My Life In Fandom: Razorfist's Shadowcast Talks New Shadow Projects

While I await the Indiegogo campaign to meet its goal--back it here--today I'm again bringing Razorfist's Shadow podcast to your attention. Shorter episode today, talking about new novels and other media adaptations.

Owner Conde Nast has not known how to bring The Shadow back to his former domination of popular culture for decades, with the '1994 film being the last serious attempt and the more recent comics runs being more of a "do this to keep awareness up" thing more than anything else. That this is now happening indicates that the corporation had a changeover in its halls that includes plans to make another attempt to return to mainstream awareness.

The press release already indicates that this new effort is irredeemably pozzed. If Razorfist isn't enthusiastic about it, then I'm not either.

I also concur that the next wave of cape films are done. The zeitgeist has shifted, the business has changed, and the time to rotate capes off the front burner has come. What will replace them? I don't know, other than it won't be any other go-to options; Mouse Wars is a joke, Fake Trek is a joke, Wick's ran his run (but action films generally have not; it just takes a production willing able to distinguish itself as Wick did), Westerns remain unappealing, Fantasy just rotated out (Witcher notwithstanding), and the mainstream industry remains too pozzed to do anything but launch failboats.

In short, we're looking at a category-wide collapse. I concur with Razorfist that the only sure success to be had is with an iconic hero with utter moral certainty, and that means presenting The Shadow exactly as he is in the pulps, such that it exposes Watchman's Rorshach as the hollow and degenerate mockery that he is. I also concur that The Shadow needs to remain in his time of the 1930s, where the veterans of the Great War are now the generation moving into positions of power and authority while their elders are the aging remnant of Victoria and Edward's era that died with said war.

We'll see how this plays out soon enough. In the meantime, we should concentrate on creating and pushing out own original works. The campaign to help me get "Hounds of Nimrod" out the door is above, and I would appreciate it if you could support it.