The Present Ain’t What It Used To Be: The Shadow Now #1 Review

Editor’s Note: Who knows what spoilers lurk in the hearts of men? Oh, I’ve used that one before? Well, I’ll email you a full refund.

Back in the mid-1980s, Howard Chaykin rebooted The Shadow for the 20th Century with his Blood & Judgment miniseries for DC Comics. And that story was a classic, firmly dropping Lamont Cranston into what was then the present, including MAC-10s instead of Colt .45s, a pastel pallate, and, being a Howard Chaykin book, more tits and ass than you can shake a stick at. And even though the book came out when I was 15 years old, long before the widespread adoption of the Internet, I categorically deny that I ever shook my stick at it. But I digress.

Well, that story took place 27 years ago, which means it’s time for another reboot, because God knows that unless someone comes up with a rational explanation for it, you can never allow a comic book character to not age in real time. That’s why Batman ‘s latest wonderful to is a colostomy bag. Jesus, I’m losing the thread again…

Anyway, writer David Liss and artist Colton Worley are tasking themselves with the same goals that Chaykin had back in 1986: bring The Shadow into the present day. And how would a dude carrying a couple of guns and an adenoid laugh fare in the world of the Internet, easily-available pornography, and where the evil that lurks in the hearts of men is leveled off by Adderal and Xanax?

Not nearly as well as you’d hope, actually.

The Shadow is back in New York in 2013, after having spent years in Shambala meditating to regain and maintain his youth. Posing as his own grandson (after posing as his own son in Blood & Judgment), he returns to retake the lead of The Shadow Organization, the network of operatives, headed by Mavis Lockhart (who he was boning back in Chaykin’s book, and who is now middle aged like the rest of us who were in – and into – comics in the mid-80s), only to find that terrorism is rampant, and his organizations efforts are futile. After following a tip only to find an ambush, The Shadow tracks the crimes to old nemesis Shiwan Khan, a man he sent to prison for life before The Shadow fucked off to do whatever spa treatment one does in Shambala… only to find what appears to be a peaceful dude who has renounced his evil past. The failed missions and bad intel have led to Harry Vincent’s grandson Kyle to start calling for Mavis’s ouster as leader, but that doesn’t prevent her from sending people out on doomed missions, only to find that the threat to the city has also been a threat to The Shadow Organization itself.

Let’s start out by saying that this isn’t a terrible comic book, but man it has some significant problems of execution. And part of that is that I think Liss is trying to accomplish too damn much in just 22 pages. We meet the modern version of Lamont Cranston, get an explanation as to why he’s still young and where he’s been, meet a bunch of unfamiliar children and grandchildren of classic Shadow operatives, catch up with Khan, and have three different ambushes against The Shadow. That’s a lot of ground to cover in one issue, and it means that there are leaps in logic and stuff that just sort of happens in order to fit it all in.

Here’s an example: the first ambush against The Shadow happens starting on the second page, with an explanation as to why it is happening that amounts to The Shadow saying, “I did some investigation while you weren’t watching. Let me show you it.” And that’s okay; I can buy that as a way to get into the action quickly and show the reader that it’s still the same old Shadow, and that he’s facing a serious threat that maybe he’s not prepared for… but the second ambush has even worse setup. A literally faceless person (seriously: we only see her from the back, with her face obscured by her hair. It is the definition of “some dude.”) tells Cranston that an agent is in a compromised situation and needs help… and that’s it. What is that situation? Dunno. How was she compromised? Good question! It’s just a thing that is happening that gives us an excuse to see The Shadow again, and its abruptness and arbitrariness kinda popped me right out of the story.

And then there’s the nature of Shiwan Khan, and his threat toward The Shadow. I can buy making one of The Shadow’s archenemies into the leadoff villain for this new title, but Liss set up his circumstances too damn well. We’re told that Khan’s been locked up in solitary confinement with no visitors or communications to the outside world whatsoever… and six pages later, we learn that somehow he has managed to amass an army of minions, infiltrate The Shadow Organization and jeopardize The Shadow’s very life. How, exactly? Look, even this isn’t utterly egregious; I can buy that a comic book supervillain can accomplish some pretty amazing stuff from a prison cell that would require the liberal trade of cigarettes and obvious handjobs to accomplish in real life, but it’s just so damn abrupt here. Khan could have been set up as a villain who paid off for a while and added some mystery to the story, but instead we spend three pages being convinced that Khan is harmless, reformed and completely cut off from the outside world, only to immediately be told nah: that’s all bullshit. It just feels abrupt, and like a wasted opportunity.

Worley’s art is fine for what it is, but what it is just isn’t to my taste. Every character in this book looks like they come from photo reference – apparently Lamont Cranston is Jude Law now. And I know that there are a lot of people who like art based on photoreference – Alex Ross didn’t become rich in a vacuum – but I am not one of them. I find that, unless done perfectly, it actually makes the art feel more static and flat. And that’s something that we get here; even the action sequences look more like simple poses transcribed to the page without a lot of fluidity or dynamism. Further, Worley tends to use some pretty stylized page layouts – there’s one page where the gutters are shaped like a silhouette of The Shadow, and another, uses drawings of intertwined dragons to delineate the panels – which, on one hand, adds a little style and interesting stuff to look at on the page, but sometimes makes the story hard to follow. There’s one page with a big sun pattern in the middle where I had to read it two or three times to figure out the flow and what was happening (and a dark panel that I really had to squint at before I could tell that there were laser sights on The Shadow didn’t help). Look: if you’re, say, a Greg Land or a Ross fan, you might find that the art works for you… but it just didn’t do a hell of a lot for me.

Look, I like David Liss as a writer, and I am an fan of The Shadow as a character. And I’m hoping that the deficiencies of this issue are just a one-off case of a writer trying to pack too much into one issue. But there are deficiencies here, and they make for a rougher start to showing The Shadow in the 21st Century than I would have hoped for. When I think of Chaykin’s first issue of his Shadow reboot, the only logical question I remember having was, “How did they stuff that guy’s corpse into that water cooler?” But unless things start improving quickly, I’m afraid that in a few years, my question will be, “There was a comic called The Shadow Now?”