Art For Art’s Sake #292: The Shadow Knows A Hell Of A Lot – It’s Bill Sienkiewicz’s Shadow…

Another Art For Art’s Sake continuing my celebration of the art from The Shadow in comics…

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Okay then, here we are again, my little Shadow obsession continues. It all came about on seeing that Bernie Wrightson ad (above) for the ’70s DC Comics version of The Shadow, the one written and drawn by Denny O’Neil and Michael W. Kaluta. That sent me down a rabbit hole of finding loads of art from The Shadow over the years. First it was meant to be just one Art For Art’s Sake, then I realised that I’d way too much incredible Kaluta art, so that got one of its own. But then I knew that if I was doing The Shadow, I had to include both the Howard Chaykin Blood and Judgment series from 1986 and the very, very different Andy Helfer, Bill Sienkiewicz, and Kyle Baker version from the late 80s – always an absolute favourite of mine.

So, here we are. It’s 1986 and Chaykin’s moved on to do the same sort of thing he did with The Shadow with Blackhawk – which is either good or bad, depending where you stand on Chaykin. But that meant DC were looking for a writer for a new ongoing series. Well, they didn’t have to look far, as Andrew Helfer, editor of Blood and Judgment, stepped up to give us 19 issues and two annuals that were just the greatest stories of The Shadow that I’d read. It kept to Chaykin’s existing over-the-top nature, but went for more comedy, all accompanied, for the first six-issue arc ‘Shadows & Light’, by Bill Sienkiewicz, being very wonderfully Bill Sienkiewicz indeed with it all…

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Yep, distinctive as all hell.

So, Shadows and Light, the first six-part arc and Sienkiewicz’s whole run on the title… six issues of increasing madness, keeping with Chaykin’s sense that this was a book where the lead character was actually a lot of an unlikeable bastard who used up his agents, just as bad as the bad guys he faced down, and every bit as deadly. Helfer also made great use of said agents, really building them up in the storylines and letting them take a hell of lot of the spotlight.

Shadows and Light is complex, fast, all over the place – although I mean that in a good way. It’s wordy, it’s cluttered, it’s got a hell of a lot going on with multiple baddies all featuring heavily – but it’s also just every bit as good as I remember it, plus with Helfer writing, the agents get a lot more time to show their stuff and the women of the series are given their agency back.

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So, it’s The Shadow and the agents following up on a series of killings in NYC, all eventually traced to a corporation run by The Shadow’s greatest enemy, Shiwan Kahn. But things run a lot deeper and more complex here. This is no simple mind-control plot to take over the world but something far more localised, all to do with Kahn’s adopted country of Taiwan and the threat posed to his new homeland by China. Oh, and then you throw in Renn and the Reverend Light, both of them looking to take over Kahn’s decidedly dastardly mind-control ray and use it for their own nefarious ends. Like I say, it’s such a big story that it could well have benefited from double the length of issues. But hey, it’s fast and furious, with Helfer busy throwing everything, and the kitchen sink, at the page.

But dammit, it was just superb. And, unlike Chaykin’s run, I think this one holds up really, really well. Six episodes of chaotic, frenzied pulp action with a really rich vein of comedy running through it all. Of course, this is merely, from my point of view, the start of things, as Kyle Baker was to come onto the book with issue 7 and really gelling with Helfer’s writing to give us 13 issues and one annual that are simply wonderful. But that comes next.

For now, the art of ‘Shadows & Light’, six issues of darkly comedic stuff, explosive artwork from Sienkiewicz, available from Dynamite as The Shadow Master Series Volume One.

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