The Shadowed Circle Compendium

 

Fanzines and fan magazines have been largely replaced by blogs and wikis and that's not a completely bad thing--especially for those of you who seek out the most brilliantly written blogs, such as... well, modesty prevents me.

But fanzines and fan magazines had their own charm and they are missed. That's why The Shadowed Circle is such a wonderful thing. It's been around a couple of years now, describing itself as a "the first pulp-comic-radio journal dedicated to The Shadow in more than two decades." With contributions by Shadow scholars such as Will Murray, Michael Uslan, John Olson and editor Steve Donoso (among others), it has been stuffed full of cool Shadow-related articles from the get-go. If you are a Shadow fan, you need to be reading this.

The Shadowed Circle Compendium has been recently released, collecting both the cream-of-the-crop of articles published in the regular issues and a bunch of new materials. Every single article and essay in it is interesting, delving deeply into the Shadow mythos.

I do have some favorites from this volume:

"Shadow--and Substance," by Dick Myers, is absolutely wonderful. Myers makes intelligent estimates to exactly how much it would have cost the Shadow to fund his operations, including paying agents, ensuring a supply of .45 automatics and ammunitions, spare cloaks, vehicles, hide-outs, etc. Myers then comes up with a reasonable theory about where Kent Allard gets the literal millions of dollars necessary to run his campaign against crime. (As a sidenote--he also makes a strong argument that there must have been two Burbanks--perhaps brothers--as otherwise the poor guy would have been on constant duty for decades without a break.)

"The Boy Who Loved the Shadow: An Interview with Michael Uslan" is fascinating throughout. But my favorite part is his explanation of how he came to write his first Shadow story for DC comics back in the 1970s. It's a delightful story.

"Doctorow's Challenge: Why the Shadow Couldn't Prevent World War II," by Albert J. Emery, is an intelligent and fascinating discussion of why the Shadow couldn't have just killed Hitler and prevented or ended the war. The article considers both what skills the Shadow has to pull of the job, then looks at what the consequences of his taking action against the Nazi leader would have been by examining real-world history. 

"The Shadowed Seven" asks various authors and Shadow fans to pick what seven Shadow stories they would want if they were stranded on a desert island. Choices can include the pulps, comics and/or radio stories. Lists like this are always valuable because they remind readers of cool stories that they themselves need to read or re-read. It can also change opinions. I'm not a huge fan of the Dynamite Comics Shadow from the 2010s, but some of these ended up on lists with good arguments about their quality. Now I'm thinking that perhaps I need to give them another try.

Those are my favorites, but every entry here is a gem. There's a look at a 1954 pilot for a Shadow TV series, a theory about how Walter Gibson came up with Burbank's name, an article by an under-30 Shadow fan about how he came to love the character, a Will Murray article about his set visit to the 1994 film, a defence of the Shadow stories written by Bruce Elliot, and much more.

Once again, if you are a Shadow fan, the Compendium is essential reading.