History YMMV / TheShadow

** MasterOfDisguise Five Face, The Black Falcon (due to his similarities to [[Characters/BatmanTheRiddler the Riddler]]), Marvin Bradthaw (for his PragmaticVillainy moments and for managing to destroy the Shadow's original Sanctum), The Cobra (an EvilCounterpart to the Shadow), and MasterOfDisguise Fifth Face are among the best-liked villains in the series despite only having one appearance apiece.

* TheyWastedAPerfectlyGoodCharacter: Many fans dislike the JokerImmunity aversion of the series and wish characters like the Black Falcon, the Red Blot, and the Cobra had survived to have at least one rematch with the Shadow.

* TheyWastedAPerfectlyGoodPlot: ''Realm of Doom'' features the Shadow's confrontation with "Thumb" Gaudrey, the last member of The Hand, TheSyndicate the Shadow first encountered sixteen novels ago and has been taking a little time to dismantle piece by piece ever since. This had the potential to be an epic confrontation where Thumb sought to learn from the mistakes of his dead fellow bosses and was especially driven to avenge them, but many readers feel the story is a fairly by-the-numbers Shadow vs. gangster tale.

** MasterOfDisguise Five Face, The Black Falcon (due to his similarities to [[Characters/BatmanTheRiddler the Riddler]]), Marvin Bradthaw (for his PragmaticVillainy moments and for managing to destroy the Shadow's original Sanctum), and MasterOfDisguise Fifth Face are among the best-liked villains in the series despite only having one appearance apiece.

* DracoInLeatherPants: The Cobra is written to be a VigilanteMan who kills for the sheer fun of it and does more harm than good, but some readers don't see the Shadow's problem with him and think that his war on crime wasn't worth the Shadow's effort to stop.

* DorkAge: The brief period in the 1960s where Archie attempted to reinvent him as a conventional superhero is pretty much universally lambasted by fans for being an extreme case of InNameOnly, on top of being incredibly mediocre in their own right.

* SpecialEffectsFailure: In the establishing shot on the bridge, the Shadow's long cloak is ''supposed'' to ominously billow out behind him, but he isn't wearing one. This is because the cloak was intended to be a CG element, but there wasn't time to composite it in. Less "Special Effects Failure" and more "Special Effects Absence".
** But still, that shot of him standing there and just [[DeathGlare staring the villains down]] is [[SugarWiki/MomentOfAwesome still pretty darn cool.]]
** The goof becomes the punchline of a ''extremely'' long-term and obscure BrickJoke ''18 years later'' in an episode of ''Series/ThirtyRock''. The episode "The Tuxedo Begins" largely plays out as an extended riff on ''Film/TheDarkKnightTrilogy'', but at one point Creator/AlecBaldwin is standing in a suit before a (faux) city skyline, and a clumsy post-production cape is inserted to the shot behind his back.

** MentorArchetype Tulsa is only in one early scene, but his impressive powers and benevolent nature make an impression.

* MyRealDaddy: The Shadow himself actually originated from the radio show ''Detective Story Hour'', which was a radio adaptation of the publisher Street & Smith's ''Detective Story Magazine''. His creators in this context are attributed toward the trio of David Chrisman (the advertising agent who sponsored the show), William Sweets (the show's writer-director), and Harry Engman Charlot (the scriptwriter who created the name "The Shadow"). These three came up with the general idea of the Shadow as a [[CreepyMonotone creepily voiced]] storyteller with an EvilLaugh. However, their creation of the character is almost entirely overwhelmed by writer Walter B. Gibson, who went on to write The Shadow pulp magazine and who fleshed out the character in far more detail than ''Detective Story Hour'' ever did (i.e. adding the Shadow's persona of [[SecretIdentityIdentity Lamont Cranston]], his use of field agents, his [[MasterOfDisguise mastery of disguise]]). The sheer amount of detail Gibson added completely overwhelmed the one-note character Chrisman, Sweets and Charlot had made [[note]] Franchise/DocSavage creator Lester Dent even commented that "The Shadow when placed in your [Gibson's] hands was a laugh, nothing more"[[/note]], and thus Gibson is widely considered the true creator by fans and historians alike.

* CreepyAwesome: If he is not the TropeMaker of superhero fiction then he is for sure the TropeCodifier.

* SugarWiki/AwesomeMusic: "Omphale's Spinning Wheel" by Camille-Saint-Saens. "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?"

** ''The Fire of Creation'' arc, by Creator/GarthEnnis, Aaron Campbell, eta al.: [[ArcVillain Taro Kondo]], a war criminal who took part in atrocities at the [[UsefulNotes/SecondSinoJapaneseWar Rape of Nanking]], develops a niche for himself as a spymaster and criminal overseas while his brother is dispatched by the Shadow in the US. [[LackOfEmpathy Dismissing his brother without a thought]], Kondo leads an expedition to secure uranium for the Japanese empire while providing young girls to his superior to rape at his leisure and leading his men to massacre an entire village as a diversion. When he has the ship the Shadow and his allies are on sunk, Kondo promptly orders any survivors to be gunned down and later betrays and murders his own allies. Faking the uranium's potency to force his superior to commit {{seppuku}} in failure, Kondo briefly taunts him with the truth before beheading him and promises to pay a "visit" to the man's daughters himself before he sells the uranium to the highest bidder.

** Shiwan Khan himself, though widely perceived as a typical YellowPeril antagonist, was given a lot more nuance than most: he's specifically noted to be Mongolian rather than Chinese or nonspecifically Asian, his ideals are never suggested to be anything more than selfishness and ambition, and in some of his appearances, he's directly opposed by the Chinese Roy Tam and the Tibetan Marpa Tulku.