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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.
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 REPORT 9:
UNSEEN SHADOWS
In addition to a 325-issue pulp run, Street and Smith also published 101 issues of a "Shadow" comic book. Then, after an embarrassing stint with the Archie group, the character went to DC Comics in the 1970s.
The book was originally supposed to be done by Len Wein and Jim Steranko, but sadly, the deal fell through when Steranko demanded that his original artwork be returned to him, and then insisted on writing his own stories.
Anticipating a problematic relationship with Steranko, DC decided instead to give the scripting job to Batman writer Denny O’Neil and assign the artistic chores to Alex Toth -- until Toth had a Hollywood screenwriter punch up O’Neil’s story, and asked DC to pay for the rewrite.
DC felt that it wasn't Toth's place
to take it upon himself to rewrite the title’s premiere story without being asked, so they took him off the book.
Next came Berni Wrightson. With the script for the first DC Shadow issue completed, teaser ads such as the ones above and below, both drawn by Wrightson, began running, but then Wrightson had to leave the book to keep up with his work on Swamp Thing and other titles.
DC wanted to replace him with Jim Aparo, but Aparo wasn’t available at the time, so he, too, faded out of the picture... leading to the hiring of Mike Kaluta. During Kaluta's legendary run, Wrightson stepped in to ink issue #3, "Kingdom of the Cobra" (panel pictured above) -- providing more tantalizing hints of the unseen shadows that might have materialized had Wrightson become the regular illuminator of the Master of Darkness.
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DOC SAVAGE PAPERBACK COVER PAINTER
JAMES BAMA
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