MYTHCOMICS: SHADOW LADY (1995-96)

I’ll make a slight addition to the structural categories I introducedhere. specifying that novellas take the same two forms as do novels; the compact and the episodic. This week’s mythcomic belongs to the “episodic novella” category, but has Just as much unity as any other form I’ve examined in this essay-series.

When I first read the English reprint of Masakazu Katsura’s SHADOW LADY in the early 2000s, I don’t imagine that I perceived the unity in the narrative’s use of psychological and sociological motifs. Now I regard the series' unity as all the more impressive in that I've learned how the series’ run in WEEKLY SHONEN JUMP came to a premature end. This development forced Katsura to truncate one of his storylines, and yet the primary narrative thread remains whole. SHADOW LADY also keeps its own identity despite borrowing tropes from both Eastern concepts (SAILOR MOON, CUTIE HONEY) and their Western kindred (BATMAN, DR. JEKYLL AND MISTER HYDE, and maybe a little Harlan Ellison on the side).

The series transpires in the fictional Gray City. The first page alludes to a vague class struggle between poor people, who “eke out a miserable existence” in the metropolis, and rich people, who “live in a beautiful city with the decadent architecture of a glorious past.” But Katsura never directly returns to this theme, for the reader never sees even the sentimentalized poor people one could witness in Golden Age BATMAN comics. 

For that matter, Katsura doesn’t show very many of the filthy rich, for most of Gray City seems inhabited by middle-class laborers. Presumably Katsura only introduced the idea of wealth-inequity to make his imaginary city seem a little more real. But in keeping with its name, Gray City is a midpoint between the extremities of black and white, and thus it incarnates the more abstract aspects of Batman’s Gotham, with its sprawling towers and its displays of conspicuous consumption. Yet, despite some visual tropes lifted from the Bat-series—Shadow Lady has batwings on her costume and her sidekick De-Mo looks like Bat-Mite—the starring character's modus operandi resembles that of Catwoman, who is seemingly addicted to the thrill of theft. But unlike Catwoman, Shadow Lady is more purely devoted to the thrills, in that she neither keeps her loot nor gives it away to the poor a la Robin Hood. She merely wants to continually tweak the noses of the Gray City police. The thief-heroine doesn’t even have any particular animus for cops; she’s just being faithful to her nocturnal nature, ever seeing to undermine the orderly processes of daytime consciousness.

The Jekyll-and-Hyde aspect of the narrative is best seen in Shadow Lady’s own daytime identity: shy twenty-something Aimi Komori. Aimi lives alone and works at a job that apparently allows her a middle-class level of comfort, so she has no real beef with the moneyed classes. But whereas Jekyll’s attempts at nobility are subverted by Hyde’s brutality, Aimi’s painful reticence finds its counterpart in the flamboyant femininity of Shadow Lady. True, the powers of her other identity—fantastic strength, leaping tall buildings with the proverbial single bound—make it possible for Shadow Lady to flaunt her body, particularly with a boob-window in the chest of her costume. (She can also morph into three other costumed forms, but they play only minor roles in the overall narrative and were probably just tips of the hat to CUTIE HONEY.)

SAILOR MOON, who transforms thanks to her “moon prism makeup,” is probably a more fundamental influence. Katsura makes his readers wait through two separate arcs before getting to Shadow Lady’s origin, which come down to “Batman being created by Bat-Mite.” De-Mo, like the other inhabitants of his extradimensional Demon World, apparently exists just to bestow occult powers on anyone who summons them. De-Mo’s only power, though, is his “magical eye shadow,” and no one in the mortal realm has ever requested that power. So De-Mo crosses into the mortal plane, picks out Aimi Komori, and gives her a “super-makeover” with the eye-shadow applicator. A roughly similar setup in SAILOR MOON leads the heroine to fight for cosmic justice, but this particular magical girl is mostly in the game for kicks, even if she does have a quasi-heroic arc.

Boy-girl romance, though, is as important in SHADOW LADY as in SAILOR MOON, right down to having a hunky guy who’s friendly to the magical girl’s regular self but really grooves to her secret identity. Here the romantic interest is a gadget-making policeman, Bright Honda, who plays the moral role that Batman plays to Catwoman: ceaselessly trying to make her give up a life of crime and become a square citizen. On some level, capturing the Shadow Lady would also constitute a sexual conquest, and thus the heroine prefers to prolong the courtship as long as possible. Shadow Lady even gets a costumed romantic rival, good-girl vigilante Spark Girl, who plays “light” to Shadow Lady’s “darkness” and hopes to bring the thief-girl down in order to end her allure for policeman Bright.

Though Shadow Lady can easily frustrate real-world cops, she encounters more forceful opponents in the Demon World Police. These otherworldly enforcers initially claim that their purpose is to slay De-Mo for crossing into the human world and to expunge Aimi’s memory of him. Aimi, who’s come to think of De-Mo as her mischievous little brother, tries to make a deal with the demon-cops, only to find that these cops have manipulated the whole encounter in order to obtain the services of Shadow Lady. Now the lady thief must use her purloining powers to seek out five demon-stones, which if brought together can doom both mortal and demon worlds.

Presumably Katsura would have devoted five separate arcs to each of the stones, but for the news that his narrative had to be cut short. The overall result is that Shadow Lady contends first with one demon named Medu, then finds three other stones without contending with any supernatural opponents, after which the final arc pits her against the fifth and last demon, Zera. Non-Japanese readers will probably never know what other ideas Katsura would have fleshed out. That said, the artist manages to create a crucial balance between the two demons encountered by the heroine. Zera is just a standard ugly-ass monster, out to foment destruction for its own sake (much as Shadow Lady steals for the sake of thrills). In contrast, though Medu turns women into stone statues (making him a sex-reversed version of Medusa), he’s also a demon who, like Honda, plays by the rules, and isn’t ready to destroy the world unless humanity has reached the necessary level of iniquity. Thus Medu the “Square Demon” comes to Shadow Lady’s aid in such a way that she can save the two worlds from destruction.

To be sure, none of the heavy “light vs. darkness” tropes should obscure the fact that SHADOW LADY has a lot of silly comedy in it, particularly with respect to T&A humor more befitting CUTIE HONEY than SAILOR MOON. Still, Katsura resists the temptation to let his heroine “get religion” and to become a crimefighter after having saved the world. Instead, the heroine mysteriously disappears, and Gray City returns to a dull normalcy. Katsura’s last few pages, sans dialogue or sound-effects, shows how even the cops have become bored with ordinary crime—until the news comes that their playful nemesis is back in business. The final panel shows Shadow Lady leaping over the high towers of Gray City, a clear reference to the visual trope of Batman gliding over the city he protects. But Shadow Lady exists not to protect people against crime, but against dullness, not unlike the prankster-figure of Harlan Ellison’s “Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman,” which is also concerned with opposing the forces of daytime repression wherever possible.