Regular readers of this blog know that I’m a big fan of The Shadow (mostly the pulp version) and have been for more than fifty years now. So it’s not surprising that I picked up a hardcover of this graphic novel when it first came out in 1988. THE SHADOW 1941: HITLER’S ASTROLOGER is by the writer/artist team of Denny O’Neil and Michael Kaluta, who produced quite a few excellent issues of The Shadow comic book series in the Seventies.
It's also not too surprising that I never got around to reading that copy I
bought back then. I have the attention span of a six-week-old puppy, after all.
However, I discovered a while back that Dynamite Comics has reissued HITLER’S
ASTROLOGER in hardback, and there’s even an ebook edition that’s available on Kindle
Unlimited. (Back in 1988 when the book first came out, none of that would have
made any sense at all.) Anyway, I figured it was finally time for me to read
it.
I’m glad I did. The script by O’Neil and Kaluta, which has The Shadow and his
agents manipulating real-world events involving the Nazi Bund, Rudolf Hess,
Joseph Goebbels, Operation Barbarossa, and Adolph Hitler himself, of course, is
action-packed, intriguing, and moves along very nicely. It doesn’t quite capture
the same feeling as Walter B. Gibson’s magnificent pulp creation, but as
pastiche goes, it’s pretty darned good. Kaluta’s art, though, with inks by Russ
Heath (a comic book legend in his own right) is just outstanding, a superb job
of creating a blend between precarious events in the real world and the
breakneck machinations of The Shadow and his crew of helpers. I had a great
time reading this graphic novel, which, ultimately, is the most important thing
to me. In the unlikely event that you’re a fan of The Shadow but haven’t read
it, like me until recently, I give it a high recommendation.
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