I recently got Will Murray’s Dark Avenger: The Strange Saga of The Shadow, his second book on The Shadow after Master of Mystery: The Rise of The Shadow. Like that book, Dark Avenger comes from Odyssey Publications.
Dark Avenger is a revamp and update of his The Duende History of The Shadow Magazine, which came out in 1980, with a second edition in 1984. As such, it’s a deep dive into The Shadow Magazine, whereas the Master of Mystery focuses on the radio program and the various personalities behind The Shadow in all his incarnations.
So what was contained in The Duende History and how does it compare? I got my copy for my birthday in 1984, which says it’s a second printing in 1984 of the 1980 edition. This is also the second revised edition, btw. I was slowly learning about pulp heroes after discovering Doc Savage. I’m not sure if I had gotten any of The Shadow reprints or the DC comic by this time. I learned of the book through the Bud Plant catalog and asked for it for my birthday. I had recently started college. (so appropriately, this will be posted close to my birthday.)
Interestingly, I have two articles that I clipped out and saved in my copy. One was a column by Bob Swift that ran in the Miami Herald on Dec. 14, 1985, commenting on the passing of Walter Gibson. The other is from a slick magazine named Miami Magazine dated May 1979. The article is “Old Pulp Magazines Painted Exciting Drama of South Florida” by Bernard A. Drew, who did the Attic Revivals fanzine and wrote several articles in other fanzines. He speaks of several pulp-hero stories set in Miami with The Shadow, Doc Savage, Cap Fury, The Phantom Detective, and Oscar Sail, as well as a few other assorted pulp stories. This was the first time I saw an actual Doc Savage pulp cover. I cut it out of the article, but I’m not sure where it is now. I think I slipped it in my Bantam paperback copy.
Getting back to Duende History, the first article is a great overview of The Shadow series, organizing the magazine into different phases, then taking a look at the different stories and how the character changes, and secondary characters and villains that came and went, along with an index of the novels. There is an article looking at how Walter Gibson revamped Lester Dent’s Shadow novel, The Golden Vulture.
An article by Robert Sampson looks at The Shadow novels by Theodore Tinsley, followed by an interview with Tinsley. Then we get another article by Sampson on Bruce Elliott‘s tenure on The Shadow. A bonus of the volume is the last new Shadow work by Gibson, the short story “Blackmail Bay.” The volume is rounded out by several other articles and artwork by Frank Hamilton and others.
Dark Avenger has most of the same artwork from Frank Hamilton, but leaves out everything but the first section by Murray. I would hope these other pieces could be included in other works. Let’s not lose them to history.
We first get a chapter on “The Men Who Cast The Shadow,” which goes over the creation of The Shadow character and magazine and the editors and authors who shaped him. Important, of course, is Walter Gibson. But you have to touch on the actors who played the radio Shadow, the Street & Smith editors Henry Ralston and John Nanovic. And the other authors of the pulp Shadow such as Lester Dent (he did one), Theodore Tinsley, and even (ugh) Bruce Elliott. We also learn of the artists involved, both covers and interiors. Cover artists included George Rozen, who created the icon look of The Shadow, Graves Gladney, and Modest Stein. Interior artists include Tom Lovell, Edd Cartier, and Earl Mayan. Another interesting thing you find in this one is how Gibson kept the series from being repetitive, by changing locals and story types.
Then we get the bulk of the volume, which are seven chapters that breaks down The Shadow magazine into different phases. In each of those phases, we look at the different stories and how the character changes, and secondary characters and villains that came and went. Interestingly, the first and third phases are the longest. All of the Bruce Elliot stories are in the sixth phase, with Gibson’s return is the seventh. This section also covers the later Belmont Shadow works and Gibson’s two short stories. I am disappointed that nothing was said that Belmont was connected to Archie Comics and Radio Comics was just an imprint of them.
This is all then wrapped up in an epilogue, a sort of “what happened after it all ended,” touching on the recent revival of The Shadow, his use in The Batman, something most people were not aware of until Murray started doing his articles in the Sanctum reprints, and the like.
I do miss all the other material. I also miss that we couldn’t get a reprint of Gibson’s Shadow short story, which was the last one he did. This and the prior one deserves a reprint. I had hoped we’d see a reprint of The Shadow Scrapbook. Oh, well.
So will Murray come out with a third volume on The Shadow? Maybe. He notes that he could collect the many articles he wrote for The Shadow reprint volumes and other articles. But that probably won’t happen for a couple of years as I think he is working on other books for 2023 at least. I know I would love to see such a volume. He also needs to collect his non-fiction work outside of Doc and The Shadow as well.
This volume, along with its predecessor, belongs on the shelf of any who would call themselves a Shadow fan, especially those reading the new “Shadow” stories from Patterson. I know when I got the original work and read through it, it was my only chance to learn about these stories. Only a handful had been reprinted, most from the first couple of years of the magazine’s run. And getting original pulps was, to me, out of the question. Now I have a complete set of reprints and hope to get into them soon. This one will be by my side.
