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maxwell-grant · 2 years

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Do you like the shadow's supernatural powers from the radio show and like when they are used in adaptations or would you prefer that they are not used?

Yes, and Yes.

I do feel like I should stress, whenever discussing The Shadow's increasing superhero bent and how they've affected his stories for the past 80 or so years, that The Shadow having the ability to "cloud men's minds" was based on a precedent Gibson had already established of The Shadow having a penchant for hypnotic tricks and blending in the darkness and move stealthily, essentially just condensing a bunch of separate, already-bordering-on-supernatural skillsets of his, into something feasible for short-form radio.

Just as they needed to trim and condense the supporting cast into a single character (Margo), it was a necessary development and Gibson's repeteadly stressed over the years that, whatever else he thought about the radio show, that they made the right call with this in particular, and he did carry this over to the comics and even a couple of the pulps themselves (we're obviously not bound by whatever it is that Gibson thought of or wanted for the character, but I do feel like it's worth prefacing this post by stating upfront that the character's own creator, who went through great lengths to uphold believability for the stories, was fine with The Shadow having at least one superpower. The Shadow was never that realistic to begin with)

In the stories, I had The Shadow frequently filter from sight, or blend with darkness and everything of that sort. I put quite a lot of hypnotic stuff in too because he'd been in Tibet, and hypnotism and magical illusions were my specialties. But I didn't overplay them. Well, they liked the idea of The Shadow begin invisible.

As a matter of fact, that very first script that Bierstadt did we were having a problem - The Shadow was to talk to a man in the death row at Sing Sing. We decided we would have the guards hypnotized and he moved in a dim light, and the man heard a voice talking. Bierstadt did a very good job of delineating that.

Well, these people just decided to take the short way, which was very good radio, to simply say that he clouded people's minds. They'd say, "Shadow, where are you?" "I'm here but you can't see me."

Well, that was wonderful because the people listening over the radio couldn't see him either. And don't forget we had a juvenile audience. It was very good formula. So really the radio was very similar to the stories where I had him use real hypnotism on people, except that mine was modified, whereas they made it a standardized thing - Gibson's panel w/Jack Kirby and Jim Steranko, at the 1975 Comic Art Convention

For the radio show, The Shadow being able to turn invisible by hypnotizing others to not see him was not only an excellent work-around for his pulp skillset, but frankly a brilliant way to bridge the gap for a audio medium where we don't get afforded lengthy moody descriptions of him slithering cooly through the darkness. It's made believable not because we're given in-story reasoning as to how The Shadow can do this, but because we can't see him either, and when he's taunting a hapless or frustrated criminal who wants to see him but can't, we're immediately thrust into the viewpoint of said criminal by default.

Which is the big reason the show succeeds (not always, but usually enough to matter) in pulling off one of the great tricks of his pulp craft, the same trick Sherlock Holmes used: We never get to see The Shadow's point of view, and we never get to see what the inside of his head looks like: it can only be expressed to us via the narrator inferring and interpreting to us, and through what he says to others. There should always be some level of distance between The Shadow and "us", and that's why both Margo as well as criminals panicking, because they are just as unable to see him as we are, work to bridge that gap.

When Gibson introduced the radio invisibility into the pulps, he introduced heavy caveats to it such as him requiring to stay completely immobile for it to work and it being not as practical as him just going around with his costume (that was effectively written as if it were urban camouflage), not so much with the comics where he was writing more juvenile stories that played more with fantasy and supervillains, but the point here is that the invisibility works in the radio show for several reasons. :

It was necessary to begin with: By the demands of radio, if he’s going to need to shed so much of his pulp skillset and resources, this work-around is what allowed the radio Lamont Cranston to still be The Shadow, still do Shadow things and have Shadow stories, even when on a budget and severe time constraints. The invisibility was necessary

It was not just a shortcut for something that he could achieve without superpowers. It was a shortcut, yes, but again, a necessary one, and because The Shadow’s entire character shifted to accomodate for the show, the stories in turn were structured around the invisibility.

It didn’t come without it’s drawbacks or stakes. The Shadow was, if anything, greatly weakened by his return into radio, as his multiple skillsets and resources were traded for a single superpower, that would overwhelm most criminals right until it couldn’t and another solution would be found. He went from a resourceful chessmaster to an invisible detective with further exploitable weaknesses.

It worked WITH the medium to sell The Shadow as a convincing character: Despite the greatly reduced mystique, listeners bought The Shadow as a powerful master of his surroundings due to the combination of his invisibility + commanding voice, and this made him the perfect hero for radio: One that cannot be seen, only heard.

The last one I think is the most important, because that’s one thing about The Shadow I have to stress, as I have before: He doesn’t need to be realistic. He needs to be convincing. He needs to be convincing as the master of the medium he’s in.

Readers accepted anything the pulp Shadow did, because the prose, Gibson’s magic expertise, the characterization and so forth could walk us through, with nothing necessary outside of words, all the steps that The Shadow had to take in order to achieve his superhuman efforts, including the steps where he faltered and slipped and showed us that he was very much a man, just clever and powerful and resourceful enough to pass off as a convincing force of nature. The radio show got it’s readers to accept the invisible avenger because the format made it so we had to take all the characters at their word for what was happening, and we were just as helpless to see him as everyone else was, so even the basic explanation for how he was able to become invisible was enough.

Outside of those mediums, where The Shadow needs to be seen more so than read about or heard, it’s a different story, and that’s how we get the tiresome onslaught of Jedi battles with Shiwan Khan as the character has to play catch-up with how pop culture superheroes are expected to be like.

I’ve done a lot of asking around Shadow fan circles on the subject of whether The Shadow should or shouldn’t exhibit powers at all, and by and large the consensus between most fans seems to be that he shouldn’t have them or, at least, in a much more diminished fashion. And out of all the arguments I’ve combed through on the matter I’m gonna list the ones I do agree with or find the most convincing:

It imbalances the power equation necessary for these stories to function too much if he is supernaturally powered, and his criminal opponents are not, which runs the risk of the stories having no stakes because we know The Shadow can bully around all enemies with superpowers, or you have to keep introducing too many mystically-empowered supervillains to match The Shadow, both of which have run their course to exhaustion in comics.

Him having superpowers or using superpowers make almost EVERYTHING he does significantly less impressive by default. He’s no longer an all-knowing psychological mastermind, he’s a telepath. He doesn’t need to go through the effort of getting to know people, allies and enemies alike, with his impressive interpersonal intelligence and reading skills and agent network, if he’s a psychic who gets everything he needs to know with just a thought. His foresight and moral judgement in case-by-case handling of criminals and those who truly are beyond redemption are no longer that impactful, if he’s got precognitive abilities that let him cheat and know exactly who is it okay to kill. He has no need for sleight-of-hand and in-depth espionage skills comprising an entire backstory, if he can mind magic his way through everything after taking a trip to Tibet.

Aren't additional superpowers kind of overkill? He's already one man with a massive network of agents and allies from all walks of life, with access to millionaire resources to fund them and his crimefighting efforts. He's got gadgets and technology ahead of his time, multiple vehicles on ground and air and sea, multiple lairs (secret and public) full of further resources. He's extensively trained on dozens of disciplines and skillsets, he's a top-notch magician, escape artist, martial artist, linguist, marksman, detective, lock-picker/safe-cracker, pilot, animal trainer, beaver communicator, athlete, chemist, businessman and etc, and his skills with ventriloquism, mesmerism, mastery of disguise, espionage, tracking and trailing, hypnosis, and even contortion / manipulation of his face/body, as well as his knowledge and interpersonal intelligence for dealing with allies and psychological manipulation of enemies, already teeter constantly between borderline-superpower and actual-superpower. He looks way worse off having all of this at his disposal, and not being able to handle criminals (or worse threats) without mind-magic. I swear I’m actually leaving stuff out of this, wait till I finally get that The Shadow Respect Thread put together to see the sheer level of bullshit this guy can do.

He shouldn’t be given superpowers out the wazoo just because Batman cornered the market on non-superpowered crimefighting, The Shadow isn’t interchangeable with Batman to the extent that he needs superpowers to not overlap.

But, I’m not against The Shadow having superpowers or getting new interesting superpowers if that’s something creators feel like doing. The problem here isn’t The Shadow having superpowers: it’s those superpowers coming into play at the expense of all the other things he can and already should be doing, and at the expense of his own characterization as a clever, strategic, cunning crimefighter who’s got so many odd skills (most of which limited and grounded to an extent that makes it they can’t be narrative shortcuts, or render his entire supporting cast worthless) that he might as well be superhuman, even when he is clearly not, when he gets tired, debilitated, beaten, stuck in problems he has to get out of by sheer luck or by the agents.

I feel like that’s the other final bit I’d have to say on it: If he is to have superpowers, they should be slotted into his existing skillset instead of superceding, and made to work just as they would any of his other weird skills. The gold standard for this in my view is Matt Wagner’s Shadow, who combines the pulp skillset as the first and foremost along with the radio hypnosis and some other weird abilities that don’t supercede the first two. The Shadow’s powers should have limits, even when they don’t have explanations.

As weird as he is, he is still a human. He is a man of cunning BEFORE he’s a man of action, that’s what the other heroes are usually doing, that’s what his villains don’t count on. He needs to be someone who thinks, and thinks always, and thinks his way out of a problem before he brings out the guns and theatrics and, yes, even the magic. He needs to be someone who can be taken out by a lucky thug, safety hazards or just plain bad luck.

Victory doesn’t mean anything to someone who can’t lose and has nothing to lose.

#replies tag #the shadow #shadow magazine #shadow comics #shadow radio #walter gibson #matt wagner #the shadow year one #wilfredo torres #pulp heroes

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