The first time I saw the Shadow was in 1964, when I was 10 and the aging crime-fighter was at a low point in his fabled career.
My parents and grandparents knew the Shadow well but had never seen him, having listened to his adventures as an invisible superhero on radio in the late 1930s through the early 1950s.
Archie Comics began publishing a Shadow comic book, and its August 1964 cover depicted the Shadow in traditional pulp magazine form, lurking hawk-nosed in a cape and slouch hat. But inside, artist John Rosenberger had sleekly “modernized” the character.
Now a prettified blond with three identities but no hat (like the late JFK), he used his role as millionaire playboy Lamont Cranston as a cover for his activities as an American secret agent (James Bond had just become immensely popular).
His spy missions were a cover for his superhero activities, an identity he assumed simply by slipping on a black cloak and “blending into the shadows.” No one knew he was the Shadow, not even his girlfriend Margo Lane.
His vaguely defined powers included stealth, ventriloquism, and a kind of super-hypnotism, and his opponent was his recurring arch-foe from the pulps, Shiwan Khan restyled as a Bondesque freelance spy villain. The Shadow also displayed a hint of 007’s ruthlessness, hurling one of Khan’s henchmen down a shaft to his death.
The story wasn’t as good as the Pulp or Radio Shadows — disjointed, but not terrible.
In later issues, however, penned by Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel, the character would hit bottom — tricked up in a superhero’s mask and tights, and armed with gadgets that might have embarrassed even Batman (a “power beam,” “weakness gas,” boot-heel jumping springs, and so forth).
Batman was based on the Shadow in any number of ways, and then in the early 1960s the Shadow was “Batman-ized.”
So spins the cycle of popular culture.
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