Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 112
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Popular Culture Review
Who was the Shadow? That was a question that no one seemed
able to answer. He was an uncanny being who was capable of
being everywhere; yet who also had the peculiar ability of being
nowhere. His name was scarcely more than a myth among gang
sters; yet they dreaded it. Some had claimed that they had heard
his voice coming through spaceless ether, over the radio. But at
the broadcasting studio, no one knew the identity of The Shadow.
(Grant, Living Shadow 18)
Like other mythic heroes, such as King Arthur and the Lone Ranger, The
Shadow possessed extraordinary weapons and other accouterments to aid him in
his war on evil: a brace of .45 automatics; a ring inset with an opal or girasol
gemstone which had a hypnotic effect on people; a wide-brimmed slouch hat and
black cloak to conceal his identity; and a secret “sanctum” lit by a weird blue light,
containing communication apparatus, files, and a laboratory. Jack Nachbar and
Kevin Lause explain that heroes often have such “icons” associated with them
(323).
Immortality
A true archetypal hero is immortal. His exploits enter the mythos of a
culture and never die. A list of other golden age radio heroes reveals that a number
of them, like The Shadow, were successful in other media after their radio careers:
for example, the Lone Ranger, the Green Hornet, Sherlock Holmes, Flash Gordon,
the Saint, Nick Carter, Buck Rogers, Superman, and Doc Savage. Besides this list,
though, there were scores of heroes who died with radio. Why were some so
successful? Perhaps because they so clearly and uniquely embodied the various
symbolic elements of the heroic archetype, a metaphor which strikes a chord deep
in the American consciousness.
The Shadow magazine ceased publication in 1949, and the radio series
went off the air in 1954, but The Shadow refused to fade out. Three television
pilots were made in the 1950s, then released as feature films. In 1963, Walter
Gibson wrote a new Shadow novel (finally under his own name), a number of the
pulp novels were reprinted as paperbacks, and recordings of the radio show were
rebroadcast nationwide (Tollin 54). Recordings of the episodes have continued to
be released on phonograph records, audiocassettes, and compact discs; the series
is still broadcast over some radio stations today (Tollin 54). The novels have
continued to be reprinted in paperback and hardcover, and in 1981 Doubleday
published two Shadow novels in a hardback Crime Club edition celebrating the
fiftieth anniversary of The Shadow’s creation (Gibson, Jade Dragon). New comic
book series based on the character have appeared in each decade since the cancel-