As memory serves, my younger self had very little knowledge of the Shadow when DC Comics first started promoting their upcoming title about him in the fall of 1972.  If asked, I probably could have told you that he was an old-time crime-fighting hero who had appeared both in pulp magazines and on the radio, though I doubt I could have told you which had come first.  And I’m all but certain that I had no knowledge that he already had a comic-book career behind him, with not only 101 issues of a titular series that ran from 1940 to 1949 (and that featured work by his primary writer in the pulps, Walter Gibson) but also a short-lived (and notoriously unfaithful) revival from Archie Comics in 1964-65 (the eighth and final issue of which coincidentally happened to come out just one month prior to my buying my own first comic book; from most reports, I was lucky to have missed this one, which might have put me off comics forever — who can say?). 

On the other hand, I was intrigued by what little I knew of the classic 193’s pulp adventurers (most of which I’d come by via Marvel Comics’ Doc Savage series, whose first issue had been released in July, 1972) — a group that I dimly understood to have been important precursors to the four-color superheroes I loved so much.

But even if I’d known nothing about the Shadow or any of his peers, I’m doubtful I could have resisted the full-page house ad that DC ran in its comics shipping in November, 1972:

The ad’s unsigned and uncredited artwork was by Bernie Wrightson, and most fans who recognized the young artist’s style must have anticipated that he’d be involved with the series when it eventually launched.  But when DC finally released the premiere issue of The Shadow in July, 1973– a full eight months after this ad first ran — the book’s illustrator wasn’t Wrightson, but rather that artist’s good friend and roommate, Michael W. Kaluta.

Knowing of that relationship, you might imagine that Wrightson, having decided for whatever reason not to do the project, simply handed it off to his pal.  But the story of how Mike Kaluta ended up as the artist on the series he’s probably still most closely associated with, fifty years on, is actually a bit more complicated than that.

The first person who appears to have been attached to The Shadow once DC had licensed the rights to the property from Condé Nast (who had themselves acquired them from the now defunct Street & Smith Publications) — and the only individual who’d remain involved with the title through its entire 12-issue run — wasn’t an artist at all.  Rather, it was Denny O’Neil, to whom DC gave oversight of the project not just as its writer, but as its editor.

O’Neil had been a freelance writer for DC since 1968, but for the last year and a half he’d also been working for the publisher as a freelance editor — an unusual, and perhaps even unique, arrangement for major American comics publishers at that time.  As he recalled decades later for an interview published in Comic Book Artist #5 (Summer, 1999):

[DC publisher] Carmine [Infantino] called me up one day and asked me if I wanted to edit some books and I’d be paid for it. I said, “Sure.”  I was a freelance editor which I think meant that they got an editor’s service without having to pay for the benefits.  I wasn’t officially on staff and paid so much per book.  As I look back, I was probably one of the worst editors in history.  I had no idea what the hell I was doing.  We had really good luck with some of the projects — The Shadow somehow came out very well despite my slipshod attitude.  But some of them didn’t come out so well.

Naturally, one of O’Neil’s first orders of business in regards to getting The Shadow up and going, if not the very first, was to find an artist.  Given the fame of the property — and the strong visual tradition established by pulp illustrators such as Jerome and George Rozen and Edd Cartier — it was a prestige assignment.  By his own account (in an interview for Alter Ego #123 [Mar., 2014]), O’Neil’s first choice was Jim Steranko, who in 1970 had written about the Shadow in the first volume of his History of Comics (and had also drawn him as part of the character montage that graced that volume’s wraparound cover).  Steranko was reportedly very interested in the job, but wanted more creative control than DC was prepared to give a freelance creator at the time, and so, it didn’t work out.  (The artist would nevertheless get to scratch his Shadow-shaped itch soon thereafter, as he almost immediately went on to paint the covers for a new series of paperback reprints of the pulp novels, launched by Pyramid Books in 1974.)

Another artist considered early on was Alex Toth, whose mastery of light and dark would seem to make him another nigh-ideal choice.  But according to “Shadow” expert (and former DC colorist) Anthony Tollin, whose recollections were included in an article by Philip Schweier published in Back Issue #89 (Jul., 2016), Toth didn’t like the script he was sent by O’Neil, and had a friend of his write an entirely new story, which he fully illustrated and lettered– and then sent to O’Neil, along with a bill for the unsolicited replacement script.  Needless to say, that didn’t fly with the writer-editor, and Toth’s work never saw the light of day, at least not in its original form.

Wrightson seems to have been the next artist brought in on the project (although it’s possible he was approached even prior to Steranko; as we’ll see momentarily, his and O’Neil’s memories appear to have differed on the matter).  As he told The Comics Journal in a 1982 interview:

…at the time I was up to my ears in Swamp Thing, and foolishly thought I could handle two books at one time…  I was penciling two pages and inking a page and a half a day.  I thought it would be a breeze.  Swamp Thing’s bi-monthly and I’ll fill in the other month with The Shadow.  Only it didn’t occur to me that I was taking the whole two months to do the book.  So I did the sample page and I think I was even slated to do the first issue of The Shadow…  And I came to my senses, fortunately, before ever starting on it.  And just said there was no way I could handle two books.  So I stuck with Swamp Thing.  It’s more in my line.  And they said, “Who’re we going to get for The Shadow?” and I immediately said, “Kaluta.”  And they didn’t hear that.  They said, “Who’re we going to get to do The Shadow?”  So then they went through all that bullshit with Jim [Steranko], I don’t know who all …

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to agree with Wrightson’s assessment that Mike Kaluta should have been an obvious choice.  But in the period we’re discussing — late 1972 to early 1973 — Kaluta had never drawn a full-length story for DC.  Most of his published jobs to date — including various covers, a number of mystery tales, a single installment of the “World of Krypton” backup feature in Superman, and two continuing backup series (“Carson of Venus” in Korak, Son of Tarzan and “Spawn of Frankenstein” in Phantom Stranger) had come in at 10 pages or less.  Ultimately, it would come down to the artist being in just the right place at exactly the right time.

Three decades later, Kaluta told the story in an interview for Back Issue #10 (May, 2005):

This took place at the DC offices in the FDR post office building on Third Avenue. They had a coffee room that they shared with the Independent News Distribution Company, and that’s where I, being freelance, would hang out and just hope something would happen…  I was sitting with my friend Steve Harper, and Denny came in with Steve Skeates.  While making small talk, I asked what was up, and I remember Denny said they were contemplating who would draw The Shadow.  I asked, “Well, who would you want?”  Denny said, “Oh, Jim Aparo, but he’s drawing everything else.”  Harper started nudging me on the side, saying, “Ask him if you could do it.” So I asked, and this may be the Hollywood version, but as I recall, Denny held up his hand, palm out towards me, and said, “Wait a second.”  He got up, left the room.  We waited three or four beats, then he came back and said, “Okay. It’s yours.”

Kaluta didn’t have much more than a general familiarity with the Shadow before getting the job.  But, as he told Back Issue in 2005, that wasn’t a problem — at least, not for long:

When [Shadow fans] figured out it wasn’t Bernie but me [doing the book], packages arrived mysteriously at my door from all over the country.  There were tons and tons of character information, covers of the pulp magazines, and other visual information that kept flooding in.  So I sat like a spider in my studio as the Shadow reference piled up.

By the same token, the artist’s lack of experience working with the period setting that O’Neil had determined to use for the series turned out not to be an issue.  Acknowledging in the same Back Issue interview that nothing he’d done previously had indicated that he “could do the 1930s/1940s look”, Kaluta went on to note:

As it turns out, I could.  It was a surprise to me, and a delight.  Drawing the period material in The Shadow was like putting on a comfortable pair of socks.

Once given the assignment, Kaluta seems to have been given an unusual amount of time to produce the artwork for the first issue.  Among other considerations, this allowed him to develop a concept for the book’s cover that would evoke the painted covers of the old Shadow pulp magazines without his actually having to work in paint.  This ultimately involved producing two distinct pieces of artwork: the first, a wash rendering of the Shadow himself (which would in fact be partially obscured in the completed illustration); the second, a more standard inked drawing of the New York City skyline and elevated train,* which would be laid over the previous piece to create the final cover.

Of course, to have the desired effect in its ultimate form, this illustration would demand extra time and attention from the cover’s colorist.  Luckily for Kaluta (and for the rest of us), that job went to Jack Adler, who’d developed a washtone process for creating a striking, painterly look for select DC covers back in the 1950s.  In his Comic Book Creator #13 interview, Kaluta described the two men’s long-distance collaboration:

I did the Shadow figure in a black ink wash, so it’s just tonal, and then Jack just laid the colors on it. I was out of town when I did this.  I was in down there in Virginia and I wrote him a letter [see right]…  I included a little color photo of a Shadow cover by either Graves Gladney or George Rozen, that showed the colors I wanted and, of course, to pay homage to those cover painters.  Then I yapped for two pages and I wrote, “Just put the colors on, don’t drop any black into color because they’re doing that a lot…”  I went on and on and I said, “I want all the windows yellow.  I don’t want them pink and blue and green… I  want this, I want that, I want that.”  I heard back that Jack was stomping around the production room, saying, “Who does this kid think he is?  Does he think I haven’t ever done a cover before?”  But later, Jack said, “We did a great cover, didn’t we?”  I said, “Yes, we did, didn’t we?  Thank you for not f*cking it up by trying to be clever because there’s enough cleverness.”  I just knew what I didn’t want, and he did great.

It was a great cover — the first of several that Kaluta and Adler would produce for the title, using the same graytone process.  But for now, we’ll leave the subject of Shadow covers — both in general and in reference to The Shadow #1 — and turn past the iconic image featured at the head of this blog post to the first issue’s first story page:

While nothing in the story’s published credits suggests that “The Doom Puzzle!” is adapted from an earlier work, Philip Schweier’s Back Issue #89 article indicates that O’Neil based his tale on one of the Shadow radio program’s scripts (though no details are given as to which one).

Michael Kaluta appears to have had the above sequence in mind when making the following comments for a 1998 interview published in Comic Book Artist #5:

The most violence that appeared [in the Shadow series] was in the art.  Denny would say, “I’m not sure we should be doing this,” because, in that first issue I drew the Shadow actually killing somebody.  It’s very unsung, but it might be one of the first times under the Comics Code that a star of a book actually kills somebody in such an off-hand manner.  Strangely to us, we got a lot of crayoned letters demanding more and congratulating us for not messing around.

In his own CBA #5 interview, O’Neil offered his own reflections on the Shadow’s propensity for lethal violence:

I had a few little liberal qualms about his tendency to shoot first and not even bother to ask questions later.  I got around it by playing him as a god, as an impersonal force…  I didn’t want The Shadow to be perceived as a human being but as this impersonal force for justice that was always right.  If you make him human, then you have problems with the fact that he shoots people a lot.  I didn’t want to soften that as it seemed integral to the appeal of the character.  This guy dealt justice and to hell with due process!  As Steranko says, The Shadow didn’t believe in the death penalty, he was the death penalty.

While your humble blogger knows a bit more about the history of the Shadow today than in 1973, I’m hardly what you’d call an authority.  That said, my admittedly limited research indicates that “secret codes” were definitely a thing in his vintage stories, both in the pulps and on the radio show.

And, yes, O’Neil did come clean with the answer to the conundrum in this issue’s text page:

At this point in our story, O’Neil has efficiently introduced us to three of the Shadow’s agents — Shrevvy the cabbie, Margo Lane the socialite, and Burbank the radio operator — and is about to bring on a fourth, Harry Vincent.  We’re given no idea why these folks work for the Shadow, or even how any of them came into his orbit.  Nor are we given any hint that “Lamont Cranston” is anything other than the Shadow’s true civilian identity.  But, of course, as any moderately knowledgeable Shadow-head could tell you, the real Lamont Cranston is actually a completely different person, whose identity our mysterious protagonist assumes from time to time; the Shadow’s true name is in fact Kent Allard.  All of which is fascinating, to be sure, as are no doubt the various agents’ colorful backstories.  But none of that information is necessary for following the present narrative, or for enjoying it, and I think that O’Neil has chosen wisely in keeping his script for the series’ first installment focused on the “here and now” of his plotline.

And now, on to “the Upper East-Side apartment building owned by one Harry Vincent…”

O’Neil is a good enough writer (and editor) to resist the temptations to add narrative captions or dialogue in sequences where they’d be completely extraneous, as in the latter half of page 6, above.

Again, O’Neil doesn’t pause to explain how the Shadow received his mystical girasol ring as a gift from Czar Nicholas II of Russia, or to relate its origin as one of the two eyes of a Xincan idol; it’s enough for us to know that by using it, the Shadow is able to cloud men’s minds…

The Shadow explains that he’s now acquired two additional pieces of the puzzle, which now “almost makes sense!”  At this point, Burbank chimes in with yet another bit of data he’s just uncovered: “…a sea captain was among the prisoners who escaped from the van!”  Absorbing this new information, the Shadow announces to the two agents that a pattern is beginning to reveal itself…

The next day, “Lamont Cranston” heads to Wall Street, where he looks up financier Osgood Bamber.  Casually inquiring about “rumors of big excitement on the Street”, Cranston receives Bamber’s assurances that there’s nothing to get alarmed about…

Confident now that all the puzzle pieces are in place, the Shadow has Shrevvy drive him back to headquarters, where there’s much for he and his agents to do before nightfall…

“Why?” asks Margo, as the autogyro takes again to the sky.  “The money shipment is already crossing the bridge.”  Which is true — but, as the Shadow explains, the “real culprits” are still at liberty.  Looking at his watch, he adds: “Unless I’ve miscalculated badly, they should be passing under us at this very moment!”

Margo is sure that now, at least, their work must at last be done; not so, says her boss.  “We’ve captured a body of hirelings — but the head — the brain — is yet at large!”

“Then… you’ve failed?” asks Margo.

“The Shadow never fails!”

Does Osgood Bamber pull the trigger, inadvertently causing his own death?  Or does the Shadow do it himself?  Neither the art nor the script make it clear, suggesting that O’Neil and/or Kaluta might have been looking for some “plausible deniability” with the Comics Code Authority.  But, whatever the case, the Shadow’s clearly not going to lose any sleep over how things have turned out; rather, he’s having a good, long laugh over it as our tale reaches its end.

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And so ends the first DC Comics issue of The Shadow — a debut outing that could hardly have been bettered, at least in the opinion of your humble blogger (now, as well as half a century ago)..  My younger self was more than ready to come back for that promised “next issue on sale during the second week in Sept.” — and for every two months after that, for as long as Denny O’Neil and Mike Kaluta could keep it up…

…which, as most people reading this probably already know, wasn’t nearly as long as one could have wished.  But, naturally, that’s a topic for discussion in another post, at a later date.

 

*One of the most distinctive elements of Kaluta’s foreground drawing — and one of the most fanciful — is the lighted sign for “Revilo’s”.  In a 2013 interview (later published in Comic Book Creator #13 [Fall, 2016]), the artist recalled:

My dad said, “My friend Frank Oliver has a kid who is a big comics fan, so you put his name in there somewhere?”  So I put Oliver in backwards, “Revilo’s.”  And then, some friend from Canada told me, “Oh, there are some guys who are big fans of yours called The Revillos and they’ve got a little New Wave rock song out,” [laughs] which they got off of this.  I said, “Do they know that it’s ‘Oliver’ backwards?”  He went, “No, they haven’t the slightest idea.”  I said, “Well, maybe you should tell them just for the hell of it.”

The Revillos — or, as they were originally and later known, the Rezillos — formed in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1976.  Described by Allmusic as a “crazed and joyous Scottish pop band with one foot in punk rock and the other sunk in 20th century kitsch”, the comic-book origin of their name was verified by founding member Jo Callis, who said in a 2005 interview:

There was an early 70’s DC comic called ‘The Shadow’ . The Shadow was a real pulp fiction character. The very first issue of that comic has in one of its pictures the Shadow standing there with his two guns and his mask. There is a street scene in the background and what was meant to be either a club or a bar. It was actually called “Revilos”with one “L” and we took that and changed the letter to a “Z”. I think we probably had the name before we had the band.

Ironically, the original incarnation of the Rezillos only lasted a couple of years, after which several members soldiered on for a couple of decades under the more comics-authentic variant name the Revillos — though the 21st century has found the band billing itself once again as the Rezillos.

And no, I have no idea whether any of the members in any configuration of the group have ever worked out that “Revilo” is just “Oliver” backwards.  But really, after 47 years, does it matter?