This week, Dynamite brings us a mashup made in genre fiction heaven: The Shadow takes a trip into a dimension of sound, sight, and mind, stepping through a door and into The Twilight Zone.
Is it good?
The Twilight Zone: The Shadow #1 (Dynamite Entertainment)
The Plot
- Killing Nazis may be serious business, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be fun, too…
- …as long as your hail of bullets and explosives don’t kill any women and children, of course.
- Car wrecks: The classic alternate reality segue way.
- Too bad Kent Allard couldn’t just go get a C.A.T. scan.
- This argument feels pretty one-sided.
- Wow. Dude actually referred to himself as a hardboiled egg.
- Uh…what?
Is It Good?
No.
The art is nice, but fairly static once we get out of the thrilling opening sequence. The story, however, fares much worse.
The script may have been going for hard-boiled, but it got ‘stilted and painful’ instead. Every interaction feels like forced exposition in dialogue wrapping. The meeting between Allard/Lamont and…uh, himself….had the potential to be really cool, but instead slammed the narrative to a screeching halt.
Also, having The Shadow experience such a stock/standard story feels like a huge waste of potential for a Twilight Zone crossover. I’m not saying we had to have him going up against Cthulhu or something (although that would have been awesome), but having him and Margo fight Shiwan Khan and bunch of faceless thugs was a major let down.
The last page of the issue is intriguing, but not enough for me to continue with this series. Whatever The Shadow knows will have to be discovered without me (unless the second issue steps it up considerably).
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