For me, it's the shadow.
Favorite Ancient Super Hero
Parker Howard
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Alexander Thomas
Rocambole
Liam Torres
The pulp books are worth checking out. The Shadow pumps the bad guys full of lead. It is super efficient.
Now that is an obscure reference.
>But Rocambole was not dead!
Jaxon Bennett
...
Nicholas Powell
The radio show, at least the Orson Welles one, doesn't have much lead pumping at all. I guess I can see why, but I was definitely expecting it
Ayden Jones
Lifelong Doc Savage fan here. I wrote reviews of all 182 original novels and read the reprints until the covers fell off.
Christian Jenkins
The Shadow is scarier when you realizing he's having a deadly shoot out with gangsters and he's LAUGHING about it!
Logan Lee
Also, the Spider is a trip. He goes through so much turmoil and traumatic injuries while cities burn down and horrible deaths kill thousands of people in every issue.
Also, Stan Lee always said he read The Spider as a young man. This story seems like an inspiration for Iron Man. The villain is called the Iron Man and he leads a squads of men in powered armor that knock down buildings and have guns built into their gauntlets,.
Nathaniel Stewart
Yeah, the radio show had to simplify a lot of things from the pulps to fit the format. It's how he ended up getting invisibility and hypnosis superpowers instead of just being extremely (borderline superhuman) good at stealth and manipulation.
I do think they did a pretty good job at still retaining The Shadow's karmic punishments, and if anything they made those worse for the show since he could hypnotize criminals into suicide and whatnot.
It's not like he was anywhere near as trigger happy in the pulps as later adaptations made him into, but then again it seems like those wanted to adapt Spider stories with The Shadow.
Jason Thomas
Orson Welles Shadow is great, because he's basically a scenery chewing Vincent Price style villain, except he terrorizes criminals and occasionally trolls the cops.