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maxwell-grant · 1 year

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Sorry, I see you already answered that question in 2021, found that post.

My new question is: what is “the shadow”?

(Art by Dan Schkade)

“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow Knows…” The maxim that the weed of crime bears bitter fruit, intoned at the start of every program, was biblical in its sternness. The Shadow was an Old Testament avenger, a ruthless slayer of the wicked, very befitting the Depression decade of his greatest strength. The Shadow was both the force for good and lurker in the darkness. - The Shadow Scrapbook

The Shadow, also known as The Master of Darkness, The Dark Avenger, The Master of Men's Minds, Weird Creature of the Night, Identity Theft Georg, That Guy Who Lives in Lamont Cranston's House, "Shads" and other many names, is a mysterious figure who fights evil by turning it against itself. He is a former globetrotting aviator-spy-soldier (revealed to be named Kent Allard, 7 years into the character's run) turned crimefighting paladin who fights to protect and uplift the innocent and bring justice to victims of strife and calamity, and he does so with the black-clad design, domineering charisma, sinister cackle, Machievellian theatrics and ruthless efficiency of a villain.

In action, The Shadow loomed as a cloaked figure, materializing from out of the night, rescuing helpless victims and striking terror into the hearts of evildoers. However, he reserved such theatrics for a logical climax. Between times, The Shadow proved himself a master of deduction as well as disguise.

While his major missions were to stamp out mobs or smash spy rings, he often tabled such routines in order to find a missing heir, uncover buried treasure, banish a ghost from a haunted house or oust a dictator from a mythical republic. The Shadow was such an incredible character in his own right that almost anything he encountered was accepted by his ardent followers. - Walter Gibson

The Shadow began life as the spooky narrator of publisher Street & Smith's radio program, whose sibilant, mocking personality and sinister cackle were dramatically more interesting than any of the programs he was narrating, and so when listeners started asking Street & Smith for a Shadow Magazine that did not exist, they had to make one of their own. To that end, they recruited a young magician turned newspaper writer and former associate of Houdini's fraud-busting network, Walter Gibson, to write the adventures. Gibson was extremely acquainted with the ins and outs of illusionism and sleight-of-hand and worked personally with many of the greatest magicians at the time, and would extensively use said knowledge in crafting The Shadow's character and adventures.

And so The Shadow Magazine began, reviving the "hero pulp" format that had died out in the pre-WW1 dime novels and redefining the mold of crimefighting "pulp heroes" from that decade onwards, as well as many superheroes from that time period inspired by him and his successors. He is currently more famous for being plagiarized by the chief inspiration for a certain guy who runs around with bat ears and for his general role as a highly influential forerunner and influence in forms of storytelling still extensively used today.

On the taxonomical chart of Western comics he’s a common ancestor for a sizeable chunk of the marketplace. Every street vigilante, every masked crime-fighter, every necessary monster: he’s in the DNA of them all. A living fossil, a coelacanth or goblin-shark for the comics world, swimming in waters of ice and ink - Si Spurrier

The Shadow maintained a fluctuating radio career over the 1930s to go along with his highly successful magazine, and he'd eventually reach newfounds heights of stardom from 1937 onwards thanks to the debut of a new radio show, initially starring Orson Welles in the titular role. Said radio show would become an audience hit well into the 1940s and would introduce new fixtures to the character such as friend-and-companion Margo Lane and an invisibility superpower, which were eventually integrated since into the comics and pulps and other media. You can still easily find many of the character's radio adventures online as well as his exploits in comics and pulps (harder to find now, but still possible if you know where to look). I'll pass along my personal recommendations here.

(Art from Matt Wagner's The Curse of Blackbeard Skull, in The Shadow #100)

In the taxonomical history of American crimefighters he sits in between the hardboiled detectives of the 1920s and the 1940s superheroes, and although the 1930s pulp heroes were in part defined largely by imitating him, he is no traditional square-jawed do-gooder: he is a tall, gaunt, cadaverous wraith with the mask of a Western bandit and a vampire's cloak and the clothes of 19th-century cartoons of saboteurs and anarchist bombers. The barest glimpse of the man beneath is that of a judgemental patrician's aquiline nose and intense, sharp eyes, like icepicks probing the back of your skull. He makes a point to show every now and then how easily he can reshape that face to suit his needs, and make it your own, even doing so in front of you to make a point.

He is Dracula meets King Arthur, Sherlockian brainpower and Lupin trickery joined forces, centerpiece to urban thrillers turned into fairytales as The Big Bad Wolf switches sides to save us. Though his setting looks the part, The Shadow is no gritty film noir creature: he is what happens when the cutthroat gangsters and invincible spymasters and predatory businessmen behind it all meet the actual scariest guy around: Death itself, as the ultimate master and servant joined in one, who found a higher calling fighting for us instead, breaking and bending and controlling the rules and tipping them ever so slightly in the favor of those who are usually in no position to fight back.

(Art by Giovanni Timpano, for The Shadow #25)

As we discussed The Shadow, I suggested an opening scene with a cloaked figure emerging from a night fog to prevent a desperate young man from taking a suicide plunge from a high bridge. Thus befriended, the young man would swear loyalty to his rescuer and thereby become involved in exciting adventures with otherp persons who had been aided by the same benefactor, all being united in a common cause against crime. - Walter Gibson

That is where the Agents come in. As The Shadow is a distant living puzzlebox, we are very rarely privy to his thoughts and feelings, he glides through many stories scarcely-seen until he needs to be, and so we frequently experience things from the viewpoint of proxies, whether they are agents or characters swept into intrigue that only The Shadow can save them from. The first Shadow story opens up with a broke and depressed young man named Harry Vincent, ruined by the Great Depression reality of the time and trying to commit suicide, who is saved from it by The Shadow, and upon accepting a new purpose in life as his agent, grows into a dependable and strong ally, friend and even leader to people once like him over the course of the following adventures.

Across his history The Shadow has had agents and allies among all walks of life: redeemed/pretend criminals who use their reputations to provide The Shadow with inside knowledge, war vets, police officers, prison reformists, troublemaking journalists, government agents, politicians, criminologists, psychologists, high society chameleons, streetwise cabbies, janitors, the homeless, even crooks who once worked for those that The Shadow opposed, with some stories dedicated entirely to The Shadow playing guardian angel or working to provide second chances to those who've turned to crime. Community leaders with opposing viewpoints, rebel spies, prostitutes, historical figures such as Amelia Earhart and Nikola Tesla, robots, political activists and freedom fighters, doctors, birds, boxers, actors, magicians, beavers, and a list too big to get into here. There was a crimefighting dog at some point also and he was a very good boy.

Said list also includes the guy most people initially assume is his secret identity, a wealthy globetrotting man-about-town named Lamont Cranston. The first on-screen meeting between The Shadow and his secret identity Lamont Cranston consisted of The Shadow showing up in the dark at Cranston's bedside, wearing his face and telling him in pristine detail how much he's usurped Cranston's life, and effectively blackmailing him into leaving town so he can continue being Cranston uninterrupted. It is considerably less known, however, that eventually Cranston and The Shadow became weird friends following this ordeal and worked together several times, with Cranston turning out to be a pretty entertaining hero in his own right even besides his designated purpose of being rich and useless, even he was not immune to The Shadow's ability to enact positive change on his allies. Which is one note I'll end this post on: that The Shadow and his surroundings can be a lot more layered than given credit for.

I make the argument again and again that The Shadow is an intriguing character with much more to him than simply the gun violence and spooky laughter and murderousness that he's frequently reduced to, even if he isn't quite consistently so (as expected of one who's been around in virtually every medium for over 90 years). He can be compassionate, thoughtful, cautious and consequence-minded in his approach to effectively combat crime and protect others, ridiculous, eccentric, flawed in ways big and small and humanizing, for better or worse depending on who's writing him. He is a versatile shapeshifter as well as an unassailable force of personality to throw into any gathering, any circumstance, any narrative, and remain unique.

(Art by Michael Kaluta, from Hell's Heat Wave)

With those other “masked avenger” pulp types, their masked identities are an act, at least in part. Underneath the hat and mask they are regular guys with relatable motivations. With the Shadow, the guy in the hat and scarf IS the real guy, and his motivations and feelings are largely kept from us.

When we see him in his “civilian” identity, THAT is an act. So there’s a kind of brutal simplicity to his dialogue.

He is what he appears to be, and says exactly what he means. - Chris Roberson

And that's about it as a summary. I have a masterpost pinned at the top because, evidently, I have a lot more to say about the character and more I can't cover here. If you want, feel free to shoot me any additional questions and let me work out my fixation on the weird crime spooky murder man. I have to go off about him at least once a month or else I start eating my furniture so, help me out here.

#replies tag #the shadow #the shadow magazine #shadow comics #shadow radio #lamont cranston #kent allard #pulp fiction #pulp heroes

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maxwell-grant · 1 year

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Has anyone asked what do you think Kent Allard/The Shadow was like as a child or a teenager? What kind of personality (courteous or crude, grandiose or grounded?) did he had, and how did carry over to his latter life?

Nobody as of yet, because this is the kind of thing that tends to be viewed as complete hardline sacrilege by Shadow fans, and for some fairly self-explanatory reasons it's gone completely unexplored in any official material for about 90 years now (besides like one scrap of dialogue in a deleted scene from the 1994 movie). Nobody's yet pulled that trigger and botched a retelling of a childhood for The Shadow, and I don't think anyone's looking to be the first.

Naturally, you can imagine that I do practice heresy on the regular and have spent a lot of time thinking and crafting ideas for that part of the character's life, most of which I'd like to keep to myself for now, although whether I'd even actually use them if I could, is another thing entirely. Not that I need to, but I do like to have some basis for whenever I go into headcanon territory, so we're gonna get into those:

Fittingly, as far as I can tell, the only two bits of concrete information we've ever received in the pulps were related to Lamont Cranston: one bit in House of Shadows that mentions Cranston's fortune was inherited, and the famous "Lamont Cranston Talks To Himself" scene in The Shadow Laughs where The Shadow mentions that he knows Cranston's family history better than he himself. We can extract that Cranston at minimum has a family history of fortune and privilege, and presume he has still living relatives.

Some people call me The Shadow. That is but one identity. I have other personalities that I assume, as easily as I don my black cloak and hat. One of my personalities is that of Lamont Cranston. In the past, I have used it while you were away. At present, I choose to use it now.

You have some knowledge of Lamont Cranston's family history. I doubt that you could recall the maiden names of both his grandmothers. I know them. - The Shadow Laughs

The question of what young Kent Allard would be like largely hinges on just how gradual was the shaping of his personality, or whether he was just on some level always Like That, and it points both ways. I've talked a lot about how The Shadow's backstory lacks that one defining moment that's supposed to provide a clear separation between who he was then and who he is now, and there really isn't one thing that makes or breaks The Shadow, so much as a series of events and processes that led him across the years. It's a sandbox backstory.

But let's look at some things that could be used to inform a reading of what Kent Allard might have been like in those formative years

Way before he was The Shadow proper, he was already redefining his presentation depending on his surroundings. As Gibson once remarked on the character, "Always, his traits and purposes were defined through the observations and reactions of persons with whom he came in contact". Kent Allard the famed war hero was one name, but he went by others like Clifford Gage the American explorer who would first meet Lamont Cranston amidst his journeys to India and Tibet. Blanton the Frenchman who would conduct missions in Monte Carlo with a man who would later call himself Cliff Marsland. Whoever he went by in his time within the deep court of Tsarist Russia, and his later claims to have names given to him across the world and be able to be recognized no matter what tribe or city he goes into, and so on.

(Relevant to the above: The Dark Eagle was a name given to him by his enemies, and it's unclear how much was it a codename or a separate identity, since certain characters connected The Dark Eagle to The Shadow, but never to Kent Allard, and of course it's because Allard was a soft retcon, but still. He never actually called himself The Shadow in the first book either, it was a name first uttered by Harry Vincent that Claude Fellows and the story's gangsters coincidentally also picked for him, he'd only embraced it later).

He was doing Shadow things decades before actually being The Shadow, like donning black-garbed disguises to rescue Allied prisoners from German camps, engaging in hard-fought battles under the cover of darkness, throwing himself into dangerous situations to protect others and/or for the thrill of it, and his backstory reads a lot like The Shadow was something in the blueprints of his life for a while, whether he knew it or not.

EXTREMELY precocious, at minimum, and he clearly didn't pick up his skillset from standard military training. Gibson placed the character's birth around 1892, which means he was doing all of that work in Russia, befriending the Czar and embedding himself into a secret spy order meant "only for the most trusted members of the regime" even while known to be the agent of another government, barely into his twenties and barely old enough to enlist at all (assuming he didn't lie about his age), to say nothing of all the other legendary things he'd go on to accomplish before settling in America. He's either just that supernaturally good at learning on the fly, or he clearly had some kind of background learning and training in some of these things before he enlisted, which begs the question of who would even teach him, but the word precocious has been attached to Kent Allard's early backstory quite a few times.

He takes to aristocratic characters with ease. Lamont was said to be his preferred or even outright "favorite" of disguises, and he has several other personalities that are basically just Lamont with a different name (some take this as proof that he had to have been raised as an aristocrat, but I'd argue it points to the opposite).

He likes to dwell within dark, silent places, not just to get work done. He feels at home within it. This isn't just a matter of efficiency and such, Gibson describes quite frequently that The Shadow enjoys dwelling in the kinds of dark, silent, gloomy locations he most blends in. The Sanctum itself is almost comparable to a sensory-deprivation room and it's where he goes to do his best thinking. Nothing else ever merits this kind of description of him, of anything feeling "like home". "To The Shadow, stealth was an instinctive possession. When garbed in his accustomed attire of black, he became a part of the night itself". "Surrounded by the blackness which to him was home." - The Shadow's Shadow "Gloom enclosed about the visitors, for the building blocked the rays of the sun. There was something somber about the atmosphere that chilled Eric Delka. The Shadow did not feel the same sensation. Instead, the smile reappeared upon his lips. This was an atmosphere of mystery that carried the touch of darkness. Such elements were to The Shadow's liking" - Castle of Doom

There's also the Street & Smith "Clews": This was part of a campaign ad released before The Living Shadow to help promote it, as listeners of S&S's radio program were supposed to be on the lookout for clues that The Shadow would randomly state in regards to who he was or what he looked like, you can read them in full here along with ensuing theories about The Shadow's early life. Some of these don't seem to have carried over much to the pulps proper and how Gibson presents him, but as a whole they were never "discontinued" either. Most of these are fairly evident in the pulps as is, but there are others that either come up very rarely or simply did not come back at all:

He has a cobra tattoo on his chest. He plainly does not have this in the pulps on the few occasions his torso was exposed.

He says he has "artistic hands" and plays cards with them.

He is blond and dyes his hair to hide "my Nordic forbears"

"Like a bird, I take to the air when seeking out a lair" I think this carried over to him becoming an aviator but "seeking out a lair" is a weird phrasing.

He is a fastidious dresser, citing Beau Brummel in tastes, who's known for having defined the modern image of the dandy. He also has slim feet ("8 triple A, the salesmen say")

He attained a Bachelor of the Arts degree at the age of twenty and is currently forty. This was way before Gibson assigned him a birthdate decades later, but it matches with the 1892 date provided.

He practiced rowing in college. The clues describe him as tall ("Low doorways please me not"), athletic and slim enough to squeeze through prison bars, which matches his pulp body type (he'd perform a far more impossible feat of contortion in one story much later). The article above uses this clue to argue pretty convincigly that The Shadow would have gone to Princeton.

Now, these are in a very ambiguous position because they're attached to a version of the character right in the middle of transition from spooky radio narrator to pulp crimefighter, and it's unclear how much if at all Gibson even used them. But they exist, and you could make them out to be facts about Allard's life, or Cranston's life, or things The Shadow made up based on former identities. Point being, it's one thing we can use to piece together things about his first 20-or-so years.

"I'm not sure about Cranston," he said seriously. "The man is famous in a way. Too famous!"

"Famous for what?"

"For his adventures all over the world. He has money, yes, which he is supposed to have inherited. But the records on the subject are very meager.

"I think that Cranston may be an adventurer in more ways than one." - House of Shadows

Cranston's upbringing should also be relevant here, because what little we do can already be a bit telling: Lamont Cranston was raised in a wealthy Jersey mansion and supposedly inherited his fortune from a family with a certain amount of history, but he's become famous for spending all of his time globetrotting and staying everywhere but home, dodging responsabilities to go shoot elephants or climb mountains in the Himalayas with his trademark leisurely, detached demeanor, barely in touch with his own family or tax records. A man who has "many friends, but none who know him well". Cranston did most of the work dissappearing from his own life and country, and half of why he and Allard have that set-up is because of that, and because Cranston quickly and even happily agrees to it. The real Lamont Cranston is completely fine with another guy doing being Lamont Cranston for him.

And a final addendum: For the most part I'm ignoring what the 1994 movie and it's different takes in comics and novelization did, but the novelization did provide a little bit of background for the Cranston family that we could go with in the absence of anything else:

Cranston was everything Allard wasn’t: privileged, pampered, opportunistic.

The Cranston fortune had been made in railroads and manufacturing, among other things, and had survived Black Friday by dint of the late Theodore Cranston’s uncanny knack for the market. Cranston was one of few New Yorkers who hadn’t sold his property to a developer because of the servant problem, or the escalating costs of maintaining fifty rooms in the heart of a thriving city

Family heirlooms handed by several generations of Cranstons. The house had the look and feel of permanence, as if the Cranstons were only the latest in a long and continuing line of distinguished occupants.

Now, some have said that Allard must have been raised an aristocrat, which makes sense but, The Shadow's aristocrat leanings are always in the form of him playing a character, and characters he's quite fond of but are always a mask he's putting on. And if Allard is meant to be different from Cranston (otherwise he's redundant as an identity), whether he's a world-renowned hero or a faceless, injured nobody, it stands to reason that he should have a fairly different upbringing than Cranston's. As The Shadow or whatever else, he relates to his own life in a completely different sense, completely buried in his duty to justice and the responsability he takes to others within it, protecting everyone while Cranston barely cares to protect himself (notably, when he does do it in The Hydra and has to kill a man with an elephant gun, he almost immediately starts feeling bad over his game hunting sports compared to what The Shadow's been doing).

So let's gather up some of our homework so far: We know Lamont Cranston has a family history from which inherited his fortune, that he was born into privilege and went on to live apathetically numbed by it. We know Kent Allard is not Lamont Cranston. We know he's had a proclivity for disguises and reshaping his identity long before he became The Shadow proper, and that just as now, most of his personas are either based on existing people or named by his enemies. We know he was doing quite a lot of things that pointed to his becoming The Shadow down the line, but that there was clearly a long process to get there and there's no clear moment where he truly becomes The Shadow, not even when he buries Kent Allard in that Guatemala plain crash.

We know he was highly precocious, enlisting and getting drafted into performing extraordinarily dangerous spy work from a very young age, and that he's apparently always had a strong sense of duty towards others, this being part of why he rejected becoming a mercenary after the war (although he still considered it). We know he likes impersonating and performing wealthy characters and he's mastered upper-class mannerisms so thoroughly to the point he can seamlessly blend in and make aristocrats, Russian or American or otherwise, mistake or accept him for one of their own. We know he likes to stay and plan and rest within dark, silent places others would find eerie or uncomfortable to stay in, and that he feels at home the most within total darkness.

And from those early contest clues, he claims to have been a rowing athlete at college and he claims to be fastidious and well-dressed, and combined with the above this points to him having either been raised in strict, aristocratic fashion, or precisely the opposite and it being something he had to learn and master just as he learned and mastered countless other skills of disguise and mimicry, or somewhere in between. He claims to have attained a Bachelor of Arts degree fairly young as well, and describes having "artistic hands". And he claims to be naturally blond and to have a cobra tattoo on his chest.

Again, I'm not getting into my headcanons for his family life and other things I'd keep to myself, but still, what do I think young Kent Allard's personality was like? Well, to keep it short, I'll think of a few things.

I think those might have been the closest years he ever had to something resembling normalcy, and it wasn't meant to last so, maybe they should be good ones, no?

I think he was raised decently, and I don't think he was raised rich with money, not during his earlier years. Other things, most definitely, but I think he had to learn a lot about how to deal with money, and this is part of why he's ultimately able to better handle Cranston's money as well as never need it and have his own undisclosed personal fortune.

I think he had to learn a lot about how to deal with people, and fighting, and mimicry, and interpersonal relationships, and aviation, and any other number of skills and things that he'd be highly proficient at barely entering adulthood and that he'd have to rely and develop so much to save his life again and again. He is restless, genial, unsuited for settling down and staying still, always thinking and planning and researching, and he most likely was always like this one way or another.

I like to think of him as having been raised mostly by his mother for several reasons, one of which being a point of contrast with Cranston's father, and maybe there were other hands on deck trying to steer his development for better or worse, but it was definitely her first and foremost. I think it was a different upbringing than you'd expect someone like him to have, maybe one that separated him of some opportunities but definitely prepared him more for those he'd give to others. I will put my foot down on just one idea, and it's the idea that he lost his parents or is driven by the loss of them: that's someone else's thing, it's never been a factor in his driving motivations and it doesn't need to be.

He grew up in an imperialistic America adapting to labor confrontations and conflicts posed by the Industrial Revolution, and I think he was no stranger to evil or injustice from an early age, and that burying Kent Allard was a decision made with a long history and experience showing him it had to be done, but that he was still very green around the gills before the war, more prepared than most but still initially out of his depth in the face of such callous, monstrous, pointless cruelty. He most certainly did not grow up knowing he'd be The Shadow, but I think he grew up knowing he'd have to be something, because being nothing, and thus doing nothing, was not an option. Maybe that was an option for the wealthy young man about town who lived elsewhere with a different name, but not for Kent Allard.

I think he had more of a sense of humor than he lets show nowadays, that the laugh was just always the language he'd prefer to use the most, same as is now. I think he had a fondness for stagecraft and arts, maybe was raised close to it, and that so much of his extensive repertoire of skills and disguises started there, and that maybe he still somewhat treasures that Bachelor of Arts degree, even if the man who worked to get it, to get into a prestigious college and had friends and a winning team and things to call his own, can't really exist anymore.

But he was there once.

I think he had things he loved very much and would have laid down his life to protect, whether they were still around for his adulthood or not. Good parent or parents, good friends, a good home, good experiences, good dreams. Maybe not all at once, but certainly they were there, and they mattered. They had to, he had to have had something, because I don't think there was ever a time where Kent Allard never had any enemies or people trying to hurt him one way or another.

"put The Shadow anywhere, in any locale, among friends or associates, even in a place of absolute security, and almost immediately crime, menace or mystery would begin to swirl about him, either threatening him personally or gathering him in its vortex to carry him off to fields where antagonists awaited."

We can never know the full extent of it, but however his life was like from childhood to adolescence, and whatever happened to him to lead him to mature so fast and ultimately enlist so early with such impressive and dangerous skills, I think Kent Allard had good times.

Or maybe I just want him to have had good times once, before what became of his life, before the war swallowed him and his own choices made all he was before an irrelevant trivia of weakness he can never admit to because it undermines the very foundation of The Shadow as an unknowable force of nature and mystery, in-universe and outside of it, and so it needs to be buried and wiped and erased.

But before the war and the spy and soldier work and the travels and the dark missions and the faked deaths and the arrival of The Master of Darkness to be all that he was, is or would be, there had to be a time where he knew something else besides those things. There had to be a time where The Shadow knew something besides being The Shadow. Because becoming The Shadow was, above all else, his choice. That which he stated the one and only time he made it a point to unmask and give us the truth about himself:

"I chose that mission."

You must treat the character as a discovery,rather than your own creation. Treat him, not just seriously, but profoundly.

Picture him as real and beyond you, in mind as well as prowess.

Feel that however much youhave learned about him, you can never uncover all.. - A Million Words a Year for TenStraight Years, by Walter Gibson (Writer’s Digest,March 1941) )

#replies tag #pulp heroes #the shadow #pulp fiction #shadow comics #shadow pulps #the shadow magazine #kent allard #lamont cranston

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