Expensive Mad, a hardcover anthology that I received as a gift from my parents (who inscribed it, "Happy Birthday, Carl E. Neuman." My parents were pretty cool).
By whichever means I first encountered Sergio's Shadow gags, I do remember sharing the experience with Mom and Dad, who responded that those "Who knows what evil?" and "The Shadow Knows" lines came from a popular old radio show. They added their recollection of a fill-in Shadow announcer who once screwed up the introduction: Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow do! I laughed (I think), and said it should have been The Shadow does.
Eh. Close enough.
This gave me only the barest, broadest strokes of The Shadow. And as weird a beginning as that was, my path to The Shadow gets even weirder after that, as it passes by one Reuben Kincaid, the fictional manager of TV's fictional family band The Partridge Family.
I told you it was weird.
Eh. Close enough.
This gave me only the barest, broadest strokes of The Shadow. And as weird a beginning as that was, my path to The Shadow gets even weirder after that, as it passes by one Reuben Kincaid, the fictional manager of TV's fictional family band The Partridge Family.
I told you it was weird.
In the early '70s, Charlton Comics had the license to produce a comic book based on the hit ABC-TV sitcom The Partridge Family. I was a fan of the show, and I was a fan of comic books, but the only one of those Partridge Family comic books I ever read was The Partridge Family # 5 from 1971. One of the stories in that issue found ol' Reuben reminiscing about the old-time radio shows that thrilled him when he was a mere lad and a beardless youth. Reuben described each of his radio faves without actually naming them (because, in the words of The Beatles' Christmas Album, Copyright, John!), and artist Dan Sherwood gave us pictures to go with the words: The Lone Ranger. Fibber McGee and Molly. Jack, Doc, and Reggie from I Love A Mystery. And, of course, the hidden face of the mysterious stranger who knew what and where evil lurked.
And that was my first conscious glimpse of The Shadow.
As I look back upon the subsequent expansion of my awareness of The Shadow in the early '70s, the timeline gets a little jumbled. My Dad liked to quote a line he remembered from The Shadow's radio adventures: He said he didn't remember; The Shadow knows! I heard my first radio adventure of The Shadow courtesy of a weekly program called Radio Rides Again, which I managed to catch on WDDS-FM in Syracuse. That specific episode provided me with another catchphrase for this (apparently sloganeering) Dark Knight: when frightened criminals stammered their question of where that spooky, disembodied voice was coming from, The Shadow sneered his response: HERE! In the SHADOWS!
Yeah. Yeah!
A couple of books at the library--Steranko's History Of The Comics and Jim Harmon's The Great Radio Heroes--offered more background information. I fell hard for the allure of pulp magazines, starting with Doc Savage. The mail-order ads in the back of Vampirella prompted me to buy an LP featuring two original radio broadcasts of The Shadow, and a Shadow jigsaw puzzle. Somewhere in there, I may have seen one of Archie Comics' ill-advised attempts to turn The Shadow into a traditional superhero in the '60s. And it all shifted into overdrive for me when DC Comics announced it would be publishing its Shadow comic book.
Berni Wrightson drew the ad, but it was Michael Kaluta who handled the exquisite artwork for DC's The Shadow # 1. The book was cover-dated October-November 1973, but it was on the racks during the summer of '73. I bought it at a bus station in Springfield, Missouri, and read it and re-read it, oh, a billion times or thereabouts. Writer Denny O'Neil captured the bloodthirsty noir zeitgeist of the pseudonymous Maxwell Grant's original pulp novels of the '30s and '40s. I was fully, hopelessly hooked. I never missed an issue, not even when Frank Robbins took over for Kaluta (and I like Robbins's work much more now than I did then). And when The Shadow met his protégé The Batman in Batman # 253 and 259, I was in my heaven. The weed of crime bears bitter fruit. Crime does not pay! The Shadow knows!
(Although it was well-known that The Shadow was the single biggest influence on the creation of Batman, it wasn't until decades later that we discovered that Batman co-creator Bill Finger's script for the first Batman story, "The Case Of The Chemical Syndicate" from 1939's Detective Comics # 27, was, um...inspired by a Shadow novel called "Partners Of Peril." Even without that bit of literary larceny, there would be no Batman without The Shadow coming first. It's fitting that Walter Gibson, the prolific writer responsible for most of the Shadow novels credited to the fictitious Maxwell Grant, would finish his long career with a Batman prose short story, "Batman Encounters Gray Face," in Detective Comics # 500 in 1981.)
Radio, comics, and history. That left only the pulp novels themselves for me to discover. Pyramid Books began a series of paperback reprints of The Shadow's pulp adventures, usually with a gorgeous Steranko painting on the cover. I also picked up a trade paperback reprinting two Shadow pulp novels (complete with the original pulp magazine illustrations) on a flea-market mission in the mid '70s. And I joined The Shadow Secret Society. I still have my membership button.
I thought enough of The Shadow to try to write some of my own Shadow adventures. My first attempt was an awful Justice Society of America story guest-starring The Shadow. In 1975, I wrote two Shadow short-shorts for my high school newspaper The NorthCaster.
As I look back upon the subsequent expansion of my awareness of The Shadow in the early '70s, the timeline gets a little jumbled. My Dad liked to quote a line he remembered from The Shadow's radio adventures: He said he didn't remember; The Shadow knows! I heard my first radio adventure of The Shadow courtesy of a weekly program called Radio Rides Again, which I managed to catch on WDDS-FM in Syracuse. That specific episode provided me with another catchphrase for this (apparently sloganeering) Dark Knight: when frightened criminals stammered their question of where that spooky, disembodied voice was coming from, The Shadow sneered his response: HERE! In the SHADOWS!
Yeah. Yeah!
A couple of books at the library--Steranko's History Of The Comics and Jim Harmon's The Great Radio Heroes--offered more background information. I fell hard for the allure of pulp magazines, starting with Doc Savage. The mail-order ads in the back of Vampirella prompted me to buy an LP featuring two original radio broadcasts of The Shadow, and a Shadow jigsaw puzzle. Somewhere in there, I may have seen one of Archie Comics' ill-advised attempts to turn The Shadow into a traditional superhero in the '60s. And it all shifted into overdrive for me when DC Comics announced it would be publishing its Shadow comic book.
Berni Wrightson drew the ad, but it was Michael Kaluta who handled the exquisite artwork for DC's The Shadow # 1. The book was cover-dated October-November 1973, but it was on the racks during the summer of '73. I bought it at a bus station in Springfield, Missouri, and read it and re-read it, oh, a billion times or thereabouts. Writer Denny O'Neil captured the bloodthirsty noir zeitgeist of the pseudonymous Maxwell Grant's original pulp novels of the '30s and '40s. I was fully, hopelessly hooked. I never missed an issue, not even when Frank Robbins took over for Kaluta (and I like Robbins's work much more now than I did then). And when The Shadow met his protégé The Batman in Batman # 253 and 259, I was in my heaven. The weed of crime bears bitter fruit. Crime does not pay! The Shadow knows!
(Although it was well-known that The Shadow was the single biggest influence on the creation of Batman, it wasn't until decades later that we discovered that Batman co-creator Bill Finger's script for the first Batman story, "The Case Of The Chemical Syndicate" from 1939's Detective Comics # 27, was, um...inspired by a Shadow novel called "Partners Of Peril." Even without that bit of literary larceny, there would be no Batman without The Shadow coming first. It's fitting that Walter Gibson, the prolific writer responsible for most of the Shadow novels credited to the fictitious Maxwell Grant, would finish his long career with a Batman prose short story, "Batman Encounters Gray Face," in Detective Comics # 500 in 1981.)
Radio, comics, and history. That left only the pulp novels themselves for me to discover. Pyramid Books began a series of paperback reprints of The Shadow's pulp adventures, usually with a gorgeous Steranko painting on the cover. I also picked up a trade paperback reprinting two Shadow pulp novels (complete with the original pulp magazine illustrations) on a flea-market mission in the mid '70s. And I joined The Shadow Secret Society. I still have my membership button.
I thought enough of The Shadow to try to write some of my own Shadow adventures. My first attempt was an awful Justice Society of America story guest-starring The Shadow. In 1975, I wrote two Shadow short-shorts for my high school newspaper The NorthCaster.
Maxwell Grant wasn't worried about competition from me. But at least North Syracuse Central High School was safe, thanks to The Shadow.
DC's The Shadow was cancelled with its twelfth issue, also in 1975. The paperback novels got harder and harder to find: I bought them when I could, but missed most of them. Nostalgia moved on. The Shadow faded away.
He would be back. I confess that I've never enjoyed latter-day attempts to revive the character, whether in comic books or on film. But the original pulp novels continue to be available in lovely two-in-one softcover editions curated by Anthony Tollin, The Shadow's # 1 fan. The weed of crime still bears bitter fruit. And there's no question where we can find the one who knows:
Here. In the shadows!
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