Synopsis
In this thrilling origin story, one young man finds himself in the middle of a war between powerful gods, and tasked with saving the city he holds dear.
Jack Boniface is having a weird day. Considering himself above the voodoo beliefs of his father and community back in New Orleans, Jack left his hometown to pursue his intellectual dreams at NYU. Normally, Jack is confident in his ultrarational approach to the world, but this morning he swears he can sense things moving in the shadows and keeps having the strangest daydreams about a hideous monster.
Below New Orleans lies the Deadside, where Baron Samedi rules over a pantheon of Lwa-voodoo gods. However, when Freda-among the most beloved Lwas in New Orleans and one of Samedi’s wives-goes missing, the Deadside falls into chaos. Freda’s absence negates a decade-long agreement to protect New Orleans from unnatural violent death, resulting in a power struggle that spills over into the human world.
When an unexpected death brings Jack back to New Orleans, he finds a city in violent uproar and a neighborhood under siege by undeniably supernatural forces. Turns out Jack was wrong: The voodoo world is quite real. And, if that wasn’t enough, Jack finds out he is heir to the mantle of Shadowman, an entity tasked with maintaining the delicate balance of power between the Deadside and the real world. Will Jack be able to control his new powers and right the balance before it’s too late? Or will the discord in the Deadside destroy New Orleans forever?
A new Shadowman is rising. Jack just hopes it’s not from the ashes of his city.
Review
Shola Adedeji makes his debut with Shadowman, a supernatural horror book based on the Valiant Universe comics. Created by writers Jim Shooter and Steve Englehart, and drawn by David Lapham, Shadowman made his debut back in 1992 and has developed a healthy legacy since, appearing regularly in print as a cornerstone of the Valiant Universe, and in a few video games, too.
So, here’s a confession: Shadowman, and Valiant Comics as a whole, had largely flew under my radar for all these years. I was aware of the comic book’s existence, but never read an issue until Cullen Bunn appeared on the “Hell Creek” episode of Staring Into The Abyss podcast, which I co-hosted at the time. Bunn was a guest and joined us to discuss his then-forthcoming relaunch of Shadowman. I dug his series opener quite a bit, but never did read past it, despite picking up the trades and a few compendiums from prior Shadowman teams.
My intent to learn more about Jack Boniface and the voodoo origins of this New Orleans superhero was genuine, and so when I was offered an advance copy of Adedeji’s Shadowman novel and his fresh take on the character, it seemed like a good entry point. Unfortunately, there are too many weak spots and narrative missteps to recommend it, and even with only one issue of the source material under my belt I know this character can be written better.
Shadowman is Adedeji’s first book, and it shows damn near right from the outset in the author’s weak and repetitive sentence constructions, and authorial crutches he leans too heavily on. I was only a few pages into reading when I began to wonder if Adedeji could write a sentence that didn’t involve “it was,” the preponderance of which was so overwhelming I couldn’t help getting annoyed, particularly when used to start a sentence, which was done ad nauseum. Dialogue is weak and often unnatural, stuffed with “Ha-ha”s and “Hm. Hm. Hm.”s over and over and over, again. Conversations between Boniface and his father, Josiah, sound more like psychological clinicians or dueling philosophy professors than father and son. At one point, Boniface marvels over the answers he’s drafted to that night’s homework, “Having ensured his written answers contained as many big words as possible…[he] sat impressed by the quality of his work.” I couldn’t help but wonder how much Boniface was an authorial stand-in, given Adedeji’s similar approach to writing Shadowman. His prose is flowery, loaded with adverbs and five-dollar words that exist more to show readers Adedeji’s capabilities of thumbing through a thesaurus than to tell a good story.
As for the story, well. Shadowman is a messy origin piece, taking us to Boniface’s college days wherein he learns that his father has passed away and he has just become endowed with supernatural powers. His father was the previous Shadowman, and it’s a legacy handed down from one generation to the next. Jack Boniface is the latest, and naturally, the greatest. Being introduced to Boniface prior to his inheritance is to meet your average, smug, self-important know-it-all college kid. Boniface considers himself the smartest man in the room, and looks down upon his elders and fellow students with derision. They’re all backwards and dullards. He’s the only one that knows anything. If he had a personality, money, charm, and sarcasm, he’d be in the Tony Stark model. Instead, he’s a humorless, arrogant whiz kid, the kind of guy everybody avoids at parties, if he ever gets invited to parties.
But then he gets superpowers, which makes him reconsider a few of the things he thought he knew while still remaining largely insufferable, not only to readers but to the ancient entity imprisoned within the shadowy void that empowers Shadowman. If that’s confusing, just think of the recent Tom Hardy-led Venom movies and the multiple-personality aspect that exists between Eddie Brock and his alien symbiote, which Adedeji has mostly ripped off to retool here. Those movies weren’t any good to begin with, and their schtick is even less appealing this time around. Boniface can step into the void and use it to travel or store stuff in, like his magical scythe or discarded street clothes. He also has a shiny new psychic limb that Adedeji and Boniface simply cannot get enough of. The amount of chapters and passages devoted to this psychic appendage grow absolutely tiresome as Boniface palpates his way through various environments with it, whipping his new member out and swinging it around all over the place like an eager, hormonal 13-year-old.
The biggest problem with Adedeji’s take on Shadowman is simply that it’s not the least bit interesting. Once Boniface inherits his father’s powers, he automatically knows how to fight and can defeat any opponent. Apparently, taking on the powers of Shadowman is like Neo downloading kung-fu prowess in The Matrix, except Boniface is able to bypass the training and a much-needed ass-whooping from Morpheus. Boniface is miraculously adept and capable right from the outset, overpowered to the point of near-invulnerability, and that’s makes for a boring hero origin. Where’s the challenge? Where’s the danger? Where are the threats and tension? Each fight scene is overdrawn, repetitious, and lead only to the forgone conclusion that Boniface is the ultimate Shadowman. When it all culminates in the usual citywide threat and ensuing mayhem, there’s no reason to care. We’ve already been told a thousand times that Boniface is the best there ever was and all he knows how to do is win. There’s no rite of passage, no sense of escalation, and pompous Boniface is never humbled enough to be the scrappy underdog. Adedeji never gives us a reason to care, acting like a helicopter parent keeping his precious Jack Boniface safe from the big, bad, scary world around him, and it all makes for a tremendously dull superhero story. That it all ends with a rimshot zinger that would feel more at home in the freeze-frame ending of an 80s buddy comedy than a supernatural horror makes it all the worse.
So far, between this and Sarah Raughley’s Livewire, Valiant Comics is 0-2 in their attempts to break into YA prose. Putting a youthful slant on their adult comic book protagonists has resulted in vapid, self-important, and self-involved characters that are simply uninteresting and impossible to root for. Shadowman, in particular, is both overwritten and overwrought, yet somehow wholly underdeveloped. Adedeji never feels fully confident as to how the various aspects of his story link together, and largely avoids the disparate plot points connecting a kidnapped god, corruption, technology, and the living and dead sides of New Orleans until very late in the book, focusing instead on trying to convince us that Jack Boniface is every bit the special boy he, Jack, and his mother insists he is. Shadowman may get his powers from the Deadside, but that’s no excuse for Adedeji to churn out a story this lifeless.
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