Monday, December 13, 2021

MYTHCOMICS: "THE SHADOW OF DUSK" (THE SPIRIT SECTION,, 6-16-42)

 Though READ COMICS ONLINE has become my go-to site for scans of obscure comics, even they couldn't provide assistance for this essay: reviewing "The Shadow of Dusk," thus far reprinted only in the fifth issue of THE SPIRIT ARCHIVES, and nowhere online.



The titular adversary featured in "Shadow," in fact, was only used four times by Will Eisner (and any collaborators involved). Mister Dusk first appears in June 1941, and appears to be a loony who kills a man for no particular reason. He then comes across the Spirit, invites him to his lair to meet his crazy wife Twilight (called a "savage" but not given any particular nationality). Inevitably both Dusk and Twilight try to kill the hero, who captures them and has them put away in an asylum. The two of them get free that same year for a Halloween story and then obligingly go back to the asylum once the holiday is over. Both of these are amusing but not particularly mythic.



The third story, though, shows Eisner in a different sort of antic moon-- metaphysically antic, that is. He starts out with a splash panel that shows the Spirit standing in a roughly cruciform position with his own amplified shadow behind him, while to the right appears a quote from a Walt Whitman poem about the questionable identity between the speaker and his own shadow.

The story proper opens with a thunder-storm erupting over the asylum where Dusk is imprisoned. (His wife Twilight is mentioned but not seen.) The madman dances in his cell to the "symphony" of thunder and  lightning, only to stop when he notices that his shadow has wandered off. Providentially the storm then blasts open Dusk's cell, so that he can go looking for his missing other half.

Meanwhile, at the Spirit's lair, his buddy Ebony sees a menacing shadow show up and try to strangle Ebony's own shadow. The bad shade disappears when the Spirit shows up.

Dusk goes looking for his other half at police HQ, and Commissioner Dolan, apparently infected by the villain's nuttiness, takes Dusk home with him. Dusk then handcuffs and slugs Dolan and abducts the cop's daughter Ellen. Moments later the Spirit shows up at Dolan's house, bursting to tell the commish about Ebony's weird experience and to go into a diatribe about shadow-folklore-- at least until the hero finds out his girlfriend has been kidnapped.

The Spirit and Dolan decide to check out the villain's former hideout, and the Spirit is highly amused to see that Ellen has somehow turned the tables on Dusk, threatening him with nothing but her fists. Possibly Dusk was de-powered by the loss of his shadow? In any case, Dusk's shadow appears and starts strangling the shadow of the hero, who chokes as if personally assaulted. However, the Spirit just happens to have brought along a camera, and he "captures" the spirit in the camera-film. (Here one presumes Eisner was playing around with the belief attributed to primitives, that a camera could capture the spirit of anyone photographed.) 

Dolan then hauls Dusk back to the asylum. The Spirit shows the camera-film to a scientist, who confirms that the image of the shadow is there. However, somehow the shadow gets loose again, and when it's seen elsewhere, the Spirit and his scientist friend confirm that the image has vanished from the film. At story's end the shadow remains on the loose and is never reunited with Dusk.

With or without his shadow, Dusk makes one more appearance, but in reduced stature. In a story spoofing the late forties' rise of Jane Russell's star, Dusk tries to kill the Spirit and launch a blackmail operation-- all far from the sustained looniness of his first three appearances.




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