Ghost of a Ghost #1
Art by Dave Johnson, Michal Avon Oeming, and Taki Soma
Digging how the Hellboy-verse is branching out with different genres. Miss Truesdale's sword and sorcery, the Kirby inspired Graveyard of Time...now we got 60's spy antics.
The Shadow v3: The Light of the World by Chris Roberson, Giovanni Timpano, Fabrico Guerra, and co.
The Shadow v4: Bitter Fruit by Roberson, Timpano, Andrea Mutti, Guerra, and co.
Dynamite began publishing Shadow comics in 2012, and seemed to lose the license around the pandemic. Their first (only?) ongoing series kicked off with an arc by Garth Ennis, which I do not have and now fetches about double its cover price. The second writer on the series is not my cup of tea, but the third, who wrote thirteen out of twenty-five issues? I love Chris Roberson. Even after reading these two trades, I still love Roberson.
The Light of the World contains a single story where where the Shadow takes on a Vietnamese nun/nurse trained to kill sinners who makes her way to the big apple. The story feels padded and poorly structured. Esclarmonde Nguyen, dubbed “The Light” was born in French-occupied Vietnam. A priest took notice of her and brought her to France to train with a group of warrior nuns. Roberson reveals this piecemeal, a bit at the beginning of each of the six parts. Her killings cause the real structural issue with the comic. Nguyen strikes at representatives of the Seven Deadly Sins, and with the murder the comic opens with, she has claimed three wealthy victims representing lust, greed, and gluttony, plus an apparent vagabond with an unknown identity. She strikes at a fifth victim at the end of the first issue. One of the Shadow's agents alerts him that this victim, a drunk rich man, seems to fit the victim profile. From what little Roberson and Timpano tell the audience, the fifth victim seems to be a repeat of gluttony, if anything. It also seems like quite a coincidence that Nguyen does, in fact, attack this one drunk rich man in a city likely full of them.
The Shadow fights Nguyen off; she possess such skills with her swords that she can knock the Shadow's bullets out of the air. The man (never named) makes it to the hospital where in her identity as a nun, Nguyen gets around his armed guard and kills him. Four issues of the series remain, and Nguyen only makes one more attempt, going after Margo Lane after she plays up her own laziness during a visit to the hospital where Nguyen works. The Shadow and Lane eventually figure out the first victim was a Frenchmen who knew Nguyen back there. She killed him to protect her identity, and because he (grossly) came on to her.
The comic has some nice passages near the end where the Shadow and Nguyen debate their own philosophies; he seeks vengeance for crimes committed while she condemns people for “human weakness and frailty.” Frankly, I wish Roberson explored this more throughout the comic, instead of confining it to their final confrontation.
Visually, it is a mess. Timpano's fairly loose pencils combined with the palette Guerra uses makes the comic look like a muddy mess most of the time. Nguyen, ironically, shines like a beacon whenever she appears on page, and marks the one exception to this. Unfortunately, I cannot give anyone here too much credit; the visuals for Nguyen in costume, especially the glow, seem to be based on the appearance of Elisa Cameron, Ghost at Dark Horse. She actually met the Shadow in a one-shot back in 1995 and was revived herself by Dark Horse the same year Dynamite started publishing Shadow comics. Timpano also draws Lane during the scene where Nguyen attacks her in about the most exploitative way possible, wearing a low-cut, short bathrobe fresh from the shower.
Bitter Fruit contains two stories. With the first, neither story receives a title, Roberson crafts the most successful of his three arcs. This globe-hoping tale offers a new narrator each issue and reveals new information about Kent Allard's past before he became the Shadow. Lane takes the lead in the first issue, where she and the Shadow investigate the kidnapping of several debutantes. In some 30 issues of the Shadow examined on the blog, this definitely offers the clearest vision of why Lane works with the Shadow: it gives her an outlet to break the norms of gender roles in the 1930s, especially now that she has aged past the debutante stage herself. Roberson writes a fun scene where Lane and a friend discuss other female adventures from the era who have gotten married or engaged-- Nora (Charles, of the the Thin Man series) and Dian (Belmont, paramour of Wesley Dodds, the Golden Age Sandman).
When he breaks up the kidnapping ring, the Shadow finds a severed male finger with a ring on it that looks like his ring. This discovery leads him on a journey to a Siberian gulag, Tibet, Guatemala, and finally back to New York. In the first two locations, he meets with men he once served with in the Seventh Star, a secret branch of Russian intelligence under Tsar Nicholas II. Roberson reveals that the stone from the Shadow's ring, the Girasol, and its mate, were eyes in a Guatemalan statue. Allard apparently received the first one after crash-landing there and befriending the indigenous population. Another man from the Seventh Star, one who goes by different names, but his colleagues knew him as the White Tiger stole the second. Already a man of questionable morals, the fall of the Romanov dynasty made him even worse. The Tiger thought the second Girasol might give him the same air of authority as Allard, but its meaning did not translate to New York. He freed himself from the kidnapping ring, but not before losing his finger and the ring. Now, he lives on the streets, still committing horrible crimes to eke out a minimal living.
If the Light of the World seemed padded, this one seems too short. The Shadow appears to stumble upon the White Tiger, four pages from the end of the final issue. As the Tiger narrates the entire issue, the reader gets no sense of how the Shadow found him. It comes off as either an accident or omniscience on the part of the Shadow. This narrative hiccup bothers me less about the arc than the thematic implication of the Shadow's visits to the gulag, Tibet and Guatemala. In those places, he confronts evils that, at least to my 2025 eyes, seem far greater and more systemic than the street crime he fights in New York. Of course, this problem often arises when discussing the superhero genre that the Shadow helped to inspire, but it is one the genre has sought to address in different ways since the late 1960s when DC Comics introduced the Wayne Foundation. It does not feel like Roberson ever gives us enough of anything from the Shadow himself during his twelve issues; the Shadow feels like a cipher, more of a vehicle to explore others than a character himself. In a sense, that is in keeping with the origins of the character as a host for a radio anthology show, but it feels hopelessly old fashioned.
Roberson's final two-parter is barely worth talking about. A dragon lady stereotype makes it seem like zombies are attacking New York. The little twist of the story (she got poison and mind control chemicals onto people by stealing soap from laundromats and then selling them laced soap herself) feels like a more elaborate version one Roberson used in the Tibet issue of the previous arc (a washerwoman soaks clothes in gasoline so they combust in the sun). Timpano's art does not improve in this volume. Mutti draws #19, and their style blends together with Guerra's palette more successfully than Timpano's, but still is largely unappealing.
