 Who is the shadow? Only the shadow knows. But through this video I hope to explore the history of the shadow and discover who he truly is. This isn't the Alec Baldwin shadow. No, no, no, no This is the shadow. Movie studios take liberties when adapting anything and everything to the big screen. So for now, we're simply getting to stick to the original material, radio, and comics. The shadow made his first appearance on July 31st, 1930 in the detective story hour in the first radio broadcast of the program. In this depiction, James Liccardo played the shadow, but he was then replaced four months later by character actor Frank Radick Jr. On April 1st, 1931, the shadow moved into print publication with the first of what would become a twice monthly publication entitled The Living Shadow. It's in this first publication that Harry Vincent is saved from suicide by the shadow and is recruited to watch Scanlon, the courier for Wang Fu, who happens to be the criminal kingpin of Chinatown. It's also in this story that the alternate identities of the shadow are introduced as Fritz the janitor, various Chinatown street people, Ling Chao, and English Johnny. The appearance and character of the shadow evolved gradually over his 87 year publication history. It was in the 1940s that artists introduced the red scarf covering just below the shadow's nose. The ability to cloud men's minds was introduced during a 1937 radio drama. It's here that it's explained that the shadow had learned the uncanny ability while traveling through East Asia. Time constraints of the 1930s radio made it difficult to explain to listeners where the shadow was hiding, and thus the ability was born out of necessity. It's revealed in the 1933 issue The Shadow's Shadow that his real name is actually Kent Allard, and not Lamont Cranston like the movie depicts. He was a French aviator who fought for the French during World War I and became known as the Black Eagle, which was later revised to be the Dark Eagle. Post-war, Allard challenges himself by waging war on criminals. He falsified his death in the South American jungles and returns to New York to adopt numerous identities to hide his existence. One of the identities Allard assumes, indeed the best known, is that of Lamont Cranston, a wealthy young man about town. In the pulps, Cranston is a separate character. Allard frequently disguises himself as Cranston and adopts his identity. While Cranston travels the world, Allard assumes his identity in New York. In their first meeting, Allard as the shadow threatens Cranston, saying he has a range to switch signatures on various documents and other means that will allow him to take over the Lamont Cranston identity. Not entirely, unless Cranston agrees to allow Allard to impersonate him when he is abroad. Although alarmed at first, Cranston is amused by the irony of this situation and agrees. The two men sometimes meet in order to impersonate each other. The shadows other disguises include Henry Arnard, Isaac Twombly, and Fritz among several others. In radio, however, the identity of the shadow being Kent Allard was dropped for simplicity and was only Lamont Cranston with no other identity or aliases. The shadow's rogues gallery consisted of a wide variety of enemies which were predecessors to the modern-day supervillains, ranging from criminal kingpins to mad scientists and everything in between. Among his villains are Shawan Khan, Dr. Rodel Mokino, the voodoo master, Bernard Stark, the prince of evil, and the wasp, with a recurring criminal organization of the hand. During the shadow's long publication history, Straten Smith, the owner of the shadow, licensed the character to many other publication companies. The syndicate published his first newspaper comic strip on June 17, 1940. Archie Comics published an eight-issue series of the shadow between August of 1964 and September of 1965, under the company's Mighty Comics imprint. During this time, Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel wrote a few of the later issues. DC Comics then published their interpretation of the character in a series lasting from November of 1973 to September of 1975. It's during this time that the shadow had its first crossover with Batman in DC Comics Batman number 253 from November of 1973. In Batman number 259 they once again team up and it's revealed that the shadow saved a young Bruce Wayne's life. DC Comics once again adapted the shadow in 1986 for the four-issue miniseries The Shadow, Blood and Judgment. It's during this time that the shadow was placed in the modern era and given many upgrades to his arsenal. An ongoing monthly series for the character continued in 1987 with 19 issues and two annuals. Marvel Comics licensed the character in 1988 and set the story during World War II with The Shadow, Hitler's astrologer, a one-shot appearance. From 1989 to 1992 DC once again published a new ongoing shadow series entitled The Shadow Stripes. Set in the 1930s, it features his first team up with Doc Savage and often led him to encounter many celebrities of the time, such as Albert Einstein, Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh. The mid-1990s saw Dark Horse Comics acquire the rights to the shadow from Condi Nast, who owned the rights to the character at the time. During the Dark Horse era, many shadow miniseries were published such as In The Quails of Leviathan, Hell's Heatwave, The Shadow and the Mysterious Three, a comics adaptation of the 1994 film, another team up with Doc Savage entitled The Case of the Shrinking Skeletons, and one final Dark Horse team up being Ghost and the Shadow in 1995. In August of 2011, Dynamite licensed the shadow from Condi Nast for several ongoing comic book series, the first of which debuted on April 19th, 2012. Soon after this series ended, Dynamite followed it up with the eight issue miniseries, Masks, where the shadow teams up with other pulp comic heroes like The Spider, Green Hornet and Kato, a 1930s version of Zorro, the Black Bat, Green Lama, Miss Fury and Black Terror. Dynamite then followed that up with The Shadow Year One, The Shadow, Green Hornet, Dark Knights, and The Shadow Now, which was set in the modern era. It was announced earlier in 2017 that Dynamite had secured the rights for another ongoing shadow comic book series. When Bob Kane and Bill Finger first conceived of The Batman, fingers suggested they patterned the character after pulp mystery, men, such as The Shadow. Finger then used Partners of Peril, a shadow pulp written by Theodore Tinsley as the basis for Batman's debut story. The case of the chemical syndicate, which Finger later publicly acknowledged, Alan Morris credited The Shadow as one of the key influences for the creation of V, the title character in his DC Comics miniseries V for Vendetta. But what happened to The Shadow's original rights holder, Street and Smith? They stopped publishing all their pulps and comics in 1949, selling off several of their titles to popular publications. Sales had declined with the advent of television. Condé Nast's publications bought the company for more than $3.5 million in 1959. Currently, Condé Nast is an American mass media company founded in 1909 and based at One World Trade Center and is owned by advanced publications. I hope you guys enjoyed this trip through the history of The Shadow. If you did and you want to continue receiving great content from us, go ahead and hit that subscribe button. And don't be afraid to leave a comment as well. Until next time my friends, I'm Shannon for Comic-Con TV, telling you to stay in the light because The Shadow knows.