The Master of Darkness

June 20, 2014 9:42 AM

The Shadow Paperback Book Covers by Jim Steranko...at least most of them...

[via]

posted by Think_Long (9 comments total)

These are great! My favorites are this one (where he pops out of a mummy case to save an imperiled redhead), and this one (where he seems to be playing cards with Death itself).
posted by Kevin Street at 10:10 AM on June 20, 2014

I read some of these as a teenager. I remember a standout being The Shadow's Shadow, and I'm pretty sure the copy I had was the one pictured here.
posted by wittgenstein at 10:14 AM on June 20, 2014

Ah man, I love me some Shadow! Great find!
posted by Naberius at 10:57 AM on June 20, 2014 [1 favorite]

Growing up in the 60's, I was fortunate enough to have access to some old pulps published by Street and Smith in the 30's. These were, for the most part, the Shadow and Doc Savage. To an eleven year old, there was nothing like them. One day I noticed that my Little Professor Bookstore was stocking paperback reprints of Doc Savage with these unbelievable covers by some guy named James Bama (There's a bunch of them on the same site ). I started buying them along with the Frazetta Conan's pretty much just for the cover art. Somehow I missed the Steranko Shadow's otherwise I would have had even less lunch money!
posted by TDavis at 11:18 AM on June 20, 2014

A red scarf and a dangerously tilting brim used to scream "origin story ahead!".
posted by One Hand Slowclapping at 11:22 AM on June 20, 2014 [1 favorite]

These range from the beautifully composed to a bizarre, almost optical-illusion quality.

But, for some reason, this one, where the Shadow is just looking at the viewer like, "Can you believe this shit?" just made me chuckle.

I'm not familiar with The Shadow. What does being a Master of Darkness entail?
posted by HE Amb. T. S. L. DuVal at 1:57 PM on June 20, 2014

These are great. I can't wait to show this to my dad who loved the old radio program when he was a kid. Thanks, Think_Long.
posted by homunculus at 2:14 PM on June 20, 2014

What does being a Master of Darkness entail?

The Shadow is a vigilante who likes to murder criminals with his twin 45s. (Though in all fairness, the criminals are also trying to murder him.) He has the ability to Know What Evil Lurks In The Hearts of Men, and to Cloud Men's Minds. Usually that means lurking around in the shadows watching criminals do evil things, then terrifying them with his maniacal laugh (leading to a wasteful expenditure of ammunition on their part), then popping up in the one place they didn't expect and shooting them.
posted by Kevin Street at 3:32 PM on June 20, 2014 [1 favorite]

One thing that should be noted about The Shadow for the unfamiliar is that he was one of the original inspirations for Batman (a bit more on that here). Batman: TAS very cleverly acknowledged that debt in the episode Beware the Gray Ghost, featuring an in-universe fictional character who was an even more direct Shadow takeoff, the memories of which had inspired Bruce Wayne's costumed persona later in life. That was also the episode where they got Adam West to do a guest voice (as the actor who had played the Grey Ghost) for extra levels of meta resonance.
posted by Wandering Idiot at 10:52 PM on June 20, 2014