Sunday, October 7, 2007

"The Laughing Corpse" (Mar 10, 1940)

Silent Avenger
"You Will Laugh but not from Joy, You Will Laugh and the Laugh Will Be the Laugh of Death"
This note is the one-way ticket to the land of the dead for those unfortunate victims of this week episode of the Shadow. Once again, we are dealing with a scientist gone mad (or bad - most of the times it's both). Revenge is what is pushing the killer in developing a poison that leaves the victims with a big "grin" on their faces (the chemical affects some of the facial muscles, as it is explained by The Shadow).
The Shadow
It's interesting how this Modus Operandi is the same adopted for the Joker in the Batman stories (which will debut later that year). We can't really tell for sure if Batman creators were inspired by this episode, but killing people by making them "laughing" to death is not a very common cause of death, not even in today world ;)

Enjoy the show and have a great (pulp) Sunday!

Francesco

Download this Episode

3 comments:

SRH said...

Kane was not known for NOT stealing ideas, so the Joker inspired by this episode would not surprise me either.

Great stuff as usual.

John Rauch said...

Unfair.

Francesco Francavilla said...

Thank you so much, srh and John, glad you enjoyed :)

Cheers,
Francesco