Howard Chaykin Returning To ‘The Shadow’ For Dynamite [SDCC]

Leading up to the start of Comic-Con, Dynamite Entertainment has already made a few big announcements, and this morning the publisher made what might be the biggest so far: Howard Chaykin has signed with Dynamite as writer and artist on an upcoming miniseries The Shadow: Midnight in Moscow. This will be Chaykin's first new story about the legendary pulp character in nearly thirty years.

Chaykin's original work on the character was The Shadow: Blood & Judgment. Written and drawn by Chaykin and published by DC Comics in 1985, the groundbreaking miniseries is sometimes overlooked because it debuted during the same span as several other seminal comics works, but it's nonetheless viewed as a classic. Chaykin was one of the first to take an early adventure character like The Shadow, created in the 1930s and made famous by the work of Walter Gibson, and move it into a modern setting. The results left many readers in awe, including Dynamite Entertainment CEO and publisher Nick Barrucci, who reprinted a collected edition of the miniseries when Dynamite acquired the rights to the Shadow license. In a statement released by Dynamite, Barrucci was enthusiastic about the upcoming story:

"The Shadow: Blood & Judgment is one of my favorite comic series of all time. It absolutely blows my mind, still to this day.  I can't even begin to express how much this means to me as the publisher of the series and how much as a fan of Howard's series.  Howard Chaykin's return to the character is going to be phenomenal.

 

"I'm delighted and grateful to Dynamite for the opportunity to work once again on so legendary a character as The Shadow," said Chaykin in a statement. The Shadow: Midnight in Moscow will take place thirty years before Chaykin's first story, according to the writer/artist, and will tell "the secret story behind the Shadow's disappearance in 1949."