The Shadow Knows: The Counter-Fantasy of the American Antihero and Symbolic Divergence in Golden Age Radio

Abstract

Various radio and pulp incarnations of The Shadow have played a pivotal role in shaping American superhero mythology and cultural unconscious. This essay explores The Shadow's origins within the 1930s, and then utilizes Fantasy Theme Analysis to uncover mythic tensions and conflicts within The Shadow's transition from noir-like dystopian antihero into the more romantic utopian superhero of Orson Welles' 1937 radio program. We conclude by contemplating rhetorical implications for The Shadow's “symbolic divergence,” a fantasy evolving into contradictory counter-fantasies and rhetorical visions in radio and pulps, as a provocative illustration of theoretical debates regarding the psychodynamic functions of rhetorical fantasy.

Notes

Different versions or parts of this manuscript were delivered at the 2004 Louisiana Communication Association in New Orleans.

The authors would like to thank Andrew King, Laura Sells, and Justin Trudeau for their generous comments on earlier drafts of this essay, as well as the gracious JRAM reviewers for their helpful suggestions.

¹In fact, it seems The Shadow's mysterious origins are even more indeterminate than previously believed. Randy Duncan in The St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture (2000) notes: “Although no actual link has been established between the two characters, a seeming prototype of The Shadow appeared in the February 1929 issue of Street and Smith's Fame and Fortune. In that story, a character named Compton Moore, with glittering eyes and a mocking laugh, donned a green shroud to fight evil as The Shadow.” Comic book legend and provocateur Jim Steranko details the numerous striking similarities in The Steranko History of Comics 1 (Steranko, 1970). Others, however, attribute such similarities to unintended or perhaps unconscious borrowing, a trend repeated with subsequent comic book icons like Superman and Batman. “Maybe ‘The Shadow of Wall Street’ laid some sort of subconcious template, later to be used,” suggests Philip Schweier (“Scorn & Ridicule,” The Comic Book Bin: 18 August 2006. http://comicbookbin.com/bubble081.html, last accessed 25 September 2006). For further reading, see Severin and Holt (1995), Larson (1995), and Toth (1999).

²The script included in The Shadow Scrapbook was actually rewritten by Edward Hale Bierstadt, with some creative embellishments from Walter B. Gibson, due to the loss of pages from the original script (Tollin, 1988). In this reproduced first draft of The Death House Rescue, Shadow agent Harry Vincent was featured from the pulp adventures but replaced when Margo Lane was invented for the radio program in the final script that was altered by radio writers and producer Clark Andrews. The transcript used here, therefore, is from the actual radio program as it aired and as preserved in the audio collection The Shadow: The Lost Shows (Radio Spirits, Inc., 2002).