The Comics Rack

I Have a Little Shadow...

   In the early 1970s, half page ads featuring a cloaked character with slouch hat and a pair of blazing 45s began to appear in various DC books. This, for many, was their first exposure to the Shadow, the famous pulp character. DC had gained the rights to the Shadow, along with the Avenger, from Street and Smith, the original publishers of the pulp magazine series, during a period of expansion that saw both DC and Marvel licensing many characters that had been popular in the pulps of the 30s and 40s. The road from gaining the rights to the character to the half page ads to the finished comic book was quite a bumpy, however, but makes for quite an interesting tale.
   When DC acquired The Shadow, the writing and editorial duties for the book went to Denny O'Neill; a fan favorite at the time for his work on many Batman titles and Green Lantern (both with Neal Adams). Yet, while O'Neill may have had success with these two characters, his approach on both involved re-inventing the characters and changing many key elements (the art by Adams didn't hurt either). Whether O'Neill wanted to put his own stamp on the Shadow, or whether he really didn't understand the character is not known, but the search for an artist for the book became quite complicated, quite possibly due, in part, to O'Neill.
   The first artist approached for the series was Jim Steranko. Steranko was an ideal choice to work on the character. He had grown up reading the Shadow in the pulps and had been partially responsible for introducing a new generation to the character through an article that appeared in The Steranko History of Comics. He was also producing covers for the Pyramid reprints of the original pulp stories and in those illustrations showed that he had a vision for the Shadow that was right on the mark. Unfortunately, Steranko and O'Neill could not agree on story control, so Steranko pulled out of the project, practically before he had begun.
   The next artist approached was Alex Toth and it is of this near collaboration that I have some first hand knowledge. When O'Neill sent Toth the script for the first issue of The Shadow, he urged Toth to make any small story changes he might desire. What Toth did was to collaborate with a comic writer friend and, between the two of them, completely rewrite the story. My memories are rather vague about what all was changed, since I only saw the rewritten script, and O'Neill's response, on one occasion, but I recall that the main changes were in characterization of the Shadow and the basic plot of the story (at least they kept the title). One example that stands out in my mind is the portion of the first story where Shrevie (sp?) is "punished" for failing in an assignment. In the Toth version, there is no such sequence, since such an action had no precedent in the original pulps or radio adventures.
    The story that Toth and his collaborator created was, in my opinion, superior to the one O'Neill had penned and, again opinion, closer to the pulp character than the story which eventually appeared in issue #1 of the series. Needless to say, O'Neill was not happy with the changes made to his script and, in the letter I was shown that accompanied the script, he made his unhappiness known to Toth in no uncertain terms. The result of this confrontation was that Toth followed in the footsteps of Steranko (maybe for the same reasons) and ended his involvement with the project.
   Berni Wrightson was the next artist approached for the project and it was he, not Kaluta, who produced the house ads for DC. Unfortunately, the deadline pressure of producing Swamp Thing kept Wrightson from contributing anything beyond the house ads and the project finally fell to Michael Kaluta.
   The rest, as they say, is history. Kaluta became an overnight sensation, but couldn't quite keep pace with the deadlines. Wrightson did some collaboration on issue #3 to help out, but the deadline problems finally forced Kaluta to leave. Frank Robbins took over, followed by E. R. Cruz, and the book was cancelled by issue #12. It is interesting, however, to speculate on how the story might have turned out had either Steranko or Toth worked on the book. More interesting still, is that even after all these years, and after DCs other revivals of the character, it is Kaluta's short 5 issue run on The Shadow that is considered the most definitive.