Number 2011: We'll give you a fair trial...then behead you.

I owned a copy of this issue of The Shadow when I was still a young teenager. Someone traded it to me with the promise that it had “the greatest art job Bob Powell ever did!” I was very impressionable in those days and believed the judgments of others, even when I was aware they were trying to get something from me. I knew Bob Powell’s art, and when I received Shadow Comics #78 (1947) in the mail I agreed it was an outstanding job. It didn’t stop me from trading it for something else soon after I read it. After all the years between then and now I got a sense of nostalgia when I found scans online.

The story, “The Sacred Sword of Sanjorojo” is about a thorium trade with a foreign power. It has a small country’s leader replaced by a double in order to sign the treaty. (Only in fiction would this work.) The Shadow intercedes and solves the problem. It has a reference to the Shadow’s “dark cloak” as his method of invisibility...and here I thought he had the power to cloud men’s minds. Or is it just my mind that is clouded?

Posted in: Pappy Comics