The Shadowmen #1

May 1990. Cover price £1.00.
28 pages. B&W contents.
Trident Comics

Cover by Daniel Vallely.

Contents:

 2 Credits / Indicia

 3 The Shadowmen, part one, w: Mark Millar; p: Andrew Hope, i: Ben Dilworth.

27 Saviour in-house advertisement.

The cover is a throwback to sixties television, which might entice people into purchasing the comic for nostalgic reasons. Which is a very risky proposition, given that the issue's contents are not entirely in line with storytelling techniques which are so beloved from such entertainment. It is possible to pick out The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits in its overall design, and the figure recalls Lost in Space's opening credits, with the spiral hinting at The Time Tunnel. Don't be fooled, as this is something entirely different.

Your hint is at the bottom of the cover, in stark white, reading "Suggested for Mature Readers."

Ignore this warning at your peril. The Shadowmen isn't a title which sits easily alongside... anything, really. Willfully obtuse, the story takes much more work to decipher than it really deserves, and should an unwary reader approach it with hopes of encountering a layered, intelligent, and compelling narrative, full of revealing insights, they will be extremely disappointed.

Opening with a man shaving his head in what appears to be a public convenience, replete with graffitti, there's no sense of where this story takes place. The next page shifts location, where Karen (whose home it is) and Joannie are watching an adult video. Karen excuses herself to use the toilet, and on walking through the door finds herself confronted with a group of people who look as if they belong in the seventeenth century, who are dancing while blindfolded. Once more the action shifts, and we get to see a television evangelist deliver a speech on casting out demons.

In the space of seven pages we are introduced to three distinct settings, each raising their own questions as well as encouraging debate on how they are interconnected. There's no indication that answers are going to be forthcoming in the immediate future, so we are free to ponder the meaning of these disparate elements - the most resonant influence seems to be what has come to be known as the Moberly-Jourdain incident, or the Versailles time-skip. It isn't a one-to-one recreation, imbued with a dream-like sensibility thanks to the blindfolds which the dancers wear, but it speaks to the overall story.

We are deep in territory which Fortean Times, Alien Encounters, and other titles (many from the nineties) would cover, mostly in the wake of The X-Files. As such, this is slightly ahead of a pop-cultural phenomena movement. Only not as well written as most exponents of Forteana.

Black-suited gentlemen, wearing hats and dark sunglasses, arrive at Karen's home to warn her about telling the story of her supernatural encounter again, as it is causing a scare. To mae sure that she follows their instructions, she is left with broken bones and teeth. When Joannie arrives unexpectedly, hearing the commotion inside the house, a suited man is forced to shoot her.

It never snowed when I was a girl.

It never rained either.

Wasn't even cloudy. The sun used to shine every day, and you could get into movies for a cent.

Standards have dropped.

A homeless woman, pushing her shopping cart along the street, is accosted by a youth - whom she uses undefined powers upon in order to make his eyeball explode. She then goes to purchase gin, and decides that it is time people listened to her...

An early work, with a number of storytelling problems and artistic missteps, this nevertheless contains a couple of interesting ideas, though so swamped under hesitant scripting and uncertain artwork as to diminish the power of its concepts. The lettering here is poor, making dialogue and text boxes throughout a chore to read, though this is hardly the most pressing concern. Unsubtle is hardly an adequate description, with homophobic and misogynistic elements clear from the start, making the text more problematic than entertaining - entirely unnecessary for dramatic purposes, as is the level of violence.

Suggesting something awful is more powerful than explicitly delineating events.

At the conclusion of the first part we are no closer to identifying the protagonist of the story, nor identifying the primary antagonist. There are three main threats shown, though the underlying danger - an increase in supernatural activity - is given as a root cause of events in the title.

It is difficult to care about these events when they are so casually revealed, one by one, without establishing any real humanity. We don't spend enough time with the people in the story to see them as anything more than chess pieces being moved across the board, playing out their roles in a game which we aren't given the rules to understand. Worse, we are actively discouraged to draw conclusions from prior depictions of similar-looking individuals - the suited men aren't the Men in Black of popular lore, as their violent natures sit at odds with accounts in both fiction and documented events.

The Shadowmen

#02