With this posting, I’ll cover a publication format that I haven’t done yet. These are Big Little Books (or BLB), particularly the trio done with The Shadow.
For those not aware of BLBs, they were started by Western Publishing’s Whitman subsidiary in 1932. They are small books aimed at kids, in a size about 4- by 4-inches with board covers. Inside there would be text on the left page and an illustration on the right page. Some also might have a corner of that artwork devoted to a “flip book” set of artwork.
The BLBs adapted a wide range of characters from radio, comicbooks, comic strips, books/pulps, children’s books, and movies. This means that some pulp and “pulp adjacent” characters like Tarzan, John Carter, Zorro, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, The Green Hornet, The Lone Ranger, and more appeared.
The name referred to them having a “big story” in a “little package.”
After Western/Whitman started them, other publishers joined in. In 1938, Whitman renamed them “Better Little Books,” and used that name into the 1960s. To be accurate, all three Shadow volumes are Better Little Books. I believe Whitman was the last to still be publishing them into 1988. I got a few of these as a kid, as did my brothers. The earlier ones I think had board covers, the rest were softbacks. And I still have them.
This posting is on the trio of BLBs that were done of The Shadow. All three have been reprinted by Gwandanaland Comics as they are in the public domain, though as The Shadow character is trademarked, this had to be obscured. They are part of Gwandanaland Comics’ “Mini-Memory” series, which reprints just BLBs.
When I approached these, I wondered if The Shadow we would get was based on the pulp magazine, the radio show, or some kind of combination of the two. Actually, I found that they seem based more on the pulp-magazine version, though some elements of that were dropped or overlooked as the series progressed.
I have no idea who wrote them. All are credited to Maxwell Grant, but that was a house pseudonym. If anyone knows, please share. While I know Walter Gibson was the main writer of the pulp version, and also did the comic strip and many of the comicbooks, I have no idea on these BLBs. Erwin L. Hess is given as the interior artist for the first two, but Erwin L. Darwin for the third.
As far as I know, all three were done specifically for the BLB and are not adaptions of The Shadow stories from other formats.
The three are:
- The Shadow and The Living Death, 1940 (Mini-Memory #64)
- The Shadow and The Master of Evil, 1941 (Mini-Memory #24)
- The Shadow and The Ghost Makers, 1942 (Mini-Memory #115)
The first, The Shadow and The Living Death, is most in line with the pulp Shadow. We are told that The Shadow pretends to be Lamont Cranston, where as the next two say that The Shadow is Cranston. This one has several of The Shadow agents, but not Margo Lane. Harry Vincent is mentioned, as is Burbank. Rutledge Mann, Clyde Burke, and Moe Shrevnitz appear. They all appear in the second one, but not the third. But Margo never appears in any of them, hence this doesn’t seem based on the radio version, as she was only later added to the pulps. Also, there isn’t any “clouding men’s minds” or the like. Commissioner Weston and Inspector Cardona appear in all three works.
In The Living Death, we get murder, a scientist working on a strange drug, a living dead man, and someone calling themselves “The Living Death.” Can The Shadow get to the bottom of things? Frankly, this was pretty serious stuff for a kid’s book.
The second one, The Shadow and The Master of Evil actually has The Shadow go up against Shiwan Khan. The strangest part of this one is they turned a bathysphere, which is a metal sphere used for deepsea diving, into a helicopter! Shiwan Khan uses this to get away at the end. Both this volume and the next one adds a “flip-it” feature in the artwork in the upper corner.
The third one, The Ghost Makers, has a seance where one of the participants is murdered. Can The Shadow figure out who is behind it before another person is murdered?
I may do further reviews of pulp-related BLBs. What I found interesting is that in a few cases, there were original characters done for the BLBs, and some of these seem to be pulp-inspired. I’ll have to see, and if so do further reviews.
