The Shadow (1986) 2

Blood & Judgment Part 2
By Howard Chaykin
Jun 1986

- mostly an origin story
- opens where the previous issue left off with The Shadow showing up but not in costume
- the reactions to his return vary quite a bit; it has been decades (30 years according to an angry Margo Lane) but he looks just as young as he did the last time they saw him
- he says it is the murders that forced him to re-emerge and to explain he tells them the story of how he came to be the Shadow
- the story begins in 1922; after serving as a spy in WWI he stayed in Europe, eventually making his way east across Russia to Vladivostok and then south into China to Shanghai
- that's where Kent Allard met Lamont Cranston; Cranston hires him to fly his plane along with some passengers and some sort of previous cargo, which appear to be caskets filled with bodies
- they just barely manage to get airborne when they are attacked by Chinese soldiers, although the plane is damaged which forces them to crash land when they are flying over the Himalayas
- Allard wakes up to find himself and Cranston in the hidden city of Shambala, the rest of the passengers of the plane were forced out of the plane by Cranston when it was still aloft, although he refused to jettison the caskets
- the people of Shambala have healed Allard and improved him, Cranston made it through the crash landing without serious injury
- the city is much more advanced than the outside world
- once Allard is healed Cramston decides he has had enough; he drugs the locals, steals a flying vehicle, and escapes with Allard and their benefactor Rudra Cakrin (the one wh operated on Allard and has provided for them in Shambala)
- Cranston forces Allard at gun point to fly them to the site of the crash where the secret of the caskets is revealed, there is heroin stashed in the bodies
- Allard and Cranston get into a fight, Allard throws Cranston off the side of the mountain and then returns with Rudra to Shambala
- with training he gains the abilities that will later serve him well as the Shadow
- in the final scene of the issue the focus shifts to the elderl, wheelchair-bound Preston Mayrock, Mercy (his young wife) and his adult son; the big reveal here seems to be that they have a small missile with a nuclear warhead and that they want to use it to take out the Shadow

- Shambala bits of the story is reminiscent of the movie Lost Horizon, although only in passing
- I don't have a lot of history with The Shadow and I always thought his real name was Lamont Cranston not Kent Allard, and that Cranston was someone else
- the way that Chaykin tells the story visually makes it tough to digest it in a single sitting; he doesn't mince words or waste panels; every panel is important in that it conveys information that is crucial to understanding the story as a whole; also there are no standard page layouts in this story, from one page to the next the panel layouts vary sometimes quite a bit