Since 1937, Margo Lane has been one of The Shadow’s most trusted agents, and occasionally his lover as well. But Margo’s time is running out in Dynamite Entertainment’s newest miniseries starring The Shadow!
Ahead of C2E2, CraveOnline is proud to exclusively announce The Shadow: The Death of Margo Lane, a five-issue miniseries beginning in June from writer and artist Matt Wagner, the creator of Grendel and the writer of The Shadow: Year One and Zorro for Dynamite. Wagner’s son, Brennan Wagner is also onboard The Death of Margo Lane as the colorist. And according to the elder Wagner, the fifth issue of this miniseries will have an extra-length, 30 page conclusion.
CraveOnline recently caught up with Matt Wagner as he told us about the decision to kill off Margo, her place in the Shadow’s history, and how her death will affect the Shadow going forward.
CraveOnline: How did this story come together?
Matt Wagner: I’ve been a fan of The Shadow since my early teens years when there was something of a renascence for the character; DC Comics had just started to release their classic run on the title, written by Dennis O’Neil and beautifully drawn by Michael Kaluta. Additionally, there were suddenly a lot of the old radio shows available on vinyl LP and then Pyramid Books began issuing paperback reprints of the original pulp novels with fantastic cover art by the legendary Jim Steranko.
So, I had a lot of access to this character right around the time you start forming favorite bonds with various pop culture icons. Many years later, I finally got to have my own crack at defining the character when I wrote the semi-origin story The Shadow: Year One for Dynamite Entertainment. I followed that up with a prestige crossover series that was something of a dream come true—pitting one of my all-time fave characters against my own creation in Grendel vs The Shadow. But…I found I still had a hankering to return The Shadow and his milieu. I love that classic 1930s-40s era, both for the fantastic style in architecture, fashion and overall design and the harsh dichotomy of a time that was so full of turmoil and strive. And, as luck would have it, I also found that I had at least one more good Shadow story to tell.
How was Margo Lane chosen to be the victim of this story?
Well, Margo’s a bit of a controversial character to longtime Shadow fans. Of course, The Shadow was the first and most successful in the eventual explosion of “Hero Pulps.” But, at the same time, the character was featured in an enormously popular radio show. Margo was The Shadow’s “constant friend and companion” on the radio program (and, yeah…audiences of the period understood exactly what that meant), but she was absent from the original pulp novels. All of which makes sense when you consider the formats. In a radio play, whose only component is audio, the main character needs someone to talk to, for exposition and to further the plot. In a pulp novel, the author can present a much more internalized or even mysterious POV.
Eventually Walter Gibson, who — writing under the in-house pen name of “Maxwell Grant” — was basically the creator of The Shadow as he’s presented in the pulps and author of the vast lion’s share of the three hundred-plus stories produced over the years, yielded to publisher pressure and introduced Margo as one of The Shadow’s many agents. I found when it was time to write the Year One series that I needed to distill and combine a lot of the disparate elements from the many interpretations of The Shadow in various media—not only the pulps and radio show but also elements of the 1994 film version starring Alec Baldwin. To many younger readers, I realized, this was their only exposure to the character.
So I set Margo up as one of The Shadow’s earliest agents who ultimately becomes his lover and confident. As a character, The Shadow presents a bit of difficulty in that he comes across as so infallible and unstoppable. Much like Sherlock Holmes, The Shadow is a larger-then-life force who’s always one step ahead of we mere mortals and who never seems to lose. I mean, the character’s most famous catchphrase is, “The Shadow knows!” As his most intimate comrade, Margo’s loss will prove to be a huge crack in The Shadow’s black and impenetrable veneer.
Can we safely assume that Margo’s death is something that the Shadow will need to avenge?
Oh, yeah…that’s very safe to assume. One of the elements I included in my portrayal of The Shadow’s history comes from the Baldwin film—the fact that the character has a definite dark and violent past that, through his own determination and training with eastern mystics, he has managed to redirect and contain. He has, literally, harnessed this shadow side of himself in the pursuit and defense of justice. But, as I said, Margo’s death will shatter his ironclad resolve and threaten to unleash The Shadow’s darker side.
When this story takes place, how long have Margo and the Shadow been aligned? And what’s their relationship like going into it?
The story establishes right off the bat that they’ve been together for a number of years. The narrative also mentions an event that fans of the character will recognize as being well into The Shadow’s crusade against crime. As I said, The Shadow’s a difficult character to portray with any sort of human empathy due to the fact that he seems invincible. But, the pulp novels often portray him being caught in various traps and other deadly scenarios with a fair regularity. It’s important to remember that The Shadow isn’t a supernatural spirit; he’s a man. An amazingly capable and powerful man, but still flesh and blood.
And yet part of the character’s appeal is the fact that he seems so much larger-than-life. To use the Sherlock Holmes analogy again, I found it important that we’re never inside The Shadow’s head…that we’re never privy to his private thoughts and machinations; his mind doesn’t work like ours. And so, like Arthur Conan Doyle did with Dr. Watson, I provided our hero a narrator in the form of Margo Lane, a story structure I’ve used in my every portrayal of the characters. Through her up-close-and-personal observations, we get to see behind The Shadow’s cloak a bit and view the man at the heart of the myth.
That said, theirs is something of a strange relationship in that Margo is both The Shadow’s lover as well as one of his agents. This places her in a rather conflicted position in that she’s never quite sure which role he considers her foremost. He’s obviously driven and obsessive in his crusade and definitely not a “sharing-his-feelings” kind of guy. So, even though Margo loves and admires him enormously…she’s also not quite confident of his own sentiments about their relationship.
Click over to the next page for the second part of our interview with Matt Wagner about The Shadow: The Death of Margo Lane!
