I haven't reviewed any pulp novels featuring the Shadow at the Nameless Zine but I'm 87 books in with my runthrough of 'Doc Savage' novels in pulp publication order. I presume that's why the folk behind 'The Shadowed Circle' reached out to see if I'd be interested in reviewing their magazine. I was happy to say yes, because I have experienced the Shadow in multiple media: a couple of the novels, way back when, but also a few episodes of the radio show and the movie with Alec Baldwin. I'm seven years in to my 'Doc Savage' runthrough, which puts me about halfway, so it'll be a while before I dive into other pulp heroes, but I'll get there.

Fortunately, 'The Shadowed Circle' works very well for someone who has a general grounding with the Shadow but is far from an expert. In fact, issue #3 includes the second half of an introduction to the character in the pulps by Todd Severin and Keith Holt, which was a solid refresher course for me. I knew some of what they talk about but not everything and it was easy to follow. I enjoyed it a great deal, even though I hadn't read part one.

Most other pieces here were accessible enough to work both for a new reader and an experienced one, because of how they were phrased. There's an interview with Michael Uslan, a lawyer and film producer who used to be a comic book writer who started out working on 'The Shadow' and a look back by pulp historian and author Will Murray on his experiences covering the making of the 1994 feature film as a journalist who happened to be an expert on the character. These work well from a Shadow-centric focus but also as general cultural history, looking generally at how the comic book and film industries treat beloved characters. Again, I know a little about both but learned much in these pieces.

Even more general, there's a look by Albert J. Emery at the classic question posed by novelist E. L. Doctorow, about why the thoroughly efficient heroes of the day, whether pulp characters like Doc Savage or the Shadow or comic book superheroes like Superman and Wonder Woman, didn't take care of Adolf Hitler, a real life supervillain if ever there was one, once they knew the true horrors of what he was doing. Further to that, are they morally complicit in his crimes beause they failed to stop them? Of course, Emery focuses on the Shadow but the question is a general one and what he comes up with could be applied to so many other characters, even if his details are specific to a single one of them.

Going a little deeper from a fan's perspective, is a piece by Tim King about a specific character in the Shadow's universe who I don't recall at all from my minor flirtations with it in decades past. I still enjoyed his article, because, like the others already mentioned, it's written from enough of a general perspective to work for newbies like me but, I would expect, digs deeply enough to work a level further in for long term fans. If the magazine continues with this sort of approach, it should thrive because it'll satisfy the die hard fans without alienating new readers who might wonder a little about a character they've heard of and maybe experienced here and there but don't know a lot about.

In fact, the only piece here that I found myself skipping paragraphs on is the last one, in which Tim Hewitt looks at the publication history of 'The Shadow' pulp north of the border in Canada. When he gets down to the detail of the cover on Canadian issue X being a rework of the cover on the U.S. edition Y, I started to gloss over and move onward. I'm sure this is thoroughly useful information and he certainly seems to have done his research, but I'm not at the level of familiarity to be able to care. It's meant for the die hards and I'm not one of them.

That said, I still found Hewitt's article fascinating, because, like the Uslan interview, it talks about how the comic book industry functions, with a focus on a specific highly unusual moment in time in which traditional processes couldn't continue and the publishers had to figure out new ones to get these stories into print in two countries. Anyone with a general interest in pulps ought to find this slice of history fascinating, even if, like me, they might skip a few of the more issue-specific parts.

'The Shadowed Circle' appears to be published three times a year in a large print format and as an e-book. The covers are in colour but the inside is all monochrome. It's not the longest magazine in the world at 66 pages in a reasonably large font size, but it's so accessible that it's easy to read on through from the beginning to the end. I enjoyed it a great deal and will happily dive into issue #4 next month. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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