In our continuing adventures, we must be wary my travelers for there are traps abound. Some are pits, with sharpened stakes at the bottom and carefully placed leaves on top. Some are, if you can believe it, even more subtly destructive. I recently found myself ensnared in the most social of tripwires, the conversation.

But I was ready for this one, oh yes. Though traditionally traps are to be escaped from, or else are to lure others into, there are some are so well oiled and cleverly wrought that one cannot help but throw oneself in to their snapping jaws. I kept that in mind as I emerged from the Gentleman’s basement, reeking of delinquent substances, knowing that as a host of the Engagement, he was surely lying in wait at the top of the stairs to drown all that crossed in a rich sauce of a discussion. Having been a party to similar discussions with similar Gentlemen at similar Engagements prior, I knew that such an interaction would surely take the better part of an hour and would be about oh just whatever was on hand.

I headed him off! Sidestepping rolling inquiries I plunged in to the thick.

“Say now, I noticed you’ve archived quite a few books and radio shows down there. Was that, by any chance… The Shadow?”

The Gentleman’s softly nodding chin snapped to attention. His toes could practically be heard to flex. The world was struck with a distinct sepia tone, an unseen organ played a stilted chord. We were well in business. Leaning in conspiratorially, he slipped a message out from under his mustache.

“Why yes, I wasn’t aware you were a fan. Though you know of course… tricky thing… The Shadow is not Lamont Cranston!”

Envision the raised eyebrows! Imagine the templed fingertips! Picture the stroking of chins! Yes, when you place any two fans of pulp mystery in the same room and set them off, we are just fucking unbearable.

He had made a study of the original paperback serial pulp novels, and spoke disparagingly of all the re-imaginings which had come thereafter. Bastardizations, he named them. Saying at length that they had sacrificed the grim gritty spirit of the original.

“The Shadow, who aids the forces of Law and Order, is in reality Lamont Cranston, wealthy young man about town. Years ago in the Orient, Cranston learned a strange and mysterious secret: the hypnotic power to cloud men’s minds so they cannot see him. Cranston’s friend and companion, the lovely Margo Lane, is the only person who knows to whom the voice of The Shadow belongs.”

This intro to the radio drama describes the basic lasting understanding of the character which has prevailed throughout the years. A dark, sinister figure whose vaguely Asian psychic powers enable him to wreak ruthless justice upon the criminal element. Yet that description applies to but a scant few of the forms this story has taken.

The Shadow Magazine, the original pulp novel started on april 1^st 1931 by Walter B. Gibson, had no trace of these supernatural aspects. A distinction that the Gentleman was quick to point out through his bristling scowl.

“He never had the power to ‘cloud men’s minds,’ or any of that nonsense. The Shadow had this uncanny ability to avoid notice and blend in with the darkness. He was a master of stealth and could infiltrate just about any location while avoiding detection. And an expert marksman, he had these two big 45’s that he carried, and wasn’t shy about using. As the novels went on, and I believe there were about 325 published of which Gibson wrote 282, it became clear that Lamont Cranston was an entirely different person! The identity of Cranston was one that The Shadow would assume while the real Lamont was off on adventures of his own in some distant lands. And Margo Lane, she wasn’t brought in to the stories for some time. Only late in the novels, after the radio show started, did she make an appearance. But that radio show… they shoved her in right from the beginning as if she was some main love interest.”

Gibson wrote the bi-monthly novels under the pen name of Maxwell Grant, and so great was the demand he was said to write “10,000 words per day” in order to produce the 24 novels per year. These novels featured a Shadow who’s true name was Kent Allard, a World War I aviator who fought alongside the French. Allard decided he needed a new cause after the war, decided to turn his energies against crime, faked his death in Africa, returned to New York, and by coercion convinced Lamont Cranston to allow him use of his identity.

The Gentleman expressed anger and bewilderment at how much the Shadow franchise deviated from the original canon. I was amazed at how little had changed. That original story was a pure iteration of the noir antiheroes of the time. His abilities were “uncanny,” because there was little in the way of a supernatural mythos to explore at the time. In 1937 the radio drama started broadcasting, and I don’t think it’s at all unreasonable for them to have taken the original identity of Cranston from the early publications, and pair him with the plucky, wry, feminine voice of Margo Lane; a more recent addition to the cast of characters who would give the brooding vigilante someone pleasant to speak aloud to for the audience’s benefit. To expand upon stealth, which would have been impossible to convey over the radio, they gave him the power of invisibility; am effect which can be reacted to by voice actors and a narrator, but directly requires very little in terms of effects to sell to an audience.

After a syndicated comic strip that ran most of the 40’s, The Shadow (like almost all comics or pulp) tripped over the ten cent plague of the fifties and landed on it’s face. The comics were lightweight as all hell in those days but nobody holds it against the titles. Not until 1973 did some dignity get restored with a 12 issue critically acclaimed series that ran under DC Comics and was written by Dennis O’Neil.

Just to be sure we’re on the same page, O’Neil is the same writer who picked up The Question and The Creeper after Steve Ditko; and he’s the same writer who made Green Arrow the radical leftist street hero we know and love, got Speedy on heroin, and put out a fantastic run on Batman that included the introduction of Ras Al Ghul.

It was here that more modern audiences saw a return to what can be considered the spirit of The Shadow. O’Neil’s comics were more along the lines of the novels. Stilted language, no Oriental ju-ju getting in the way of a dynamic depiction of some ruthless noir adventures.

At last we come to 1994. The year of Alec Baldwin. A high budget, feature length film that this Gentleman could only refer to as an “abortion.” I disagree. Just cause this baby didn’t come out like you wanted, doesn’t mean it didn’t get born. Perhaps not a healthy child, not a child you really make a big deal about getting in any family photos, but boy howdy could it sing. Felt like the director had listened to every single recording of the radio show he could find all in a row, then took the entire budget in his left hand, Alec Baldwin in his right, and just plunged ever deeper in to the crevasse.

I’m afraid that no, that is not a hint of sarcasm you detect. Lamont Cranston started the movie as a 1930s MONGOLIAN-FUCKING-OPIUM WARLORD, seemingly just for laughs. Then he gets kidnapped, fights a flying knife which bites him, and somehow comes out of that as The Shadow. Supernatural to the nth degree, Margo Lane’s a telepath who gets kidnapped ’cause that’s her job, even Tim Curry makes an appearance just to be a honey voiced creep until Baldwin drives him insane with a smoldering look. This movie was insane, sure. But it was still a natural progression of the story’s premises. It skirted and at times went over the edge of what works, and that’s what has to be done with ideas or else they get stagnant and die.

Fiction is compelling because it allows the writer and the reader to create worlds. Over time these worlds are explored and expanded, the characters given life through experiences. We as an audience become invested in developing canon. And when creators try and alter our worlds, our people, we get up in arms because they’re not doing the original justice, or they’ve clearly missed the whole point, because they don’t know it, not like we do. But the ecstasy of recognition does not lend itself to progress. The Shadow, this powerful echoing meme that has reared it’s head throughout our collective consciousness again and again over the 20^th century didn’t even start out as a character. Not even as a novel. Originally The Shadow debuted July 31^st, 1930 as a narrator for the Street and Smith program Detective Story Hour. In the past the narrator had always been a friendly figure; a comrade to the audience, who lead them through the story by the hand. The Shadow was a dark, antagonistic figure who told crime dramas to his listenership as if he was threatening them with the dire fates found within. People began demanding to read about this character who honestly had not been written, so Walter B. Gibson got to work. The entirety of this character’s spirit, this franchise’s atmosphere, is conveyed in the haunting, sinister laugh of The Shadow. And that has never faltered.

Earlier I spoke of traps. There is no trap more attractive than familiarity. Weep not when your names are changed and your histories unwritten. We made it all up before, I can’t wait to see those stories told anew.

“Yes Margo, and this will be a warning to the others. That even the best laid plans of criminals shall all go to ruin.”