OK, gather round folks. Time for a lecture on pop culture history.

The Shadow--one of the most iconic pre-superhero figures and clear inspiration for Batman and the dark, brooding anti-hero archtype that has persisted to this day--was created as a marketing gimmick.

(I'm going to assume you know who The Shadow, the dark avenger who fights for the common man, has mysterious and vague magical abilities and "knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men," but if not here's his Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow )

Street & Smith Publications wanted to use a radio show to promote a new magazine series of detective stories. A trio of writers came up with the idea of a mysterious narrator. It was Harry Engman Charlot who came up with the name--"The Shadow."

None of the Shadow's original creators died rich or famous. Charlot apparently killed himself five years later. Bill Sweets, one of the other creators, continued to work in radio and was eventually blacklisted.

The radio show was a hit, and folks loved the narrator. People started going up to the newstands and asking for the "Shadow books," which was a problem because there weren't any. S&S realized they needed to start writing some, quick.

Walter Gibson, under the pen name Maxwell Grant, churned out a new Shadow novel every two weeks, for more than a decade. He developed more iconic attributes of the character--the mysterious hat, the dual pistols, the mystical abilities.

In a great quote from his diary, Gibson once asked why genre conventions dictate that the "villain get away with all sorts of wild stuff, and the hero act like a hick?" He wanted to create a hero as interesting and intimidating as the villain.

For about 10 years the Shadow books built a following, until they decided they needed to create a new radio show, this one starring the Shadow himself. He's not a narrator anymore. *This* is the one with Orson Welles that everyone remembers.

Edith Meiser was the story editor of the show its first year. A former suffragette and vaudevillian, she was one of those Victorian-era personalities that seemed to blot out the sun, and now is almost completely forgotten.

She was a mildly famous actress who appeared on "I Love Lucy," but she's most famous for creating the first Sherlock Holmes radio show, credited with sparking interest in the character in the U.S.

She was a lifelong Holmes fan who pushed radio execs for years to make the show. It was a big enough hit to spawn the Basil Rathbone movies which spawned a second radio show with Basil, that Meiser resigned from in protest after sponsors demanded more violence. But I digress.

It's unclear, at least to me, how much from the Shadow show came from Meiser's pen. Did she come up with the Shadow's invisibility--an ingenious gimmick to translate him to the radio medium?

Or for compacting the Shadow's multiple assumed identities into a single character--wealthy playboy Lamont Cranston, template for Bruce Wayne and dozens of other billionaire vigilantes?

What everyone agrees she's responsible for is the Shadow's sassy sidekick--Margo Lane, played by Agnes Moorehead.

Now the show was very popular and ran for years. But remember, there was also this series of Shadow pulp novels at the same time. The novels were darker and grittier than the show, and technically featured a different Shadow. (The novel character's name is Kent Allard.)

But the producers still wanted them to be synced up a little, so Walter Gibson was told to start writing Margo into the stories. This caused a huge backlash with the pulp fans--what the heck was this woman suddenly doing in their stories?

Anyways, that's the point of my lecture--everything old is new again. Even back in the 30s you had male fans complaining about seemingly gratuitous female characters. The end.