Category: Shadow
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What a terrible comic. Chaykin’s handling of The Shadow reminds of someone trying to catch a hot potato; whenever he does have a hold on it, it’s not for long enough and it always leaves that all right place for an unpredictable direction. The problem with this issue–besides the big revelations are predictable and idiotic–is…
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With his third of four issues, Chaykin gets around to showing what his Shadow comic is actually going to be like. Tepid. Lots of ribald talk, lots of innuendo (both verbal and visual) and not much else. There’s one good action sequence, where Chaykin’s sense of design and the toughness of the comic inform how…
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So after an entirely forward-looking first issue, Chaykin gets around to the flashbacks in the second. In some ways, since the Shadow isn’t the most familiar character, an origin is necessary. But Chaykin goes overboard. He feels the need to rationalize the magical city where the Shadow, back before he was the Shadow, finds himself.…
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Howard Chaykin's The Shadow. He takes an interesting approach to bringing back a World War II era costumed adventurer–he lets everyone age while the Shadow is away. Most of the issue has various agents–people in their later years–getting viciously murdered. One of the Shadow's agents has had a daughter who works for some crime bureau…
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I don’t know why I should keep reading Noir. It’s a perfectly serviceable comic for Dynamite to exploit a couple licenses they hold–The Shadow and Miss Fury–but there’s nothing else going on with it. The art, from Andrea Mutti, is pretty good. So’s the writing, actually. Victor Gischler does a fine enough job with it.…
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Eh. Ennis doesn’t have a good finish for the arc. He goes for the funny finish with a joke about something not particularly amusing. He hasn’t really established the Shadow making jokes along those lines–I think he did mention a foul sense of humor at one point, but it wasn’t enough. The end flops. It’s…
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Ennis brings the Shadow in–he didn’t show up last issue–and it doesn’t work out. The issue works, for the first half, because it’s the wartime intrigue book. The Japanese villains have their machinations and Cranston and Margo have some stuff going on too. Then Cranston gets into costume and it all goes to pot. Well,…
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I don’t think Ennis has a good handle on Margo and Cranston’s relationship. He’s trying to figure it out in the story, which is fine, but it’s a minor subplot and it ought to be more. He keeps insinuating things, but never clarifies. It’s a bewildering approach. Or it would be if he weren’t doing…
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I wonder if Ennis is going out of his way to demonize the main villains–he ends on with reminder of their atrociousness–as a way to curb the Japanese being the main villains of the story. When it comes to World War II, the Germans get the most emphasis from Western storytellers. Ennis avoids that route.…
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Ennis plays The Shadow like a really tough Indiana Jones picture. Indiana Jones with some magic and the bad guys are worse. They’re not just villains because they’re Japanese, they’re also villains because they do really bad things. While the issue’s entertaining–and it’s nice to see Ennis give Margo Lane some personality–he hasn’t introduced any…
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I’m having a hard time describing Garth Ennis’s take on The Shadow. There’s some magic to it, which makes the Dynamite rendition different from the others I’ve read or seen. But the magic just makes the character more cold; he’s not so much vicious or aloof, rather calculatedly cold. It probably makes the character more…
The Stop Button 