"His gun’s bigger than mine - I hate it when that happens!"
— Boot, Shadow Riders #1
Shadow Riders is a Marvel Comics miniseries, published as part of the Marvel UK brand in 1993. It's written by John Freeman and Brian Williamson, with art by Ross Dearsley and color art by Euan Peters.
The riders are superhuman bikers, fighting a long war against Marvel UK villains Mys-Tech.
They’re recruited and led by the alien wizard Vorin, a very old and angry enemy of Mys-Tech who can now act more openly.
The characters include:
- Boot (Steven White), once a Mys-Tech Warhead mercenary, now a superhuman warrior with some cybernetic limbs.
- Stranger, whose powers grant him stealth, intangibility and some form of shapeshifting.
- Roadie (Alison Kane), who has various psychic powers.
- Grunt (Arnold Coltrane), a Mys-Tech security guard who becomes superhumanly large and strong. He may also have some level of psychic power.
- Vorin, a centuries-old alien techno-wizard with a vendetta against Mys-Tech.
- Goodfellow, Vorin’s familiar.
- Che, an active Mys-Tech Warhead with loyalties elsewhere.
- Cable, time-travelling mutant and sometime leader of X-Force. He’s not one of the riders and, technically, he’s a guest star - but he’s as prominent in the story as any of them.
Tropes included in Shadow Riders:
- Aliens in Cardiff: The heroes are an alien wizard and his superhuman not-quite-alive biker gang in Lancashire.
- All There in the Manual: Boot and Roadie’s original names were eventually published in the Marvel Atlas (Stranger’s name is still unrevealed).
- And You Thought It Was a Game: Mys-Tech trains its Warheads on ‘Arena World’, one of several dead worlds linked by stable wormholes. They’re opposed by armed androids, simulated opponents to prepare them for more dangerous jumps. Except that they aren’t androids - they’re the last of Vorin’s race, and the world is only dead because Mys-Tech’s killed everything that once lived there.
- Artificial Limbs:
- Boot’s got a cybernetic right arm.
- After his troubled resurrection, Che seems to have acquired a cybernetic left leg and right arm.
- Badass Biker: The Shadow Riders, Roadie, and the wizard Vorin himself.
- Badass Longcoat: Vorin tends to wear a long coat, and is certainly a badass.
- Bad Boss: Porlock. Other books have already shown that Mys-Tech are pretty callous about the lives of their employees, especially Warheads. This time Che’s trainees are used as cannon fodder to test the new skills of the Slaughterhouse Six.
- Because You Were Nice to Me: Abadon says a variation of this to Roadie, and actually listens as she tries to talk him down.
- Blood Knight: Boot is described as a borderline berserker, and definitely falls into this category.
- Bullying a Dragon: Porlock and Mys-Tech’s torture of Matthew/Abadon.
- Came Back Strong: The way Vorin’s resurrections work when he’s creating shadow riders.
- Came Back Wrong: Che is immune to magic. Vorin still manages to bring him back from the dead, but it's a troubled resurrection and he doesn’t look human any more.
- Catapult Nightmare: Matthew, after he’s been rescued from Mys-Tech. Roadie’s there to grab him as he wakes up screaming.
- Code Name: Once they’re recruited and resurrected, the riders are only ever referred to by their nicknames.
- Continuity Nod: Porlock mentions the loss of the previous Kether Troop, which happened at the end of the original Warheads series.
- Cool Bike: They wouldn’t be shadow riders without them. Also, the bikes have guns.
- Cool Shades: Stranger
- Death by Origin Story: The Shadow Riders themselves. Each is resurrected and empowered by Vorin following their death. And dialogue suggests that they’re no longer alive.
- Dream Intro: After Matthew’s rescued from Mys-Tech, the third issue starts with a nightmare sequence where he’s dreaming that the riders only want his power and will kill him so that they can recruit him.
- Easily Forgiven:
- Boot killed Arnold Coltrane with an incendiary bullet, joking as he burned. When Arnold’s resurrected as Grunt, he doesn’t seem to hold a grudge.
- When Boot was a Warhead, Cable killed him. Boot doesn’t seem to remember it too clearly, but he doesn’t take it personally when he works it out.
- Emotion Eater: Porlock’s minion Gadafel, although we don’t get to see what his abilities actually do.
- Evil, Inc.: Mys-Tech, as with many other Marvel UK books. They're an evil corporation dabbling in Magitek and led by immortal wizards who've sold their souls to a demon. Vorin's been quietly feuding with them for centuries.
- First-Episode Resurrection: Grunt’s killed and revived in the first issue.
- Foreshadowing:
- Roadie and Vorin aren’t able to do a full telepathic scan of Matthew after rescuing him, as he’s still too weak. Which means that they don’t realise that ‘Matthew’ is just an artificial personality for Abadon.
- When security team six respond to the alarm on Mys-Tech’s roof, Coltrane’s told to hurry it up - “…you’d be late for your own funeral”. Boot kills him when he reaches the roof.
- Gone Horribly Right: Porlock knows that Matthew’s not the person he thinks he is, and uses him as bait for Vorin before revealing Abadon and unleashing his power. Too bad he underestimated just how powerful - and how hard to magically bind - Abadon actually is. Or how much Abadon resents his previous treatment at Mephisto and Porlock’s hands.
- Heel–Face Door-Slam: Cable and Boot scupper Roadie’s attempt to talk Abadon into a peaceful solution - at which point his demonic nature takes full control and he starts trying to kill everyone, including Roadie.
- Heel–Face Turn:
- Grunt was a Mys-Tech security guard, although he didn’t realise quite how bad his employers were.
- Boot was a Mys-Tech Warhead and at least slightly complicit in the deaths of Vorin’s people.
- Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: The riders don’t wear motorbike helmets. Called out in-story.
- Heroes Prefer Swords: Vorin’s the leader of the heroes, and carries a sword across his back.
- Last of His Kind: Possibly Vorin, although at the end of the series there’s some hope that others survived.
- Magitek: Mys-Tech and Vorin both use this a lot. How much Vorin learned from them is left unclear.
- Manchurian Agent: Matthew is actually the demon Abadon, and his rescue was part of Porlock’s plan.
- Master of Disguise: Stranger. With some preparation, and with technology boosting his innate powers, he can even duplicate his target’s own powers.
- Mistaken Identity: Due to a typo somewhere, Death’s Head ends up trying to kill Rick Jones instead of “Mick Jones”. And yes, that’s Rick Jones the Hulk’s friend. Which means the big guy intervenes to save his life and Vorin is unsuccessful in his attempt to recruit Rick.
- Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Abadon, unsurprisingly.
- Necromancer: Vorin seems to qualify. He brings dead people back, but they claim they’re not alive after he’s revived them.
- '90s Anti-Hero: Boot certainly qualifies. A Blood Knight with a huge gun who wisecracks when killing people. And the people he guns down include mooks who don’t realise their employer is evil.
- No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Porlock invokes this, surprising nobody. The riders have defeated Abadon, saving the world (and saving Porlock himself). So he congratulates them and immediately orders his guards to shoot them, killing Che.
- Only Known by Their Nickname:
- Stranger
- Initially true of Boot and Roadie, too - real names for them weren’t provided until the Marvel Atlas covered the characters, a decade or more after the original series.
- Powers as Programs: Stranger’s intrinsic camouflage and disguise powers are boosted by prepared pods with information about a particular target. Using these, he can accurately impersonate someone else - and can potentially even copy their powers.
- Power Copying:
- Stranger can do this, with some limitations, but it requires preparation and it’s specific to each target.
- Goodfellow can copy powers and assign them to one of the riders, but can’t use the copied power himself.
- Quirky Mini Boss Squad: The Slaughterhouse Six, first seen in sister title Motormouth & Killpower, although they don’t get much of an introduction here for new readers.
- Red Eyes, Take Warning: Vorin. Coupled with his hair and angular features, it makes him look a little like a stereotypical vampire (although he doesn’t seem to have the fangs). And he’s definitely both powerful and sinister.
- Sealed Inside a Person-Shaped Can: Abadon, an elemental, demonic force that’s now personified as Matthew.
- Seers: Vorin, in a specific but unreliable way. He relies on precognition of deaths to find new recruits - but neither example we see goes to plan.
- When he attacks Malkuth Troop’s base, he’s expecting to recruit Che. But it’s a mortally wounded Boot, not Che, who falls through the portal.
- His vision of Rick Jones’s death is false (as the Hulk saves him), so he recruits Grunt instead.
- The Sleepless: The riders aren’t fully alive and don’t sleep. They watch a lot of TV to pass the time.
- Shapeshifter Mode Lock: Discussed. How much of Stranger’s disguise power involves physically shapeshifting is left unclear, but he runs this risk if he holds an impersonation for too long.
- The Slow Path: Played with. Vorin’s not actually a time-traveller, but Mys-Tech’s stable wormhole crosses time as well as space. When Vorin made his own way to earth to confront them for their attacks on his world, he arrived 600 years early.
- Superhero Packing Heat: The whole team, including Vorin (and, of course, guest star Cable). In practice, Boot and Grunt seem to do most of the shooting, though.
- Talking the Monster to Death: Played with. Roadie tries this on Abadon, with some success - until Cable and Boot use the speech as a distraction and shoot him.
- Temporal Paradox: Invoked. Vorin didn’t realise that Mys-Tech’s wormhole crossed time as well as space, so he ended up on earth six hundred years before the attack he came to avenge. He was well aware of the risk of paradox, so limited himself to opposing them in subtle ways until time caught up and he could directly fight back.
- The Undead: Possibly the riders themselves. It’s left a little ambiguous, but they don’t sleep and they don’t consider themselves to be alive.
- Undeath Always Ends: For some value of undeath, as noted elsewhere. When Grunt’s revived, he sees visions of Vorin doing this for centuries. And another rider notes that he’s seen it a dozen times. But there are only three of them left at the start of the series…
- Weaponized Car: More accurately, weaponized bikes. They have some pretty big guns built in.
- Weaponized Teleportation: Seems to be Abadon’s final fate, as Vorin closes the wormhole back to earth when he’s halfway through. Unlear if it’s a Portal Cut scenario or something else, but it certainly hurts.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: Vorin is quite prepared to let prospective recruits (such as Rick Jones) die without intervening.
- Wolverine Publicity: Played with and averted.
- Fan favourite Cable gets cover billing, but he’s also a big part of the story (and it builds on his appearance in many other Marvel UK titles).
- The Ghost Rider’s appearance largely plays this straight. He’s summoned, joins a fight, and is then dismissed from the plot.
- Averted with Doctor Doom, Death’s Head II and the Hulk. None of them plays a major part in the story, but none of them are advertised on the covers, either.
