The Shade (original) (raw)

[The Shade]

Real Name: Richard Swift
Aliases: Many, including James Black, Louie Fox
Occupation: Various, including criminal
Past Group Membership: Injustice Society of the World
Base of Operations: Opal City
Past Base of Operations: Keystone City, Kansas
First Appearance: Flash Comics #33 (September 1942)

In 1838, a young man wandered the streets of London, dazed and amnesiac. Taken in by Piers Ludlow and his family, he recovered his strength but not his memory, until the day the Ludlows tried to kill him. In desperation he lashed out, and discovered the force of darkness he could control. He killed all the Ludlows save the two youngest, who had remained at home—and whose descendants would pursue him for a century and a half. Not long afterward he encountered Charles Dickens, who had known him in his previous life and, it seems, witnessed his transformation.

The man who would become known as the Shade had stopped aging, and could use the shadow he controlled to heal most wounds. Over time, he began to wonder if he was truly “alive” in any real sense. Feeling set apart from the world’s mortals, he spent the next century living a life of adventure and lawlessness. Every few years another Ludlow would attack him and die. Every few years he would return to Opal City in the American west, eventually coming to call it home.

There was another man who had gained the same power of shadow, and on the very same night: Simon Culp. He and the Shade clashed many times over the years, until an explosion during a fight in the midst of the London Blitz fused them together. The Shade was unaware of this for decades, but at times of extreme fatigue the Culp personality would become dominant.

The Joust

[[The Shade (Silver Age) - Flash #151]](bigimages/shade-silverage.jpg)

In the 1940s the first wave of super-heroes and villains appeared. The Shade desired the challenge of battling an equal, and he chose theFlash. He hid his ability to be lethal, concealed his shadow’s origin by allowing people to think it was created by his cane*, and embarked on a series of crimes in Keystone Citydesigned to draw out the city’s protector. The Shade relished the “joust,” as he considered it, until the Flash’s retirement in 1950. The thrill of the contest brought out a sense of being alive, breaking the melancholy that pervaded his existence.

A hero called the Spider briefly patrolled Keystone City after the Flash’s retirement, and the Shade prepared for a new joust. In his investigations he learned that the Spider was actually a criminal mastermind behind the scenes. When the Shade confronted him, the “hero” revealed another crucial detail: he was a Ludlow, and was prepared to frame the Shade for the Flash’s murder. The Shade escaped his trap, killed the Spider, then rescued the Garricks from the hired killers, leaving the evidence he had collected where the police could find it. He and the Flash parted as friends that day, though they would meet again as enemies.

Master Plan

The Shade’s most ambitious scheme as a super-villain was planned by the Thinker and carried out with the aid of the Fiddler. The trio managed to shift Keystone City out of phase with the rest of the world for thirty years while the population slept. No one inside could put up any resistance, and no one outside could remember the city even existed. The three of them were able to plunder the city at their leisure. About ten years ago the second Flashdiscovered and crossed into the hidden city, then tracked down theoriginal Flash, waking him up and joining him to stop the trio and restore the city.**

The Shade occasionally crossed paths with the second Flash, but eventually retired to Opal City, slowly transforming from villain to near-hero.

Text by Kelson Vibber. Do not copy without permission.

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Significant Golden-Age Appearances

Unlike the Silver and Modern Age lists, the Golden Age info is secondhand and possibly incomplete. Sources include The Comics Archive and GCD.

Significant Silver-Age & Bronze-Age Flash Appearances

Significant Legacy-Era Flash Appearances

Notes

[The Shade (Golden Age)] * In the Shade’s only(?) Golden Age appearance, he did not have any powers. Instead, he used an air-conditioner–sized machine to remove light from an area. When he returned in the Silver Age, he was depicted as having a device in his cane that projected darkness. Later still, his history was changed so that he had intrinsic powers.

** “Flash of Two Worlds,” originally presented in_The Flash #123_ (1961) and now available in_The World’s Greatest Team-Up Stories_ andThe Flash Archives Volume 3, was the first meeting of the pre-Crisis Earth-1and Earth-2. In it, Barry Allen crossed over to Earth-2 and convinced Jay Garrick to come out of retirement to help solve a string of robberies carried out by the Thinker, Fiddler, and Shade. The aftermath of the Crisis placed Keystone and Central Cities on the same Earth, across the river from each other. Grant Morrison, in Secret Origins #50(1990) updated the tale to fit with post-Crisis continuity. As far as how long it was out of phase, that’s less clear. Morrison’s story implies that it was under 10 years (“There were a couple of orphans there that day who suddenly weren’t orphans anymore”), but Brian Augustyn’s “Riddle of the Retro Robberies” (Flash 80-page Giant #2, 1999) states that it was thirty.