I probably discovered him about the same time. I am not 100% sure when I first learned of him. There was a local comic shop that was a total hole in the wall called "The Shadow’s Sanctum, which was a total hole in the wall I heard. I am not sure I ever went there because he had weird hours. This was during the huge comics boom in the 90s, so you would think he would be doing ok, but I think it was more like a collector who had a half ass store. I saw him one time at like a fair or something and he had a book with a ton of the shows on tape.
There were ads in some of the DC comics for their two comic series. I did get some of those in the past as back issues. For some reason I knew of, and saw some of the old 70s stuff, but I think I only ever had 2 of those back issues back in the day. I know I got Kaluta’s 1941 at some point.
But starting in the early 90s I was on an Art Deco kick. Tall building designs, fedoras, the Anastasia font, and trench coats were right up my alley. I bought a blue trench coat with a black hat - which I guess would be a slouch hat, vs a fedora. Yes I was that kid in high school.
When Kaluta started to do his Dark Horse mini-series I was enthralled. Holy hell, his art work was amazing. And technology increase from the 70s meant his fine line work wasn’t muddled up, and the colorists were able to compliment his style perfectly.
Around then, I too found two tape sets of Shadow radio plays - complete with ads for Blue Coal! I asked my grandma about it, and she remembered listening to him on the radio. And he had a bit of a resurgence in 1994 with the movie. Which wasn’t great, but not horrible either.
I was aware of, and wanted to buy a pulp or two, but never found one. Early in the 2000s I bought a CDROM off of ebay with most of the pulp covers and stories scanned and/or converted to text. (I never did get through all those stories.) I STILL haven’t bought a real pulp, though that is on the list for future searches. I have a handful of vintage pulps, and it is a sort of happy/sad thing. To posses something so old and connected to the history - but it is also a brittle, yellow mess due to the horrible quality of paper.
So I think the combination of Kaluta’s amazing art, the classic mysterious vibe of the character, the stark red/black contrast (red/black was my color scheme back then), taking place in the Art Deco filled 30s/40s, the voice work of Welles, the .45s, and my sort of romantic love of history all culminated into me being a fan.
