BITTER FRUIT
by Jason T. Miles
Saturday, August 7, 2010
I’ve always been attracted to genre comic-book characters from (or descended from) pulp magazines. These characters and their stories, imagery, and cult seem to have their own point of reference, their own pool of collective unconscious, their own roster of archetypes separate from the majority of popular entertainment.
Pulp’s well known characters include Doc Savage, the Spider, and my favorite, the Shadow, an ink splotch of a character, an icon made of three or four distinct visual features: a large black hat, a Cyrano de Bergerac-esque nose, and guns.
Over the years since the character’s inception, the Shadow has rapidly lurched in and out of the public’s trash consciousness, I think due in large part to the Shadow (aka Lamont Cranston) being a real son of a bitch, a bastard of character difficult to identify with. I’ve often thought that if Lamont Cranston’s crime fighting motives were as empathetic as Bruce Wayne’s call to the Bat Signal then the Shadow’s presence in our daily genre lives would be more consistent.
I’m a fan of the many different takes on the Shadow, visual or otherwise, but I think my favorite is by Andy Helfer and Kyle Baker, in particular their six-issue story Seven Deadly Finns. Helfer and Baker understand the dark comedy of The Shadow. They recognize the ridiculous and frightening visual conflict of a large nose emerging from a large black shape accompanied by twin explosions and a rain of bullets. To think of this as the last image you encounter before death is absurd but not necessarily inappropriate.
Helfer more than recognizes the Shadow’s war on crime as fucked and thankfully writes it as fucked. Helfer’s Shadow is a scumbag and a warlord blackmailing people into helping him with his murdering. Not what you’d call an immediately recognizable character readers can relate to and certainly not a “hero.” Fact is, the Shadow is not much of a character at all but more of an idea. So it’s interesting that over the course of Seven Deadly Finns, Helfer and Baker’s Shadow becomes more likable and more bloodstained as a result of his fucked perspective. Here’s an effective, surprising human scene between the Shadow and his secretary:
It’s story moments like these alongside something more appropriately familiar, such as this…
… that elevates Helfer’s writing above the genre comic-book din. There’s no easy moralizing in Helfer’s The Shadow. There’s isn’t any justified vigilantism and there aren’t any dignified victim’s and thank god the “bad guys” are bad guys (no wuvable Tony Soprano’s here). The reader’s empathy is left to crawl alongside the Shadow’s captive helpers and the kaleidoscope of their thoughts and emotions as they willingly or unwillingly murder. The Shadow’s world is a fishbowl of shared schizophrenia. It’s fucked and it’s funny, which is perhaps the cause of the Shadow’s laughter…
Kyle Baker’s restless and versatile cartooning is a perfect match to Helfer’s writing. Baker easily delivers the Shadow’s malformed pulp mass…
…as well as the Shadow as deadpan comedian:
Next to Special Forces, Baker’s work on The Shadow is my favorite of his interesting and varied career and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that due to the consistency of awesome figure work, thinking as drawing, smart panel composition and panel layout—his panels stick to a grid established during the golden age of comics yet expand and retract with the action and emotion of the scene—make his Shadow the mountain top of his career. I’m currently obsessed with this panel:
This panel is an inventory. Its composition is beholden to information. Baker throws out standard, representational composition and charts the panel to read. The fact that this panel also looks pretty, for genre comics, would normally be a bonus but because Baker is a cartoonist rather then an illustrator, it’s cartooning we get: a visual service to function storytelling.
The Shadow nose!
Labels: Andrew Helfer, Kyle Baker, pulp, The Shadow
“It’s funny, everybody thought Conde Nast shut us down, but it was just that we weren’t making any money. When you work on a licensed book, the owner of the license gets half the royalty check. Andy and I, on one of the later issues, ended up splitting a $20 royalty check, and we decided it was time to go. [laughter]” – Kyle Baker on his Shadow run with Andy Helfer – from Modern Masters interview w Eric Nolen-Weathington, 2009
Easily one of the best comics of the 80’s. It’s worth seeking out the individual issues, since it’ll probably never get reprinted. The Sienkiewicz & Marshall Rogers issues were great too, but Kyle Baker really made the series sing.
This is personal, but I always found the appeal of the Shadow mystifying. He’s a great visual with nothing else great about him. His general shtick is he’s invisible, clouds men’s minds, and does a lot of nothing with that so the stories can continue. Like Golden Age Flash stories, the Shadow has waffle around a lot and be kinda dumb for the pages to fill out. The plots should variably wrap up within a short while, I’m invisible to you, instead of killing your criminal ass, tell the readers and me what you plan to do, and I’ll mull it over and get a few things going on my end and meet up with you later. (With the GA Flash, substitute, I’m the fastest man around, so I’ll sit here and spin like a top to remain unseen and listen to gangland exposition and then — uhhh…go home and wait for your plans to unfold. The brain synapses weren’t so fast, I guess.) The Shadow pulps are really dull (again, imo), dragged-out procedural things with forgetful enemies and the Shadow weaving in and out of them (he does at least show up more often in his own pulps more than Doc Savage, Man of Bronze and Better Things to Do while his flunkies run around waiting for him to show up at the end of the story to mop up. I generalize, Doc, but. come on now, really.). The radio show is more fun because of the pulpy aspects played out in a short time, with fun organ music and the weed of crime bit and ads for Blue Coal, and early on you get Orson Wells slumming and having some fun. But in general, he does the same thing, listens in, laughs, which is cool and all, and takes his sweet time so you get more Blue Coal ad breaks in a half an hour of crooks and mad scientists talking to themselves, Margo Lane stumbling into shit and the Shadow clouding the minds of criminal half-wits and probably a lot of listeners. I still kinda like the Shadow, but mostly as stored energy rather than kinetic energy. And yeah, maybe the Helfer/Baker comics were the best run of the character because they had some wit and bounce and humor and didn’t take it too seriously. Neither creator takes much too seriously when it comes to genre, on the whole, and they worked well together (although their take on the Avenger, the really, really dull pulp fella who was shocked so badly his face became malleable (!!!!!) was actually pretty forgettable, perhaps because it was more straightforward (I dunno).
I’ll put in a plug for the Spider pulps, which are incredibly bugfuck, and ruined other pulps for me, by and large. All the John Woo/Bullet-fu type spectacle and nonsense I expected from pulps was in the Spider, and almost nowhere else I’ve looked, the Shadow, et al. He’s insane, clearly, as is his girlfriend, an anti-Margot Lane et al type named Nita Van Sloan (spelling might be wrong, ditto on Margot Lane, sorry). Anyway, they’re both gun-crazy nuts (always blazing away with two at a time, John Woo-style), super-intensely driven, crazy mad and crazy, madly in love, almost palpably, and it’s all sorta adorable even while it all hurts your head. Everything is larger than life and moves faster than a pulp serial, because there’s no budge, so thousands die, cities are rocked, tenements are leveled, diseased bats are let loose on towns, goons trample NY in early mecha suits, homeless crowds riot, myriad things are blown up, police are mowed down, municipalities are taken over by criminal organizations, etc etc. Criminal motives and methods are ludicrous, over the top and head-spinning. Stories start on the run and never let up, you can become exhausted reading one of these things because of the relentless nature of them, they often take place over a fairly short period of time and you wish everyone would cut it out and take a nap so you can stop reading and go to bed. I mean, I don’t dislike the Shadow, the mood is cool and all, but I can’t get into the actual material, ditto the Avenger, Savage, etc. I keep hoping, but for me The Spider just delivers the goods when it comes to the maniacal crime-smasher pulp guys.
Anyway, I was just telling a friend about the Spider yesterday and bought a new Girasol reprint of two pulp adventures so my mind-rot enthusiasm’s a bit high at the moment. Plus I did some yard work and can’t move, so, hey, extra computer time today.
Truth, Evan. What propelled me to write this thing about The Shadow is that I’ve always been suckered by the pulps and I’m almost always disappointed, yet the allure and the resonance of The Shadow still thrives for me. Same goes for Batman… but I’m tired of being forced to relate to Batman, which is probably why I’m loving Batman Odyssey so much (its the most irreverent and funny comic i’ve read in a lot time). Helfer and Baker’s approach seems like a no brainer, yet so many genre comics dress up characters in boring formulae and call them archetypes so we can relate. I respect we’re talking about $ properties $ here which is why I’m surprised more artists don’t take the the Helfer / Baker route and treat iconic characters more as an idea or image.
Most folks making comics about iconic characters buy into the icon, and even if they don’t, the editorial folks generally take the characters very, very seriously. As do the readers they/we have left. So, you get things like Bizarro Comics and Strange Tales to blow off steam and laugh at the capes, but in a corner, at the children’s table, because the “adults” know this stuff is actually very, very serious.
Re: Batman: Odyssey…um…different strokes. For me it’s Ed Wood funny/car accident/awful without the charm. But I really, really can’t stand Adams’ work. I know, I’m in the minority there.
This run is so classic. It’s been a while, and my collection is in post-move disarray so I can’t check, but didn’t it kind of _not end_? Like, wasn’t there supposed to be a big showdown with Shiwan Khan that never went down due to the book getting axed (or them quitting)? That seems like a bigger knock against collecting the series than anything else.
Also, it’s not nearly as good, (and my teenaged self was sort of non-plussed by losing the exciting and funny Helfer/Baker run for a more typical take on the pulps) but the Eduardo Barreto SHADOW STRIKES issues were at least pretty.
Iirc they left off with the Shadow as a severed head on a robot body, either on the moon or en route. I don’t have the comics any longer, but yeah, there was an insane cliffhanger, for as long as I knew Kyle back in the day, he was asked about finishing up The Shadow seemingly every other day by a fan or fellow professional.
It’s too late now..
http://www.bleedingcool.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/dp8render.jpg
WHOA! What the fuck is that!?! It’s so beautiful and disgusting! It looks like slick clip art king terry computer comix!
that’s Baker’s current style..
That current Kyle Baker style seems like a weird, next-level continuation of the photoshop gloss-damage style Chaykin’s been producing in his mainstream work recently. How full circle that the Helfer series was a continuation brought about by the sales success of a Chaykin Shadow comic.
These comics are pretty good, but I’d make the criticism that, in what I’ve read, they’re at their best at the beginning of arcs- as the stories go on, and become more convoluted and crowded with plot movement, they lose a little. The first Kyle Baker issue is pretty cool and self-contained.
Is his secretary in an iron lung?!?
An iron lung? Yep.
Although that was Chaykin’s creation, not Helfer/Baker. If I remember right she was a phone sex operator who ran the Shadow’s operations on the side, all the while living in an iron lung. Oh, and she had a monkey for an assistant.
I loved, loved this series and was so disappointed when and where it ended. One of the great “untold stories” of comics. In the followup to the Finns plotline Helfer pushed the line for just how ludicrous a comic could get, and with Baker’s help (IMHO) pulled it off.
So was this the same Shadow series that Sienkiewicz worked on? I have a couple of issues of it, somewhere….and I suppose it’d make sense to have him drawing it after or before Kyle Baker’s….so, same run, or what?!?.
Yes, Sienkiewicz did the first six or so issues of Helfer’s run, and then Baker took over. The book was a sequel to a miniseries by Howard Chaykin (which Helfer edited).
Incidentally, Harlan Ellison hated the Chaykin series, and publicly declared it “vile,” and a travesty of the original character and its “mythos,” which I find amusing.
In addition, the Marshall Rogers issue mentioned above (#7) was inked by Baker, forming a bridge between Sienkiewicz’s run and his… nice self-contained issue, that. Multiple young children dying on-panel for comedy’s sake; one of ’em hangs on a cowboy hat from a model of the Washington Monument, which tells you all you need to know about the book’s political aims…
There were two Annuals too… the second was a Baker-drawn origin flashback thing, but the first was a side-story to the Sienkiewicz run, drawn by Joe Orlando…
Gosh, I’d forgotten about the Orlando issue! Time to pick this series out of the white-boxes…
This would be a good series to do your Book Club on, as the issues are still out there for the cheap. I saw a complete run in a local quarter bin recently.
Start with the Chaykin material, and work your way through Sienkiewicz, into Marshall Rogers and then finish up with Baker and that crazy cliffhanger the series ended on. There’s lots of material to discuss. Heck, you can see Baker grow as a cartoonist right there on the page! And the Helfer stories ain’t bad either. An under-rated author, IMHO.