The Shadow Knows
Ah, Howard Chaykin's SHADOW miniseries. How I love thee.
When I first picked up the book in 1986, I hadn't been back in comics long, and the most mature title I'd read at that point was probably something like WONDER WART HOG AND THE NURDS OF NOVEMBER, which was a paperback collection of a bunch of Gilbert Sheldon's WONDER WART HOG strips, which fit in well with my skewed view of the 60s as a kid growing up in the early eighties. It also wasn't particularly mature. I mean, yeah, it had mature subject matter (grafting SGT ROCK parody onto the complexities of Viet Nam, fer instance), but it wasn't a 'mature' work per se. And I'd been a bit of a Shadow fan, by way of my father, who had a few of the old radio shows on tape, and some books with collections of the covers and such. Seductive stuff.
I wasn't ready for Chaykin's take on THE SHADOW. It hit me in the frontal lobes like a semi-truck running over a hamster. Sex. Violence. Nobody liked anybody else. It was about as far away from the happy-go-lucky superhero stuff that I'd been reading that you could get and still be reading mainstream comics. It was a shocking slap in the face following a quick kiss. It was a bucket of icewater thrown on you just after a hot shower. It took no prisoners and laughed at you when you showed the slightest weakness.
Lamont Cranston? Lamont Cranston is a dissolute junkie rapist turned crime king. He isn't the heir to a Colorado silver fortune. He's a wheelchair-ridden telekenetic voyeur boffing his game-show hostess wife (who's crazier than a snake's armipt) by way of mentally hijacking his idiot vat-grown son. He's petty, venal, treacherous, murderous. He is not the Lamont Cranston you thought you knew.
The Lamont Cranston/Shadow you thought you knew is really soldier of fortune Henry Allard, spy turned oriental assassin, sent from the city of Shamballah as an ambassador and dispenser of justice. And by justice, we're not talking incarceration until redemption. Justice comes from the barrel of a gun, baby, or two mini-uzis in the Shadow's Case (though he seems to favor Mach 10s in the later series). Chaykin's shadow is also an elitist, chauvinist manipulator of those surrounding him. His loyal army of assistants? It's fairly clear that they're not there entirely of their own free wil. His two sons (by way of Shamballah) come closest, but even they are there primarily out of a sense of disbelief at the world that their father came from and more than a faint mockery lies there. Allard might be an unreconstructed bastard and pig, but he's also charismatic as any lead to grace the pages of a Chaykin comic.
And make no mistake, this is a goddamned CHAYKIN COMIC. This is a no-holds barred affair. Shotguns to the spyglass of a front door? Check. Septugenarian stuffed into a sparkletts bottle? Check. Mushroom-cloud obsessed ultravixen? Check. Style and panache enough to power a thousand lesser comics? You're goddamn right check. You want a taste of the eighties beyond the cliches of sitcoms? Get your taste right here. I'd say that it's a weakeness of the book, but it isn't. THE SHADOW is unmistakably of the middle eighties, fashion and culturewise. It out-Nagels Nagel. The Shadow is sexier than Simon LeBon (bonus points if you don't google the name to get the reference). Crazy sunglasses and Atomic Vampire style rolled up with Ernest and Julio Gallo jokes, all rendered in Chaykin's immaculate style.
Now, why is this book the template after which all superhero revamps are modelled? You were wondering when I'd get to that, weren't you? Let's take a look at a few things that THE SHADOW does that others have emulated to lesser effect.
Build. We don't see the Shadow until the last page of the first issue. And even then, it's just the dapper Allard. We get a sense of what the Shadow is, seen through the eyes of others. By the time we get to him, we're desperate for even a glimpse of him. The entire second issue is basically flashback, to Allard/Cranston's shiny-new-minted origin, but we only get a panel or two of The Shadow proper. We don't get action until the third issue, and most of that is in disguise. But when he hits the page, he EXPLODES.
Everything You Know Is Wrong. Cranston isn't the Shadow, Allard is. The Shadow's arch enemy is actually Lamont Cranston, under a variety of assumed names. The Shadow himself, yeah, he's an ultrabastard. But he's a compellingly and believably-written ultrabastard. He's on the edge of being un-sympathetic, and empathy is a long ways away. He doesn't love and cherish the world that he's protecting. He's largely mocking of it, superior in every way, which makes it easy for him to do what he does, whether that's mowing down mooks or blatantly manipulating his inner circle with his ability to Cloud Men's (and Women's) Minds.
Maturity. This is where most folks fall short, but Chaykin shines here. He's written a comicbook for adults, thinking out how the situation would really play out in the modern world, and not simply changing fashions or giving things a new look. Harry Vincent is an aging Lothario, performing parlor tricks under his old boss' assumed identity. Cranston is a reclusive and insane billionaire with a psychotic trophy wife. Vincent's daugther is a burned out FBI agent who's refused field assignment after field assignment and allows herself to be swayed by the Shadow, even though she outright loathes him for his stuck-in-the-thirties outlook. This is not an *easy* book to read. It'll make you squirm. It's respectful of the source material, but not reverent by any stretch. It is a nearly perfect reimagining of the source material into the time which it is set.
But it ain't for the kids.
Reading it and skipping over the period references, you'd swear it came out this year. Maybe last. Maybe. It has not lost any of its bite or become dulled in the slightest. Like a finely made knife, lovingly preserved for twenty years, THE SHADOW can still cut and make you bleed, even to this day.