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The year was 1930. To boost sales of their Detective Story Magazine, pulp publishers Street and Smith decided to sponsor a radio program where an announcer read stories from the magazine.
Rather than referring to him as "the guy who reads the stories," a man at Street and Smith's ad agency suggested naming him The Shadow.
Soon customers began asking for a pulp magazine of that name.
No such magazine existed at the time -- but Street and Smith knew an opportunity when they saw one, and quickly decided to created just such a title.
In time The Master of Darkness recruited numerous agents, among them the mysterious Burbank.
Little is known about Burbank, other than the fact that he is an "old friend" of the Master of Darkness, and that his mission is to facilitate communication among agents.
The Shadow copyright Advance magazine Publishers, Inc./ The Condé Nast Pubs. Inc.
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 REPORT 16:
TOM LOVELL
The first artist to draw interiors for the Shadow pulps on a regular basis was TOM LOVELL (pictured right). Publishers Street and Smith paid Lovell just 12 dollars for each drawing.
Today, Lovell's original Shadow drawings are only available for thousands of dollars -- when they are available at all, which is very rarely.
Shadow creator Walter Gibson once said that Lovell’s Shadow came closest to his own mental picture of the character, because Lovell pictured him as a figure of vengeance dressed in a judge-like, all-black robe, with a black scarf totally covering his mouth. |
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| ABOVE: Art from "The Chinese Disks." BELOW: Another Tom Lovell Shadow illustration. |
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Lovell left the pulps after four years to become a Sgt in the US Marine Corps. He later became famous for his highly-detailed, photo-realistic paintings of the American west, the Civil War and historic battle scenes. Pictured below is Lovell's "Battle Of The Crater," immortalizing a bloody encounter between the North and the South.
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Finally, below is Tom Lovell's masterful "Surrender At Appomattox," depicting the ceremony which marked the end of the Civil War (and I don't mean the Marvel Comics Civil War -- this one happened way earlier, and it was real.)
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THE SHADOW IN PULPS - RADIO - FILM - TV - MOVIES - MAGAZINES
THE KING OF ALL MEDIA!
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