tmp_the _shadow_vs_grendel_promo_2013313739154Since taking over The Shadow license, Dynamite Comics has come out with what seems like a Bakers Dozen worth of Shadow titles, some good, some only okay. And I have taken or left them on a title-by-title basis without really getting excited about too many of them after Garth Ennis’s initial few issues… up until now.

Dynamite and Dark Horse Comics have announced that they will be producing a crossover: The Shadow Vs. Grendel. Colt .45-wielding Vigilante Lamont Cranston versus Wagner’s fork-bladed staff-swinging master criminal Hunter Rose.

Jesus. This idea is such a gimme that I’m almost okay with it being yet another project between Wagner and Mage: The Hero Denied.

tmp_shadow_now_1_cover_2013-1782885318Editor’s Note: Who knows what spoilers lurk in the hearts of men? Oh, I’ve used that one before? Well, I’ll email you a full refund.

Back in the mid-1980s, Howard Chaykin rebooted The Shadow for the 20th Century with his Blood & Judgment miniseries for DC Comics. And that story was a classic, firmly dropping Lamont Cranston into what was then the present, including MAC-10s instead of Colt .45s, a pastel pallate, and, being a Howard Chaykin book, more tits and ass than you can shake a stick at. And even though the book came out when I was 15 years old, long before the widespread adoption of the Internet, I categorically deny that I ever shook my stick at it. But I digress.

Well, that story took place 27 years ago, which means it’s time for another reboot, because God knows that unless someone comes up with a rational explanation for it, you can never allow a comic book character to not age in real time. That’s why Batman ‘s latest wonderful to is a colostomy bag. Jesus, I’m losing the thread again…

Anyway, writer David Liss and artist Colton Worley are tasking themselves with the same goals that Chaykin had back in 1986: bring The Shadow into the present day. And how would a dude carrying a couple of guns and an adenoid laugh fare in the world of the Internet, easily-available pornography, and where the evil that lurks in the hearts of men is leveled off by Adderal and Xanax?

Not nearly as well as you’d hope, actually.

Garth Ennis’s The Shadow does many things effectively, including presenting an interesting “modern” characterization of the title character (considering, unlike Howard Chaykin’s 1980s reboot for DC Comics, Ennis writes this as a period piece), slowly introducing The Shadow’s “faithful companions” for people who aren’t necessarily already familiar with them, and, within 22 pages, setting the stage for a story that is international and possibly terrifying in scope.

However, the thing it does most effectively is to instill a deep and visceral unholy rage toward the government and military of the nation of Japan, circa 1939, to the point where when I was finished with the book, I wished that Oppenheimer and company had built a third nuke. A shit nuke. That caused a mushroom cloud made of feces. Which is a feeling that I personally found to be pretty damned disturbing. But I’ll come back to that.

Let’s move to an admission: I am not all that familiar with The Shadow, at least when it comes to the character’s Street And Smith pulp origins. Sure, I’ve read Chaykin’s miniseries, and I have a couple of issues of the Andy Helfer series that followed it, and I saw the 1994 movie starring Alec Baldwin and that 80s movie actress who isn’t what’s-her-face from Weeds. So what I knew about the character was based on those sources: that he carries two guns, and that he has some kind of power to “cloud men’s minds,” which, in the sources I’ve read, amounts to: “Hey! I have the ability to cloud men’s minds (shoots criminal in face)!”