Superman and The Shadow part 26 comments and FAQs
Please don’t be bashful; this is your last chance to comment on the entire story.
If there is something about this story that you think should be changed before it is posted to the archive, now is your chance to let me know. Good or bad. I do not mind criticism.
I am fairly certain that a lot of my younger readers have never heard of THE SHADOW.
Let’s start with the FAQs:
A common thread in The Shadow radio series was the disbelief of the common public that The Shadow was anything more than a voice on the radio, while criminals knew different and feared him.
That was because The Shadow started as a just voice on the radio. Starting on July 31, 1930 The Shadow debuted as the mysterious narrator of the Street & Smith radio program titled ’Detective Story Hour.’
The character caught the attention of the listening public and they started asking for copies of ‘That Shadow Detective Magazine’. That inspired Street and Smith to develop The Shadow Magazine as a pulp series.
As a result, The Shadow was one of the first super heroes to appear in American Classical Literature, first on radio and then in pulp novels which debuted on April 1, 1931 when the first Shadow pulp magazine went on sale. By comparison, Doc Savage made his debut in March of 1933. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were still high school students and wouldn’t sell their Superman idea to Detective Comics, later to become DC Comics, until 1938. Who knows, they may have derived some of their inspiration from Doc Savage.
The Shadow has been in most of the major genre, pulp novels, comic books, paperback novels, radio and movies. The only thing lacking was TV and I have not found any referenced to that. As for movies, there were several movies made in the thirties and early forties. In 1994 Alec Baldwin and Penelope Ann Miller starred in ‘The Shadow’ a campy take on the super hero. Penelope Ann Miller happens to be a blond, however in most of the descriptions of Margo that I have read, she was a brunette.
During the run of the radio drama the character of the shadow was played by various actors, among them being the very famous Orson Wells (Of Citizen Kane, The Third Man and War of the World fame.).
Margot Lane, the Shadow’s girlfriend and ‘Girl Friday’ was not in the original pulp novels and was introduced as part of the cast of the radio drama to give Lamont Cranston, The Shadow, a foil that he could explain what happened ‘off screen’. One of the famous women to play that part was the young Agnes Moorehead who later became Endora, Samantha’s mother, on the ’Bewitched’ TV program opposite Elizabeth Montgomery.
The radio series first aired in 1937 and was on the air regularly until December of 1954. In the radio dramas, due to the limitations of the ½ hour format and the decision not to have multi-part stories the ensemble cast was reduced to the two primary characters, The Shadow, Lamont Cranston, and Margot Lane.
In the pulp magazines, The Shadow had a number of assistants, most of whom I have introduced in this story. In the original pulps, Margot Lane did not appear, but after she was introduced in the radio dramas, she started to appear in the pulp publications. I have attempted to portray all of them as accurately as possible. For instance, The Harry Vincent origin story is as true to what appeared in the pulps as I could make it from my memory of having read the story.
Over the course of this story I have taken some small liberties. The actual origin of The Shadow was never actually spelled out. There are sketchy references to his participation in WW1 and his travels in the orient. I have taken the liberty of filling in some of the blanks creating a back story that was something of a parallel to a Superman that we are familiar with (Alt1).
To set the period I have also attempted to include historical references accurate to the time. I am not a historian, by any means, but I have done some study of the period around WW1 and WW2 so the news stories and events of the time are accurate to the day.
Initially, The Shadow was simply a crime fighter, but as the country moved into WW2, as I indicated in the story, he broadened the scope of his activities to include spies and saboteurs.
The last Shadow magazine was published in the summer of 1949. The paperbacks were published between 1963 and 1980. In 2015 a Shadow novel was released. The author used unpublished material produced by the original author and the story was set in 1933. A sequel was released in 2016. These two novels are a Doc Savage crossover.
Last edited by KenJ; 07/29/17 11:43 PM.
