The City of Doom/The Fifth Face

I won't go into detail here because enough has already been laid out for you. Maxwell Grant is really Walter B. Gibson, famous magician/occultist and pulp writer who brilliantly turned the crimefighter/vigilante The Shadow into a truly mysterious and frightening figure in his stories about the character. Please don't pass this up if you love adventure/pulp/crime stories with a dose of the fantastic. Long live The Shadow!

Nostalgia Ventures and Anthony Tollin have teamed up to do a comprehensive reprint of several Street & Smith pulp heroes. At present, they are doing double reprints of The Shadow and Doc Savage. Shortly, they will start new series reprinting The Avenger and The Whisperer. All have complete pulp texts (no edits or removals, like past reprints), tho reset so its easier to read, the original illustrations, reprinted covers (one is used as the cover of the book, but both original pulp covers are shown on the back), and several additional articles and additions. Hopefully, they can succeed to reprinting all these characters in these new editions, they are all excellent. With The Shadow having over 325 pulp novels, only a few reprinted, for the most part they are avoiding those that have been reprinted. They do try to pick two that more or less 'go together' in terms of a common theme. This volume reprints "The City of Doom" (May 15, 1936) and "The Fifth Face" (Aug 15, 1940). The cover of "The City of Doom" is used as the cover of the volume, but both covers are shown on the back. The common theme of this volume is "Supervillians". The Shadow did have a few, very few, reoccuring villians. And some of this was due to competition of the comic books. In some ways, its also a followup volume to #9, which features stories that inspired Batman and some of his villians. "The City of Doom" provides a return of the villian "Voodoo Master" (Dr. Mocquino) who first appeared in "The Voodoo Master" reprinted in volume 3. In some ways, this character seems an inspiration to "Dr Death", an early Batman villian. "The Fifth Face" provides another supervillian, known as "Five Face". For extras in this issue, we get: An intro by Harlan Ellison A short article by pulp historian Will Murray on "the Rise of the Supervillian", which focuses on some of the supervillians in The Shadow, and the Batman supervillians they inspired. A Shadow radio scrip, "The Immortal Murderer" (Dec 10 1944) written by SF author Alfred Bester, along with a short intro by Anthony Tollin who speaks of Bester and the work he had done in comics, radio, and SF. He also talks about the basis of this villian in the character of the immortal Vandal Savage, which Bester created as a villian for the Golden Age Green Lantern, and who continues to be a major villian in the DC Comics Universe to this day.