The Shadow knows… when to be a background character?
Creative Staff:
Story: Phil Hester
Art: Ivan Rodriguez
What They Say:
The weed of crime, which once grew madly in the rich soil of the Great Depression, is now withering on the streets of New York. A new factory has sprung up among the shuttered sweatshops, sweeping the city’s most notorious criminals and desperate lowlifes into its employ. When The Shadow’s loyal operative Jericho Druke infiltrates the works, he finds it run by a fascist, technocratic madman bent on fomenting the racial tensions that threaten to shatter the United States. The Shadow and his team must destroy this Factory of Death before its lethal product poisons a nation.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
One of the best known of the pulp heroes, and the one of the trio of books that Dynamite has released together that I know the best, The Shadow is definitely a kind of fun character, if a difficult one. Admittedly, my main exposure is from the Alec Baldwin movie all those years ago, but it hit the right kind of campy fun for me that still makes it a treat to see. I’ve read a smattering of comic stories over the years about him, but not in this century. There’s something fun about working in this time period with this character since he’s such a prototype for so many comic characters to come and since it has a lot more visual material in its original side to work with, the comics always feel a lot more defined and real.
The story here is a bit of an odd duck though because after the first ten pages, the character of The Shadow is largely kept out of sight for a lot of it. We get to see a criminal enterprise that he’s taking down that has some of his associates helping with initially, but it all goes quite wrong along the way when the truck carrying the goods is actually loaded with explosives and The Shadow is blown to smithereens, leaving only a handy piece of his red scarf for Clyde and Cliff to find so that they can verbalize that he’s gone. That leads to six weeks of chaos in the city as the crime wave “continues to swell” as there’s no countering balance with The Shadow out of the picture. The way his associate are handling things only adds to the chaos of it all because they want to do more but can do only so much.
Cliff and Clyde do their best though to continue to push back and we see as Margo does what she can to align herself with the man that killed The Shadow so she can take revenge. It’s all obvious plot points and character pieces, but it does fit within the context of the old pulp material and it’s well illustrated to give it a very fun and dark feeling. The somewhat supernatural side does come into play as well for Margo as they get closer to some of Lamont’s origins and see what’s going on there, but it’s all part of the larger plan by Lamont as he’s essentially faked his death for all these weeks to get to his real goal of the man behind so much misery with the Golden Myst. It’s a kind of outlandish thing for the period and piece, but it fits into the narrative just enough to work. But it also asks that The Shadow ignores six weeks of really bad crime in the city to go after one guy, no matter how powerful he is, and that’s just had to wrap your head around.
In Summary:
In a general sense, I can definitely enjoy The Shadow and what it represents as it does capture that pulp feel well and it has a certain dark flair that’s still appealing, especially for a period piece like this. What hurts this special though is that it ends up being more about his agents. That’s not a bad idea, but I wanted more of Lamont Cranston here than I got, especially since it went for the obvious faking his death route. While it may be “original” for those living in the story itself and can be believed, it’s just too trite and overused in general to be done effectively for new stories because you get it. When done in the original works, it’d be a few pages and he’d be back on track with the shorter storytelling. With the forty-eight page special here, losing him for half of it just made the event drawn out. It’s a fun book overall for the most part though, especially with the artwork capturing the tone well, but the story is hit or miss depending on what you’re really wanting out of it.
Grade: B-
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Dynamite Entertainment
Release Date: December 24th, 2014
MSRP: $7.99