The Shadow Custom Joe

Lamont Cranston, playboy and man about town has a secret. He has studied in the orient, and learned the power to cloud mens' minds. As his alter-ego, The Shadow, he uses these powers to fight crime and corruption in 1920 New York.

Most famous, perhaps for the radio stories starring among others, Orson Welles, the Shadow also had his own pulp publication, and his stories were serialized within.

The ingredients for this custom are fairly easily available, with a couple of exceptions, perhaps.

• Classic Collection GI Joe body. Both trigger fingers are cut. (Or you can use 21st Century trigger hands.)

• Action Man Mountain Climber head. The prominent nose and features are just perfect for The Shadow!

• Pants and red-satin-lined cape from Son of Dracula figure from 1997 or so. I found mine at KB Outlet, and they are still obtainable. I got mine for $10.00, and though the body is awful, the pants, socks, shirt with vest, and waiters' jacket are excellent, and the cape phenomenal!

• Vinyl black trenchcoat from the 21st Century Villain, with belt. Other black coats can be used. This worked perfectly for me.

• Black socks and shoes from the Prosperity Bank cop. Other black socks and shoes or even boots will work fine.

• Red hood from Hall of Fame Astronaut carded set (a scarf could be substituted). This could be hard to find, but a scarf could be made fairly easily from satin scraps.

• Michael's Craft Store black cowboy hat. This is a felt-covered plastic hat. Remove the string hat-band, and then bend the brim down in line with the actual hat, all the way around the brim, and continue doing this several times, until the brim stays flat, rather than curved like a cowboy hat. Pinch the peaked front a little to make it more fedorah-like.

• Two .45 automatics. These can be any size, but I found that the TC Scramble Pilot ones work well, or vintage. Mine are silver. Ideally, I'd use the die-cast ones that came with the new KB TC Talking Pilot. That metal is just perfect, and impossible to duplicate with paint. (Addendum: I have changed the silver .45s to two black ones instead. They are a little larger, for exaggeration purposes, and they match. The two used in these pictures are slighly off-color from each other, and did not match perfectly.)

Following are some pictures I shot of the Shadow custom. Click on any image for a larger image.

The Shadow pulp cover

One thing you may notice is that the blacks look blue. They are not. They are indeed jet black, but in altering the photographs to remove glare, and overlight, and considering I'm using a pretty crappy digital camera, the result shows more of a blue hue than there should be.

I seriously think that of all the customs I've played around with so far, this one is by far the most marketable. I could see this as an actual figure, if someone would just do it.

Packaged Up And Perfect

I took the carton from a Universal Monsters "Invisible Man" figure, strapped The Shadow to the built-in figure stand, and designed my own label for The Shadow. Click any image for a closeup.

I presented this package to my good friend, John Brooks, who was moving away to take a job in Washington state. He's a huge fan of The Shadow.