After receiving - and reading - the long awaited 1st issue of the new Shadow series from Dynamite comics, I am again disappointed in the portrayal of Walter Gibson's creation. The comic book has a cover price of $3.99, and contains 36 pages counting front and back cover. There is 22 pages of Shadow story, plus the cover for a total of 23 pages, then 13 pages of advertisements for Dynamite's other comics. In fact, the center pages are devoted to a two-page advertisement for Dynamite's Prophesy. Again, the buyer should feel cheated that this wasn't a two-page spread for The Shadow instead! Seems to me the buyer is paying for their advertisements, and getting very little story for the price. The artwork is good, and The Shadow looks okay, but Lamont Cranston and Margo Lane do not capture the familiar images from the pulps. Nor does the dialog. Yes, The Shadow blurts "The Weed of Crime", etc., but his foolish dialog while shooting crooks is not like the character, but belongs to the modern sensibilities I suppose. Margo Lane seems to merely be a sexual companion for Lamont Cranston. Except for the costume and name, this could have been a modern comic book set in the 1930s or '40s. The cover of my copy is the one with bats in the background. I suppose to connect the image to Batman. My personal opinion? Forget this version of The Shadow. At the price, we deserve much more than this.
Tom
22-24 pages of story is about standard for most comics these days. The writer admitted to reading only the DC Shadow comics by O'Neil & Kaluta and Howard Chaykin as research, and viewed in that light, you can see a lot of Chaykin's Shadow transposed to the 1930s setting.
ReplyDeleteAgreed that it's not ideally what we'd want in Shadow comic adaptation. One of the problems is they'll always have to graft some of the radio Shadow elements onto Gibson's version, since the radio version is what more people are familiar with.
That said, it's its own version of the character, and works well enough in its own context. Could have been a lot worse, in my opinion, and I was prepared to be pretty picky about it. We have to remember that most of the consumers purchasing this have never read any of the pulp novels.
If you check that cover carefully, I think you'll see those are birds (ravens, maybe) not bats.
Addendum - Not only have most of the consumers purchasing this not read a single one of Gibson's novels, but neither has the writer, Garth Ennis. He's admitted to being most heavily influenced by Howard Chaykin's Shadow update from the 1980s, and Howard Chaykin also admitted to never reading any of the novels!
ReplyDeleteAlas, it is not an easy thing to be a pulp purist.
PS -- If you hated Dynamite's version of The Shadow, you're really going to hate their version of The Spider...
ReplyDeleteHi Dennis, yes I have the first issue of The Spider, and you're right, I hate it. Dennis Lynds told me that he never read The Shadow, or if he did, very few of them. He had Gibson's notes when he wrote the Belmont Shadow and said he tried to stay with them to a degree. But what he remembered most about The Shadow came from the radio, and this was the tone he took with the Belmont series. Plus, the James Bond, U.N.C.L.E. graze at that time was strong in the paperback market, and the publisher wanted the stories bent in that direction. To be honest, I came out of the radio era, and the Belmont series was my introduction to prose Shadow. I discovered the pulp Shadow much later. Comic books have really had a hard time capturing the pulp characters. They've come close with The Shadow a few times, but I've never really been satisfied with Doc Savage, or any of the others in comic book format.
ReplyDeleteWell, your opinion is your opinion, and that's fine. I guess I am willing to cut these things a little more leeway these days in light of such things as DC's First Wave (terrible, IMO) which are still fresh in my mind, and movies such as The Dark Knight and The Avengers, which are hugely successful and highly rated by most people, but which I find to bear very little resemblance to the comic books on which they're supposedly based. The fact that the Shadow hasn't really had an ongoing presence in pop culture since the end of the 1940s means that each new iteration gets a little further away from the source material. I originally had mixed feelings about The Shadow movie with Alec Baldwin (still do), but must must admit that in light of recent movie adaptations it begins to look better and better. DE's Spider is much more along the lines of their updating of the Green Hornet (as opposed to Green Hornet: Year One, which I loved, even if it wasn't 100% accurate to the original radio show).
ReplyDeletePS - For me, my introduction to the Shadow was radio show first, then the 1970s DC comic book, then the Pyramid/Jove paperback reprints with Steranko covers. Started reading The Avenger and Doc Savage paperback reprints around the same time, and to this day those paperback covers still represent my idealized images of those characters.
ReplyDeleteI know that things can be done better some times. Zorro is a good example. Plus, I think the 1970s DC Shadow was excellent. Maybe the b&w Doc Savage magazine, but I've been disappointed in most other ventures. I have some of the 1940s Shadow and Doc Savage comics, as well as other pulp to comic books back then, but felt the comic books never did well with the characters. The Shadow comic strips were reprinted in comic book format a couple decades ago, and these were pretty good (b&w stripes). Howard Wright reprinted most (maybe all) of the Doc Savage comics from the 1940s in THE BRONZE GAZETTE, so those are available if you haven't read them. Yeah, I still watch the Baldwin Shadow movie every so often. Same with the Doc Savage movie. So much more could have been done with both, but I still like them. At least Baldwin's Shadow is better than those late 1940s comedy Shadows. The serial was okay. My problem with the current media, whether comic books, TV, or movies, they feel the material has to be changed for the modern generation. Why? The stories entertained the masses for twenty years in the pulps, and were so popular they were brought back in the 1960s paperbacks. Now, suddenly, they need to be changed to reach a modern audience? Has the audience really changed that much, that they can't enjoy the originals?
ReplyDeleteNo, I think it's more about the overweening attitude of film people. There's no love for the source material there, it's just a job. Furthermore, there seems to be almost a sneering at the idea of just doing as faithful a translation as possible (there are rare exceptions) that is generally excused by Joe Average under the blanket excuse of "well, it wouldn't work for film, it's a different medium". The movie people seem to have the know-it-all approach of "trust us, we'll take your crummy little idea and turn it into something awesome".
ReplyDeleteAs far as the pulp-to-comics adaptations go, there's really a feeling of this stuff is so old that most of the audience really doesn't know or care about the original -- and that goes for the writer as well. Not that they're deliberately trying to change stuff, it's more like, as a writer, if I don't really know the character, the readers probably don't either, so it's all good, my conception of what this thing is is just as valid as anyone else's. The guys they hire just aren't that "into it" to bother doing research for the job because they figure it doesn't matter to most of their audience, and for the most part, they're right.
Still, compared to DC's recent Doc Savage and Avenger attempts, The Shadow looks like a work of genius.
ReplyDeleteI knew that The Spider was updated and using the movie serial as the basis for the look of the character, and it's sort of understandable to me. I mean, if you're publishing BOTH The Shadow and The Spider, you've got distinguish the two as much as possible. One stays in the 1930s while the other inhabits a slightly-alternate present. I always kind of liked The Spider serials, even if just like The Shadow serial they were watered-down versions of the pulps, so I think the look is a good one. You have to admit that except for a half-dozen issues, Popular was afraid to actually show The Spider as described in the novels on their covers, opting for as close an imitation of The Shadow as possible.
There's another way to look at it. If the original character - created by someone else - does not fit today's ideals, or if the publisher/writer/artist, etc. doesn't want to do their homework on the original character, why destroy something the rest of us love? Why not create your own character, say The Creep, The Caped Killer, The Whatever, and do what ever you want with him/her. They don't have to take an existing character and put robot heads on them, or have them take drugs in order to kill the bad guys, or hear voices in their heads, or the many other changes I've seen with the updated pulp heroes in comic books. :-)
ReplyDeleteNot really sure. Could be something to do with human psychology, word association, branding, synergy, whatever. All I know is that people want to revive/remake things, then change them.
ReplyDeleteThere are a few examples of the "do your own thing, but inspired by" type that jump to mind like Indiana Jones, Rocketeer, or Sky Captain but far outweighed by the "we just want to exploit the name recognition" thing.