In the episode The Immortal Murderer, they heard invisible avenger Lamont Cranston confront a Neanderthal museum exhibit come to life, a 100,000-year-old super-villain who called himself Adam Cain.
Explaining that he had effectively been made immortal by radioactive gases, Cain reveals that he knows the Shadow’s secret identity and offers him a partnership in plundering the world.
But wait a minute.
That was virtually the same plot as DC’s Green Lantern 10, the Winter 1943 issue that had appeared on newsstands a year before.
“You know!” exclaimed the nonplussed Green Lantern.
“But of course!” replied Savage. “I have been watching your movements for some time. The mere application of symbolic logic to the 6th degree led me to that inevitable conclusion.”
The inevitable conclusion that the listeners might have reached is that both stories had been dreamed up by the same person, and they’d have been right. The writer was Alfred Bester, later a celebrated science fiction author, who had recycled his Green Lantern story for The Shadow.
Bester appreciated the springboard comics gave him. “The comic book days were over, but the splendid training I received in visualization, attack, dialogue and economy stayed with me forever,” he recalled.
Cranston locked himself into an airless bank vault with Cain in an attempt to destroy them both, but luckily Margot Lane turned up to accidentally shoot the Neanderthal through the heart. Green Lantern’s ring drilled a bottomless pit beneath Savage’s feet, but unlike Cain, the million-year-old monster returned many times to menace humanity.
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| Vandal Savage returned in the early 1960s. |
ReplyDeleteKnut Robert Knutsen wrote:
Then, many years later, on the show Smallville, Vandal Savage appears under the pseudonym "Curtis Knox," played by an actor named Cain. Dean Cain. From Cain to Cain. 😉
Earl Leon Liles wrote:
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed "The Stars My Destination" and "The Demolished Man" — and I think Bester not only won a Hugo, but the first Hugo for best novel. All of that said, he also wrote the Green Lantern oath; how do you top that?
Paul Zuckerman wrote:
ReplyDeleteHave never read that first VS story and did not know that he knew GL's secret identity. What missed opportunity for DC in reprinting those early stories!
It's nice to know that the, um, swiping, was not all from pulps (or other prose) to comics but sometimes comics got swiped as well! Though the actual storylines are basically different enough that one could not accuse Bester of copyright violation. Still, it's interesting to if the Shadow producers knew — I suspect not. While comic book editors were more likely familiar with the goings on in pulps, I suspect most radio producers never picked up a comic book back then.
But--"the mere application of symbolic logic to the 6th degree led me to that inevitable conclusion." Indeed!!! The 6th degree. How does one learn to that in school?
Steve Guy wrote:
ReplyDelete"Huffing magic gas" was the "bitten by a radioactive something" of the 1940s.
"Hey Flash, how'd you get so fast?"
"I inhaled some steam that had previously been water that had a higher-than-usual amount of calcium in it!"