Happy 80th Anniversary to ‘The Shadow’ Magazine!
Eighty years ago, on March 6th, 1931, the first issue of The Shadow Magazine appeared on American newsstands. The Shadow Magazine was the first modern character/hero magazine, reviving a heroic fiction format that had disappeared decades earlier with the demise of dime novels.
In the pages of The Shadow Magazine, magician-turned-journalist Walter B. Gibson refashioned the sinister narrator of CBS-Radio’s Detective Story Magazine Hour into fiction’s first Dark Hero, creating a crimebusting supersleuth who embodied the iconic power of classic melodrama villains like Dracula. Gibson’s novels introduced the concept of super-crooks and super-crime, and became the template for hero pulps and scores of future comic book superheroes, many of which were created by devoted readers of The Shadow Magazine including Jerry Siegel, Jack Kirby, Bill Finger and Bob Kane. In fact, the 1936 Shadow pulp novel “Partners of Peril” was adapted scene-by-scene and character-for-character, as the first Batman story in Detective Comics #27.
In honor of this anniversary, Sanctum Books has just reprinted “The Living Shadow,” the debut Shadow novel, and for the first time has restored the original text as it originally appeared in 1931 in the first issue of The Shadow Magazine. (The text was revised/updated when it was reprinted in a 1934 hardcover which became the source for future annual and paperback reprints.)
The Shadow Volume 47, reprinting “The Living Shadow” and “The Black Hush” with historical articles by Will Murray and Anthony Tollin, will arrive at comic book specialty shops on March 16th.
That first Shadow story had to be re-written after Gibson delivered it, i’ve read, because Street & Smith had so little faith in the character and the magazine – since it was mostly a radio tie-in they didn’t expect to last (sort of like the producer who told the Beatles that guitar bands were a fad that would never last) – that they didn’t even commission a cover.
The art department went through its unused art till they found one with a menacing shadow on it.
However, it also showed a sinsiter Oriental.
So Gibson (or an editor) had to re-write the story to include an Oriental villain…
At The Cobalt Club, a few old Shadow fans are going to start an on-line Shadow book club. We are getting together to read this pulp novel “The Living Shadow” and discuss it together online. If you want to get in
on this, you need to join the Cobalt Club and the reading group
within, which are both free. We old-time fans would be glad to
share our insights with you neophytes, as well as welcome the
comments of people coming to it with fresh eyes. Again, since this is
the first Shadow pulp novel, what better a place to jump on!
If you are interested, here’s the link/address.
http://cobaltclub.ning.com/group/theshadowbookdiscussionclub
I hope to see some of you there. The fun starts April 1st.