this story is brought to you by a slightly more sane NRA, aka everyone needs guns but you should definitely train with them and keep them locked up away from the kiddos (sadly, not even kidding, it's one of the letters "The Spider" answered in the back of the magazine...)
(It comes off as especially bad when compared to the Twilight Zone/Shadow episode I'll talk about soon on first look and also...maybe not so good an inspiration for Spider-Man which apparently according to the (unfortunately late) Stan Lee he was somehow??)
honestly though?
The Spider is not as fun as The Shadow. The Spider definitely comes off as a copycat (though I find the limp interesting, that’s like…a single detail). I have no idea what this man does for a living. Sure, he’s a vigilante, but what’s his day job? I don’t get the sense that the writer has an idea of his backstory, only where he is now, and that’s good and all but that’s a single aspect of the character.
There’s definite similarities in the writing but I like “Grant’s” writing less. Part of it is the construction—not sure what’s up here, but…eh, part of it might be that hyphens are liberally used rather than further elaboration. I dunno, I’ll pull out one of my Shadow Magazines tomorrow to do a comparison. (Looking at it now…The Shadow doesn’t overuse exclamation points. Yeah, okay, it’s largely a punctuation thing. The excess of hyphens/dashes and ellipses [problems I’ve got but I work on it] and exclamation points [which I do not have as a problem] make it a much less smooth read, unlike The Shadow where semicolons are often used correctly and unobtrusively. It’s an issue of flow. There are a few issues where dialogue also feels less good in flow, but.)
And part of that lack of character understanding leads to a less charismatic character. One of the best parts of the Shadow is his organization, actually, which is something some of the adaptations miss. And while there was the occasional Shadow story with racist stuff (largely in the radio adaptations, though again I’ll dig through and find the single story I’d found so far that was over the top—that would be Lingo, which has a Chinatown segment and also Jericho being cool), Jericho’s an important and especially for the time complex portrayal of an African-American character. He plays a little into the gentle giant stereotype but subverts it in that he has to be just as quick-witted and fast on his feet as his (probably white) fellow Agents.
(Again, I’ll look more into the stereotype later, but especially in analysis of Detroit: Become Human I’d heard about the stereotype and it seemed different than that. [Looked into it. Okay, TV Tropes says that it’s the mere fact that they are scary, but there are subversions you can do with the stereotype and I’d say this is one, particularly when the villains are portrayed as unintelligent for believing the stereotype and underestimating him, particularly his intelligence. Quite honestly it’s bad that we’ve got more nuance in a story from the 1930s than David Cage can dream of. Okay, I’ve come up with a good analogy. It’s like Charlie Chan, which is simultaneously stereotypical, regressive, progressive, and kind of fun, and there’s no problem with liking it [I do!] but you have to be aware and acknowledge and maybe even discuss that you can’t separate one part from all the others.])
It’s even sexist with the main villain woman being a cardboard cutout femme fatale. While Margo was again, just as capable an Agent. (Not always portrayed that way in movies or the radio program. Unfortunately.) The Shadow as portrayed in the magazine series, which almost always has more nuance, like I mentioned, than the movies or radio, is not perfect. Certainly there are problematic aspects, but it seems less pervasive and one-sided than many of the other work I’ve seen from the time.
It just seems like while “Maxwell Grant” thinks about layers and layers of stuff that never makes it onto the page (and sometimes contradicts itself making the Shadow ever more so “terribly mysterious” [quoting Blue Raja there]), “Grant Stockbridge” just isn’t. In other words, don’t just tell a story with things you find cool. That’s first draft material. Once you get to second and especially final draft, you have to question why things are there, what the audience will think, why why why. Creators aren’t creating in a vacuum; what they make is both impacted by and impacting the world they live in, because media shapes public and private opinion. It could go further (a female Shadow would be really cool, for instance), but I really like where the Shadow was, especially for its time, and I just…don’t like where the Spider is. Not for today, and especially not for its time. (Maybe I just read the worst of the Spider stories, kind of like how I’d write off the entirety of Star Trek if the first episode I saw was the TNG episode Code of Honor but…it’s not exactly a good look/start.)
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