Criadoman writes:I agree with everything you said til this point, only because I'm not buying so much that comics killed pulps as much as publishers figured people would rather look at pictures than read. I believe the "exploitive money machine" philosophy had at least as much if not more to do with the death of pulps.
I'm pretty sure that if pulps had still been selling well, they'd have kept publishing them, comics or no comics. Or anyway I should say "hero pulps". The likes of Doc and the Shadow saw their popularity dwindle as the fortunes of Superman and Batman rose...the logical conclusion is that kids left the former for the latter. But "pulps" as a format did soldier on for quite a while afterward, evolving into the lurid "true crime" magazines I remember seeing on stands as late as the 70s (usually featuring photos of women being held at gunpoint in their underwear), and the "Analog," "Alfred Hitchcok Mystery" and "Asimov's SF" magazines that are still being churned out today.
Also it should be remembered that pulps in general were much racier, lurid and more violent than comics, and if they'd still been big in the 50s it's likely Wertham and Kefauver would've driven a stake right through their hearts. At least comics had funny animals, teen romances and westerns to fall back on when crime and horror fell out of vogue.
TELLE writes:I'm going to have to dig that out now just because you reminded me; even better than the mini was the ongoing series written by Andrew Helfer with art by Bill Sienkewicz first, then Kyle Baker. I still have the originals, but I wish they'd reprint that in TPB (or have they?). It was a great series that got rudely cancelled. The Avenger mini that followed, also by Helfer and Baker, was gold too.
Thank You, YES! Weren't those great books? I was beginning to think I was the only one who missed them. I nearly dropped the series toward the end of Sienkewicz's run, but Kyle Baker knocked my socks off. This'll sound funny coming from a guy who complains about violence so much, but I loved the sheer meanness of that book. I remember when two of the (Seven Deadly) Finn brothers threw a guy off a balcony and took a bet on how he'd land. The one brother goes, "Heads again! You always win!"

See where a little knowledge of physics can pay off, kids?
Can't remember what happened to that Shadow series - was it a copyright issue or were they just not selling enough?
Apparently the copyright holder, Conde Nast, was extremely displeased with the direction the series took, and forced DC to pull the plug. Keep in mind that by the end of the Helfer/Baker run, the Shadow had been killed, his body accidentally destroyed by his dufus half-Tibetan sons and his head attached to a huge robot body. Probably NOT what the caretakers of his legend envisioned when they let DC borrow him.

An oversized one-shot was announced that would've resolved the plotline, but it never saw print.

I liked the atmospherics and the Barreto art on the next DC series, "The Shadow Strikes!," but it never had the spark of the Helfer run.
Oh, and I didn't dig the Chaykin mini nearly as much. It was kind of an 80s, "Shadow in Armani" take that didn't click for me. Plus with all the sex it came off as a poor man's American Flagg, like much of Chaykin's stuff (the worst being his "Blackhawk").