Art For Art’s Sake #293: The Shadow Knows It’s Over – Kyle Baker’s Art Sends The Series Off

One last time… Art For Art’s Sake‘s final look at the art from The Shadow in comics…

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Okay then, the fifth and final Art For Art’s Sake on my Shadow obsession. All triggered by 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.

I’ve done entries on artists doing the classic characters, I’ve done one full of Kaluta’s artwork, Howard Chaykin‘s art from Blood and Judgment series from 1986 and done the first six issues of the 19-issue series from 1987-1989, written by Andy Helfer, with stunning art from Bill Sienkiewicz.

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All of which brings me to my all-time favourite bit of The Shadow, when Kyle Baker came onboard, first as the inker over Marshall Rogers‘s pencils for issue #7, the quite magnificent ‘Harold Goes To Washington’, then doing it all from issue #8 through to the finale of #19. There was also a Helfer/Baker Annual at the time. But that was it. That’s all we got.

‘Harold Goes To Washington’ was a one-off Shadow tale, one of my favourites amongst a hell of a lot of competition in this run of Helfer/Baker Shadows, 12-year-old Harold is on his way to kill President Reagan on a school trip to Washington DC, all because Ronnie’s promised world peace and the kid desperately wants to be a war hero. It’s brilliant, it’s cutting, it’s terribly sad as well as ridiculously funny. And it looks perfect.

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So, plenty of incredible stuff, Helfer keeping it all funny, ably abetted by Baker’s natural funniness in the artwork (as you’ll all know when you regularly thumb through his masterful Why I Hate Saturn, The Cowboy Wally Show, I Die At Midnight, and You Are Here, to mention just a few), but also delivering the thrills as things just get packed into there, such dense storytelling, maybe overly dense at times, but still quite magnificent and a series that holds up so well and one I’ll re-read every few years. It never gets old.

So, plenty of agents, plenty of Shadow, although he does happen to die in the latter part of the series and spends the last few issues as an ever-more battered corpse. Join us for ‘Harold Goes To Washington’, the six-part ‘The Seven Deadly Finns’, Annual #2 – Agents, and the leaving us on a cliffhanger that’s never been resolved final six-parter, ‘Body and Soul’.

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Helfer and Baker also combined to do the two-part Justice, Inc., where they kept the Shadow vibe going with another classic pulp here, the Avenger, who’d appeared in a couple of their issues of The Shadow. Good luck finding that one – if you can track it down, it’s definitely worth it.

You can get hold of the entire Helfer/Baker run in The Shadow Master Series Volume 2 and 3, published by Dynamite.

Now… art…

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