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?).  Read More