Adventuring In The Shadow Empire
Pulp Heroes Reborn Through Historical Fiction
“Death is your life— kill death and live to eat again”
1988. Like many other popular arts of the period, comic books had expanded upon the independently minded, socially conscious work of the previous decade and snuck a cultural deconstruction of epic proportions into the mainstream. Amidst the revisionist explosions, The Shadow re-emerged as an icon particularly malleable to the trends of the day, as in Howard Chaykin’s 1986 cyberpunk interpretation of the character’s backdrop, while remaining perfectly expansive when set in his original era. And so in The Shadow 1941: Hitler’s Astrologer, writer Denny O’Neil and artist Michael W. Kaluta deliver a wartime yarn definitive of its title character on multiple levels, while proving how surprisingly layered pulp heroes can be when delving into personal contexts surrounding historical events.
Spanning multiple mediums since his introduction to audiences via radio dramas, The Shadow is arguably best served by the graphic juxtapositions available in comic book compositions. As the character’s catchphrases and vocal affectations became so familiar as effected in his radio portrayal by Orson Welles, so too do the words take on a life of their own when rendered graphically on the page. The haunting laughter is always lettered with iconic gusto (in this offering by Phil Felix), made all the more palpable by its presence without The Shadow in the same image. And when the letters do share a frame with the hero, his mouth is as always covered by a red scarf, his remaining visage displaying no signs of jubilance in conjunction with the “HA HA HA HA HA” emanating from his form. The jarring impossibility of such imagery only works in comic books, where sounds are visual, and time is dictated spatially as the creative team guides the reader’s eyes across the page.
In comics, The Shadow can speak, laugh, and grimace all in the same instant.
Along with these visual elements, powerfully conveyed by Kaluta along with inker Russ Heath and colorists Mark Chiarello, Nick Janschigg, and John Wellington, the period detail in the clothing, vehicles, and architecture is utterly immersive, while allowing for fantastic flights of fancy that again work best in the tonal clashes that comics easily produce. From the design of the autogyro that takes on a U-Boat in a thrilling action sequence, to the near-cybernetic accoutrements worn by The Shadow’s communications oracle Burbank, Kaluta draws his adventurers in a space between gritty crimefighters and lofty science heroes with breathtaking precision. The equal care taken in his depictions of the true-life Nazi antagonists bolster the realism permeating throughout the story, delineating O’Neil’s passionately researched history fueling the narrative.
The astrologer in question is actually a pair of characters, Heimlich and Gretchen Baur, a father and daughter separated by the Atlantic and a family history frayed by the incursion of ethnic hatred as personified by an S.S. Colonel, Friedrich Wolff. O’Neil sets his creations of the Baurs and Wolff amidst the historical Himmler, Goebbels, Hess, and Hitler in a freeform exploration of the political strategies behind Germany’s decision to attack Russia instead of England in 1941. Many historians point to this maneuver, Operation Barberossa, as a Nazi error that allowed the British time for American support to formalize by the end of the year, and O’Neil reconfigures this notion as a forethought precipitated by the machinations of The Shadow and his team of high society adventurers.
The plot centers around Wolff’s own shadow cabinet within the Nazi Party, the Auslands Organization, and their attempt to kidnap Gretchen from New York for their own mysterious ends. Yet far from being a solely a damsel in distress, Gretchen continues the strong line of female figures in The Shadow’s world, while personifying the familial drama at the heart of the story. Dispatched to America by Goebbels in further research of Hitler’s obsession with astrology, Gretchen is made to question the agendas of her homeland when they begin to act at cross-purposes. The Shadow, née Lamont Cranston, organically uses this crisis to draw out the splinter factions within Germany’s power structure and foment their aggression against Russia in order to buy England time for America to enter the war.
“You serve him because you need to serve someone so certain of himself.”
Like Batman, who owes his cultural lineage to heroes such as this and Judex as much as the directly acknowledged Zorro, The Shadow can be dangerously manipulative, especially towards his own compatriots. This is particularly precarious in his relationship with women, oft-relegated to subservient status in male-dominated superhero tales. O’Neil addresses this head-on with his portrayals of Gretchen and Margo Lane as willful protagonists, bringing their own objectives to bear alongside The Shadow’s aegis. Gretchen is the actual hero of the story, taking the political context proffered by The Shadow and channeling it towards her own burgeoning influence over the Führer, turning the tide of the war at a critical moment. More than an instrument of The Shadow’s will, Gretchen’s personal arc cements the humanity that ultimately won the day in WWII’s European theatre.
At the same time, O’Neil fashions Wolff as a tragic figure in his own right, at once representing the monstrous actions of the Nazis, while fraught with a frighteningly relatable internal turmoil. Like many persons of the modern age, including the central figures of this story, Wolff must make his way through the world with an allegiance to two or more sovereignties, doomed to make only wrong choices from one perspective or another. The dramatic breadth embodied by these characters transcends their pulp archetypes, befitting the impact of the horrific events that they are being used to examine. If fiction is the scalpel through which we dissect history, it has rarely been so succinctly exercised as it has been packed into this one-shot’s 62 pages.
My own first encounter with Lamont Cranston and his iconic alter ego was through Russell Mulcahy’s 1994 movie adaptation starring Alec Baldwin. An impossible mishmash of genre elements set out of time, the work yet made an impression on multiple fronts. Following the gothic visions of Tim Burton’s early 90's Batman, this Shadow was perhaps hopelessly dealing with a loaded deck when it came to the audience’s capacity for pulp heroism. Opening with Lamont Cranston inexplicably established as a Chinese warlord, the film fearlessly ran with all of its preceding canon, boldly trusting viewers to latch on to whatever elements they could to make some thematic sense of the genre chaos.
Yet Cranston’s interplay with the antagonist Shiwan Khan (John Lone) particularly treads into some fun territory without devolving fully into Orientalism. In their first encounter out of costumes and other superheroic regalia, the two men study each other’s bespoke suits admiringly, exchanging notes on tailoring and the like. It’s a key moment that establishes Khan as a societal equal to Cranston, despite his villainous agendas. Even now, Hollywood and the American mainstream in general struggle to understand what racial depictions constitute an Other, and this particular instance remains remarkable as a balanced attempt to enlarge the dramatic conflicts of the source material while updating ethnic sensibilities.
For my own limited experience with the character, it established The Shadow as a citizen of the world, not limited in affection or influence to his life in Manhattan. So as O’Neil keys upon his hero’s ties to both Russia and Germany to spark some pivotal plot points, it also expands the historical context on which his narrative operates, beyond both the events it is depicting. The ousting of Czar Nicholas II, followed by the murder of his family, explicitly informs the story as much as the Cold War being waged at the time of this work’s original publication implicitly would. By funneling these themes through the character arcs of Gretchen and Wolff, the story thus utilizes The Shadow as a familiar hook into the personal drama, casting him as more of a mentor figure than the central protagonist. In this way, O’Neil is able to use the notion that a fictional superhero was behind a turning point in the war without making light of the actual history in the process.
It’s fitting for the title character act as a guide for the others who perform the key actions and ponder their personal motivations, as much of his canon shows the breadth of his leadership capabilities. Within his vast sphere of influence, The Shadow can come off as something of an occult figure, when it seems like most of the city’s populace work for him in some secret capacity. While the premise is not unlike that of Sherlock Holmes’s Baker Street Irregulars, it has an eerier quality when coupled with The Shadow’s powers of hypnotism and other forms of mind control. It’s important that the focal players come to their turns of their own free will here, so The Shadow aids them and his small band of journeymen by donning various disguises rather than deploying his army of embedded operatives.
Dynamite Entertainment’s remastering of this seminal work brings it back into print after two decades, alongside the continuing original books it has been publishing with the character. As an archetype whose elements have themselves fragmented across the pulp vigilantes of subsequent generations, the mystique, methods, and motivations of The Shadow remain ever boundless. As evinced by the international setting and scale of his doings in this story, so efficiently and elegantly pulled off by O’Neil and Kaluta, such genre elements serve well as a window into the complexities of real-world history without simplifying it in perspective.
