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MEANINGFUL_SPLOTCH

                                              May 10, 2008

  "Blackness that moved like a living thing - a streak of
  inkiness that terminated in a hawklike silhouette. There
  was a meaning to that splotch. It foretold the appearance
  of The Shadow!"

    -- "The Cobra" (1934) Maxwell Grant, Chapter XIX, "The Shadow's Clew"

An unusually weak Shadow novel.
Reminiscent of a Republic serial.

The schtick of the villain (The Cobra!)
seems like a bad joke.


The fake-out on the identity of the mastermind
got me, but it wasn't exactly plausibile...

   SPOILERS

   But then the way I was faked out is interesting:

   I presumed that Gibson would have gone with
   his first thought, but there are some clear
   signs he decided it was too obvious, and did
   a re-write, creating a new character to be
   the true culprit.

   My contention is that that the
   two characters "Crawler Gorgan" and
   "Old Growdy" were originally one:

   I had Gorgan/Growdy confused at first:
   in Gorgan's first scene, he talks
   about how he has a secret entrance no
   one knows about, then there's a scene
   where the (newly introduced) Growdy is
   being attacked through his own secret
   entrance.

   The similarity in the names of both
   Gorgan and Growdy is another symptom,
   but it's a really peculiar one:

   Why wouldn't Gibson choose a more
   distinct name?

      Possibly: he feared he would screw-up
      changing the names on re-write, and
      it would be better to have a similar
      name to make those mistakes seem less
      strange.

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