KIM NEWMAN

The Original Dr Shade

KIM NEWMAN is fast building a reputation as a writer, with his acclaimed short stories published in Interzone, Fantasy Tales and New Worlds, amongst other titles, and regular appearances in various “Year’s Best” anthologies.

His first novel, The Night Mayor, was recently optioned by Hollywood, and two subsequent books, Bad Dreams and Jago look set to be equally successful. As “Jack Yeovil” he has published a number of gaming novelisations set in offbeat fantasy and futuristic milieus.

In 1990, he won the Horror Writers of America Award for Horror: 100 Best Books, which he co-edited with Stephen Jones, and other non-fiction books under his byline include Ghastly Beyond Belief (with Neil Gaiman), Nightmare Movies and Wild West Movies. He is currently working on an original anthology with Paul J. McAuley.

“The Original Dr Shade” is a darkly downbeat novella that mixes Thatcherite Britain, comics fans, and an unusual type of haunting into a highly original horror tale. However, that didn’t stop it winning the 1991 British Science Fiction Award for Best Short Story.

 

 

Like a shark breaking inky waters, the big black car surfaced out of the night, its searchlight headlamps freezing the Bolsheviks en tableau as they huddled over their dynamite. Cohen, their vile leader, tried to control his raging emotions, realizing that yet again his schemings to bring about the ruination of the British Empire were undone. Borzoff, his hands shaking uncontrollably, fell to his ragged-trousered knees and tried one last prayer to the God whose icons he had spat upon that day in the mother country when he had taken his riflebutt to the princess’ eggshell-delicate skull. Petrofsky drooled into his stringy beard, his one diseased eye shrinking in the light like a slug exposed to salt, and uselessly thumb-cocked his revolver.

The canvas top of the Rolls Royce “Shadowshark” raised like a hawk’s eyelid, and a dark shape seemed to grow out of the driver’s seat, cloak billowing in the strong wind, twin moons reflected in the insectlike dark goggles, wide-brimmed hat at a jaunty angle.

Petrofsky raised his shaking pistol, and slammed back against the iron globe of the chemical tank, cut down by another silent dart from the doctor’s famous airgun. In the distance, the conspirators could hear police sirens, but they knew they would not be taken into custody. The shadowman would not allow them to live out the night to further sully the green and fruitful soil of sacred England with their foul presence.

As the doctor advanced, the headlamps threw his expanding shadow on the Bolsheviks.

Israel Cohen, the Mad Genius of the Revolution, trembled, his flabby chins slapping against his chest, sweat pouring from his ape-like forehead down his protuberant nose to his fleshy, sensual lips. He raised a ham-sized fist against the doctor, sneering insane defiance to the last:

“Curse you, Shade!”

—Rex Cash, Dr Shade Vs the Dynamite Boys (1936)

THEY ATE AN EXPENSIVELY minimalist meal at Alastair Little’s in Frith Street, and Basil Crosbie, Leech’s Art Editor, picked up the bill with his company card. Throughout, Tamara, his agent, kept reminding Crosbie of the Eagle awards Greg had gained for Fat Chance, not mentioning that that was two years ago. As with most restaurants, there was nowhere that could safely accommodate Greg’s yardsquare artwork folder, and he was worried the sample strips would get scrunched or warped. He would have brought copies, but wanted to put himself over as sharply as possible. Besides, the ink wasn’t dry on the pieces he had finished this morning. As usual, there hadn’t been time to cover himself.

Whenever there was dead air in the conversation, Tamara filled it with more selected highlights from Greg’s career. Greg guessed she had invited herself to this lunch to keep him under control. She remembered, but was carefully avoiding mention of, his scratchy beginnings in the ’70s—spiky strips and singletons for punk fanzines like Sheep Worrying, Brainrape and Kill Your Pet Puppy—and knew exactly how he felt about the Derek Leech organization. She probably thought he was going to turn up in a ripped rubbish bag, with lots of black eyeliner and safety-pins through his earlobes, then go for Crosbie with a screwdriver. Actually, while the Sex Pistols were swearing on live television and gobbing at gigs, he had been a neatly-dressed, normal-haired art student. It was only at the easel, where he used to assemble police-brutality collages with ransom note captions, that he had embodied the spirit of ’77.

If Tamara would shut up, he thought he could get on with Crosbie. Greg knew the man had started out on the Eagle, and filled in on Garth once in a while. He had been a genuine minor talent in his day. Still, he worked for Leech, and if there was one artefact that summed up everything Greg loathed about Britain under late Thatcherism, it was Leech’s Daily Comet. The paper was known for its Boobs ’n’ Pubes, its multi-million Giveaway Grids, its unflinching support of the diamond-hard right, its lawsuit-fuelled muckraking, and prose that read like a football hooligan’s attempt to imitate the Janet and John books. It was Britain’s fastest-growing newspaper, and the hub of a communications empire that was putting Leech in the Murdoch-Maxwell bracket. In Madame Tussaud’s last annual poll, the statue of Derek Leech had ranked eighth on the Most Admired list, between Gorbachev and Prince Charles, and second on the Most Hated and Feared chart, after Margaret Thatcher but before Adolf Hitler, Colonel Quadaffi, Count Dracula and the Yorkshire Ripper.

Crosbie didn’t start talking business until eyedropper-sized cups of coffee arrived. With the plates taken away, the Art Editor opened his folder on the table, and brought out a neatly paperclipped set of notes. Tamara was still picking at her fruit salad, five pieces of pale apple and/or pear floating in a steel bowl of water with a solitary grape. She and Crosbie had been drinking dry white wine with the meal, but Greg stuck to mineral water. The gritty coffee gave him quite a punch, and he felt his heart tighten like an angry fist. Since Fat Chance, he hadn’t done anything notable. This was an important meeting for him. Tamara might not dump him if it didn’t come out right, but she might shift him from her A-list to her B-list.

“As you probably know,” Crosbie began, “Leech United Kingdom is expanding at the moment. I don’t know if you keep up with the trades, but Derek has recently bought up the rights to a lot of defunct titles with a view to relaunch. It’s a lot easier to sell something familiar than something new. Just now, Derek’s special baby is the Evening Argus.”

“The Brighton paper?” Greg asked.

“No, a national. It folded in 1953, but it was very big from the ’20s through to the War. Lord Badgerfield ran it.”

“I have heard of it,” Greg said. “It’s always an Argus headline in those old films about Dunkirk.”

“That’s right. The paper had what they used to call ‘a good War’. Churchill called it ‘the voice of true democracy’. Like Churchill, it was never quite the same after the War . . . but now, what with the interest in the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Britain and all that, we think the time is right to bring it back. It’ll be nostalgia, but it’ll be new too . . .”

“Gasmasks and rationing and the spirit of the Blitz, eh?”

“That sort of thing. It’ll come out in the Autumn, and we’ll build up to it with a massive campaign. ‘The voice is back.’ We’ll cut from this ovaltine-type ’40s look to an aggressive ’90s feel, yuppies on carphones, designer style, full-colour pages. It’ll be a harder news paper than the Comet, but it’ll still be a Leech UK product, populist and commercial. We aim to be the turn-of-the-century newspaper.”

“And you want a cartoonist?”

Crosbie smiled. “I liked your Fat Chance work a lot, Greg. The script was a bit manky for my taste, but you draw with clean lines, good solid blocks of black. Your private eye was a thug, but he looked like a real strip hero. There was a bit of Jeff Hawke there. It was just what we want for the Argus, the feel of the past but the content of the present.”

“So you’ll be wanting Greg to do a Fat Chance strip for the new paper?”

Greg had made the connection, and was cracking a smile.

“No, Tamara, that’s not what he wants. I’ve remembered the other thing I know about the Argus. I should have recognized the name straight off. It’s a by-word . . .”

Crosbie cut in, “that’s right. The Mirror had Jane and Garth, but the Argus had . . .”

Greg was actually excited. He thought he had grown up, but there was still a pulp heart in him. As a child, he had pored through second- and third-hand books and magazines. Before Brainrape and Fat Chance and PC Rozzerblade, he had tried to draw his other heroes: Bulldog Drummond, the Saint, Sexton Blake, Biggles, and . . .

“Dr Shade.”

“You may haff caught me, Herr Doktor Schatten, but ze glory off ze Sird Reich vill roll over zis passetic country like a tchuggernaucht. I die for ze greater glory off Tchermany, off ze Nazi party and off Adolf Hitler . . .”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Von Spielsdorf. I wouldn’t dirty my hands by killing you, even if it is what you so richly deserve.”

“Ain’t we gonna ice the lousy stinkin’ rat, Doc?” asked Hank the Yank. The American loomed over the German mastermind, a snub-nosed automatic in his meaty fist.

“Yours is a young country, Henry,” said Dr Shade gently, laying a black-gloved hand of restraint upon his comrade’s arm. “That’s not how we do things in England. Von Spielsdorf here may be shot as a spy, but that decision is not ours to make. We have courts and laws and justice. That’s what this whole war’s about, my friend. The right of the people to have courts and laws and justice. Even you, Von Spielsdorf. We’re fighting for your rights too.”

“Pah, decadent Englische Scheweinhund!”

Hank tapped the German on the forehead with his pistol-grip, and the saboteur sat down suddenly, his eyes rolling upwards.

“That showed him, eh, Doc?”

Dr Shade’s thin, normally inexpressive lips, curled in a slight smile.

“Indubitably, Henry. Indubitably.”

—Rex Cash, “The Fiend of the Fifth Column”,
Dr Shade Monthly No 111 [May, 1943]

The heart of Leech UK was a chrome-and-glass pyramid in London docklands, squatting by the Thames like a recently-arrived flying saucer. Greg felt a little queasy as the minicab they had sent for him slipped through the pickets. It was a chilly Spring day, and there weren’t many of them about. Crosbie had warned him of “the Union Luddites” and their stance against the new technology that enabled Leech to put out the Comet and its other papers with a bare minimum of production staff. Greg hoped none of the placard-carriers would recognize him. Last year, there had been quite a bit of violence as the pickets, augmented by busloads of radicals as annoyed by Leech’s editorials as his industrial relations policies, came up against the police and a contingent of the Comet-reading skinheads who were the backbone of Leech’s support. Now, the dispute dragged on but was almost forgotten. Leech’s papers had never mentioned it much, and the rest of the press had fresher strikes, revolutions and outrages to cover.

The minicab drove right into the pyramid, into an enclosed reception area where the vehicle was checked by security guards. Greg was allowed out and issued with a blue day pass that a smiling girl in a smart uniform pinned on his lapel.

Behind her desk were framed colour shots of smiling girls without uniforms, smart or otherwise, their nipples like squashed cherries, their faces cleanly unexpressive. The Comet Knock-Outs were supposed to be a national institution. But so, according to the Comet, were corporal punishment in schools, capital punishment for supporters of Sinn Fein, and the right to tell lies about the sexual preferences of soap opera performers. Greg wondered what Penny Stamp—Girl Reporter, Dr Shade’s sidekick in the old strip, would have made of a Comet Knock-Out. Penny had always been rowing with the editor who wanted her to cover fashion shows and garden parties when she would rather be chasing crime scoops for the front page; perhaps her modern equivalent should be a pin-up girl who wants to keep her clothes on and become Roger Cook or Woodward and Bernstein?

He rode up to the 23rd floor, which was where Crosbie had arranged to meet him. The girl downstairs had telephoned up, and her clone was waiting for him in the thickly-carpeted lobby outside the lift. She smiled, and escorted him through an open-plan office where telephones and computers were being installed by a cadre of workmen. At the far end were a series of glassed-off cubicles. She eased him into one of these, and asked if he wanted tea or coffee. She brought him instant coffee, the granules floating near the bottom of a paper cupful of hot brown water. There was a dummy edition of the Evening Argus on the desk. The headline was “IT’S WAR!” Greg didn’t have time to look at it.

Crosbie came in with a tall, slightly stooped man, and ordered more coffee. The newcomer was in his 70s, but looked fit for his age. He wore comfortable old trousers and a cardigan under a new sports jacket. Greg knew who he was.

“Rex Cash?” he asked, his hand out.

The man’s grip was firm. “One of him,” he said. “Not the original.”

“This is Harry Lipman, Greg.”

“Harry,” Harry said.

“Greg. Greg Daniels.”

“Fat Chance?”

Greg nodded. He was surprised Harry had kept up with the business. He had been retired for a long time, he knew.

“Mr Crosbie told me. I’ve been looking your stuff out. I don’t know much about the drawing side. Words are my line. But you’re a talented young man.”

“Thanks.”

“Can we work together?” Harry was being direct. Greg didn’t have an answer.

“I hope so.”

“So do I. It’s been a long time. I’ll need someone to snip the extra words out of the panels.”

Harry Lipman had been Rex Cash from 1939 to 1952, taking over the name from Donald Moncrieff, the creator of Dr Shade. He had filled 58 Dr Shade books with words, 42 novels and 135 short stories, and he had scripted the newspaper strip all the while, juggling storylines. Several of the best-known artists in British adventure comics had worked on the Dr Shade strip—Mack Bullivant, who would create Andy of the Arsenal for British Pluck, Tommy Wrathall, highly regarded for his commando and paratroop stories in Boys’ War, and, greatest of all, Frank FitzGerald, who had, for six years, made Dr Shade dark, funny and almost magical. They were all dead now. Harry was the last survivor of those days. And so the Argus was calling in Greg to fill the footprints.

“Harry has been working up some storylines,” said Crosbie. “I’ll leave you to talk them through. If you need more coffee, give Nicola a buzz. I’ll be back in a few hours to see how you’re doing.”

Crosbie left. Harry and Greg looked at each other and, for no reason, started laughing like members of a family sharing a joke they could never explain to an outsider.

“Considering Dr Shade must be about 150 now,” Harry began, “I thought we’d start the strip with him trying to get the DHSS to up his heating allowance for the winter . . .”

SHADE, DOCTOR Scientific vigilante of mysterious origins, usually hidden behind a cloak and goggle-like dark glasses, although also a master of disguise with many other identities. Operating out of an outwardly dilapidated but inwardly luxurious retreat in London’s East End, he employs a group of semi-criminal bully boys in his neverending war against foreign elements importing evil into the heart of the British Empire. Originally introduced (under the name “Dr Jonathan Shadow”) as a minor character in The Cur of Limehouse (1929), a novel by Rex Cash (Donald Moncrieff), in which he turns up in the final chapters to help the aristocratic pugilist hero Reggie Brandon defeat the East End opium warlord Baron Quon. The character was so popular with the readers of Wendover’s Magazine, the monthly publication in which the novel was serialized, that Moncrieff wrote several series of short adventures, later collected in the volumes Dr Shadow and the Poison Goddess (1931) and Dr Shadow’s Nigger Trouble (1932). In 1934, alleging plagiarism of their character, The SHADOW, Street and Smith threatened to sue Badgerfield, publishers of Wendover’s and of the collections, and, to appease the American firm, the character was renamed Dr Shade.

A semi-supernatural, ultra-patriotic avenger whose politics would seem to be somewhat to the right of those of Sapper’s Bulldog DRUMMOND or the real-life Oswald Mosley (of whom Moncrieff was reputed to be a great admirer), Dr Shade is much given to executing minor villains with his airgun or gruesomely torturing them for information. He appeared in nearly 100 short novels, all credited to Rex Cash, written for Dr Shade Monthly, a pulp periodical issued by Badgerfield from 1934 until 1947. The house pseudonym was also used by a few other writers, mostly for back-up stories in the 1930s, when the prolific Moncrieff’s inspiration flagged. The character became even more popular when featured in a daily strip in the Evening Argus, most famously drawn by Frank FitzGerald, from 1935 to 1952. Moncrieff, after a bitter dispute with Lord Badgerfield, stopped writing Dr Shade in 1939, and the strip was taken over by Harry Lipman, a writer who had done a few Dr Shade stories for the magazine. By the outbreak of war, Lipman had effectively become Rex Cash, and was producing stories and novels for the magazine as well as scripting the comic.

Lipman’s Dr Shade is a less frightening figure than Moncrieff’s. Although his uniform and gadgets are unchanged, Lipman’s hero was an official agent of the British government who refrained from sadistically mistreating his enemies the way Moncrieff’s had. It was revealed that Dr Shade is really Dr Jonathan Chambers, an honest and dedicated general practitioner, and the supernatural elements of the strip were toned down. During WW II, Dr Shade’s politics changed; as written by Moncrieff, he is an implacable foe of the non-white races and international communism, but Lipman’s hero is a straightforward defender of democracy in the face of the Nazi menace. Moncrieff’s Moriarty figure, introduced in Dr Shade and the Whooping Horror (1934), is Israel Cohen, a stereotypically Jewish master criminal in league with Russian anarchists and Indian Thuggees in a plot to destroy Britain’s naval superiority. During the War, Cohen was retired—although he returned in the late 1940s as a comic East End nightclub owner and friend of Dr Shade—and the penumbral adventurer, joined by two-fisted American OSS agent Harry Hemingway and peppy girl reporter Penny Stamp, concentrated exclusively on licking Hitler.

Moncrieff’s Dr Shade novels include Dr Shade Vs the Dynamite Boys (1936), A Yellow Man’s Treachery (1936), Dr Shade’s Balkan Affair (1937), To the Last Drop of Our British Blood (1937), The Bulldog Bites Back (1937), The International Conspirators (1938) and Dr Shade in Suez (1939), while Lipman’s are Dr Shade’s Home Front (1940), Underground in France (1941), Dr Shade Takes Over (1943), Dr Shade in Tokyo (1945), Dr Shade Buries the Hatchet (1948) and The Piccadilly Gestapo (1951). The character also featured in films, beginning with Dr Shade’s Phantom Taxi Mystery (1936; dir. Michael Powell), in which he was played by Raymond Massey, while Francis L. Sullivan was a decidedly non-Semitic Israel Cohen, renamed “Idris Kobon.” Valentine Dyall took the role in a BBC Radio serial from 1943 to 1946, and Ronald Howard wore the cloak in a 1963 Rediffusion TV serial, Introducing Dr Shade . . ., with Elizabeth Shepherd as Penny Stamp and Alfie Bass as Israel Cohen.

See also: Dr Shade’s associates: Reggie BRANDON, Lord Highbury and Islington; Henry HEMINGWAY (Hank the Yank); Penny STAMP, Girl Reporter; and his enemies: Israel COHEN, the Mad Genius of the Revolution; ACHMET the Almost Human; Melchior Umberto GASPARD, Prince of Forgers; Professor IZAN, the Führer’s Favourite.

—David Pringle, Imaginary People:
A Who’s Who of Modern Fictional Characters (1987)

*

Greg and Harry Lipman met several times over the next few weeks, mainly away from the Leech building. In Soho pubs and cheap restaurants, they discussed the direction of the new Dr Shade strip. Greg had liked Harry immediately, and came to admire his still-quick storyteller’s mind. He knew he could work with this man. Having taken Dr Shade over from Donald Moncrieff, he didn’t have a creator’s obsessive attachment to the property, and was open to suggestions that would change the frame of the strip. Harry agreed that there was no point in producing a ’40s pastiche. Their Dr Shade had to be different from all the character’s previous incarnations, but still maintain some of the continuity. Gradually, their ideas came together.

In keeping with the Argus’ stated old-but-new approach, they decided to set the strip in the near future. Everybody was talking about the turn of the century. They would have Dr Shade come out of retirement, disenchanted with the post-war world he fought for back in the old days, and assembling a new team of adventurers to tackle up-to-the-moment villains against a backdrop of urban decay and injustice. Greg suggested pitting the avenging shadowman against rapacious property speculators laying waste to his old East End stamping grounds, a Crack cartel posing as a fundamentalist religious sect, corporate despoilers of the environment, or unethical stock-brokers with Mafia connections.

“You know,” Harry said one afternoon in The Posts, sipping his pint, “if Donald were writing these stories, Dr Shade would be on the side of those fellers. He died thinking he’d lost everything, and here we are, half a century later, with a country the original Dr Shade would have been proud of.”

Nearby, a bored mid-afternoon drinker, swallows tattooed on his neck, zapped spaceships, his beeping deathrays cutting into the piped jazz. Greg pulled open his bag of salt-and-vinegar crisps. “I don’t know much about Moncrieff. Even the reference books are pretty sketchy. What was he like?”

“I didn’t really know the man, Greg. To him, Lipmans were like Cohens . . . not people you talked to.”

“Was he really a fascist?”

“Oh yes,” Harry’s eyes got a little larger. “Nobody had a shirt blacker than Donald Moncrieff. The whole kit and kaboodle, he had: glassy eyes, toothbrush moustache, thin blonde hair. Marched through Brixton with Mosley a couple of times. Smashed up my brother’s newsagent’s shop, they did. And he went on goodwill jaunts to Spain and Germany. I believe he wrote pamphlets for the British Union of Fascists, and he certainly conned poor old Frank into designing a recruiting poster for the Cause.”

“Frank FitzGerald?”

“Yes, your predecessor with the pencils. Frank never forgave Donald for that. During the war, the intelligence people kept interrogating Frank whenever there was a bit of suspected sabotage. You know the line in Casablanca? ‘Round up the usual suspects.’ Well, Donald put Frank on the list of ‘usual suspects’.”

The space cadet burned out. He swore and thumped the machine as it flashed its “Game Over” sneer at him.

“Were you brought in specifically to change Dr Shade?”

“Oh yes. Badgerfield was an appeasement man right up until Munich, but he was a smart newspaper boy and saw the change in the wind. He dumped a lot of people—not just fascists, lots of pacifists got tarred with the same brush—and about-faced his editorial policy. You’d think he’d overlook the comic strip, but he didn’t. He knew it was as much a part of the Argus as the editorial pages and his own ‘Honest Opinion’ column. My orders when I took over were quite blunt. He told me to ‘de-Nazify’ Dr Shade.”

“What happened to Moncrieff?”

“Oh, he sued and sued and sued, but Badgerfield owned the character and could do what he wanted. When the War started, he became very unpopular, of course. He spent some time in one of those holiday camps they set up for Germans and Italians and sympathizers. They didn’t have much concrete on him, and he came back to London. He wrote some books, I think, but couldn’t get them published. I heard he had a stack of Dr Shade stories he was never able to use because only His Lordship had the right to exploit the character. Then, he died . . .”

“He was young, wasn’t he?”

“Younger than me. It was the Blitz. They tried to say he was waving a torch in the blackout for the Lüftwaffe, but I reckon he was just under the wrong bomb at the wrong time. I saw him near the end, and he was pretty cracked. Not at all the privileged smoothie he’d been in the ’30s. I didn’t like the feller, of course, but you had to feel sorry for him. He thought Hitler was Jesus Christ, and the War just drove him off his head. Lots of Englishmen like that, there were. You don’t hear much about them these days.”

“I don’t know. They all seem to be in Parliament now.”

Harry chuckled. “Too right, but Dr Shade’ll see to ’em, you bet, eh?”

They raised their drinks and toasted the avenging shadow, the implacable enemy of injustice, intolerance and ill-will.

*

IN PRAISE OF BRITISH HERO’S

Those of us PROUD TO BE BRITISH know that in this nations HOUR OF DIREST NEED, the True Blue BRITISH HERO’S will appear and STAND TALL TOGETHER to WIPE FROM THE FACE OF THIS FAIR FLOWER OF A LAND those who BESMERCH IT’S PURITY. With the WHITE BRITON’S in danger of drowning under the tidal wave of COLOUREDS, and the dedicated and law-upholding BRITISH POLICE going unarmed against the SEMITEX BOMBS, OOZY MACHINE GUNS and ROCKET LAUNCHERS of the KINK-HAIRED NIGGER’S, MONEY-GRUBBING YIDS, ARSE-BANDIT AID’S-SPREADERS, SLANT-EYED KUNGFU CHINKIE’S, LONG-HAIRED HIPPY RABBLE, LOONY LEFT LESBIONS, and RAGHEADED MUSSULMEN, the time has come for KING ARTHUR to return from under the hill, for the CROSS OF ST GEORGE to fly from the banners of the CRUSADERS OF CHRISTENDOM, for ROBIN HOOD to come back from the greenwood of Avalon, for the archers of CRECY to notch up their arrows on the orders of GOOD KING HENRY THE FIFTH, for ADMIRAL HORATIO NELSON to take command of the STOUTHEARTED FLEET, for RAJAH BROOKE OF SARA-WAK to show the coons and gooks and spooks and poofs whats what, for the MURDER of GENERAL GORDON to be avenged with the blood of AY-RAB troublemakers, for DICK TURPIN to rob the JEW-INFESTED coffers of the INVADING IMMIGRANT VERMIN AND FILTH, for DR SHADE to use his airgun on the enemies of WHITE LIBERTY . . .

The time will come soon when all GOOD BRITISH MEN will have to dip their FISTS in PAKKYNIGGERYIDCHINK-AY-RAB BLOOD to make clean for the healthy WHITE babies of our women this sacred island. The STINKING SCUM with their DOG-EATING, their DISGUSTING UNCHRISTIAN RITUAL PRACTICES, their PIG-SCREWING, CHILD-RAPING, MARRIAGE-ARRANGING, DISEASE-SPREADING habits will be thrown off the WHITE cliffs of Dover and swept out to sea as we, THE TRUE INHABITANTS OF GREAT BRITAIN, reclame the homes, the jobs, the lands and the women that are ours by DIVINE RIGHT.

KING ARTHUR! ST GEORGE! DR SHADE!

Today, go out and glassbottle a chinkie waiter, rapefuck a stinking coon bitch, piss burning petrol in a pakky news-agent, stick the boot to a raghead, hang a queer, shit in a sinnagog, puke on a lesbion. ITS YOUR LEGAL RIGHT! ITS YOUR DUTY! ITS YOUR DESTINY!

ARTHUR is COMING BACK! DR SHADE WILL RETURN!

Our’s is the RIGHT, our’s is the GLORY, our’s is the ONLY TRUE JUSTICE! We shall PREVALE!

We are the SONS OF DR SHADE!

—“Johnny British Man,” Britannia Rules fanzine,
Issue 37, June 1991.
(Confiscated by police at a South London football fixture.)

Harry had given him a map of the estate, but Greg still got lost. The place was one of those ’60s wastelands, concrete slabs now disfigured by layers of spray-painted hatred, odd little depressions clogged with rubbish, more than a few burned-out or derelict houses. There was loud Heavy Metal coming from somewhere, and teenagers hung about in menacing gaggles, looking at him with empty, hostile eyes as they compared tattoos or passed bottles. One group was inhaling something—glue?—from a brown paper bag. He looked at them a moment or two longer than he should have, and they stared defiance. A girl whose skin haircut showed the odd bumps of her skull flashed him the V sign.

He kept his eyes on the ground and got more lost. The numbering system of the houses was irregular and contradictory, and Greg had to go round in circles for a while. He asked for directions from a pair of henna-redheaded teenage girls sitting on a wall, and they just shrugged their shoulders and went back to chewing gum. One of the girls was pregnant, her swollen belly pushing through her torn T-shirt, bursting the buttons of her jeans fly.

Greg was conscious that even his old overcoat was several degrees smarter than the norm in this area, and that that might mark him as a mugging target. He also knew that he had less than ten pounds on him, and that frustrated muggers usually make up the difference between their expectations and their acquisitions with bare-knuckle beatings and loose teeth.

It was a summer evening, and quite warm, but the estate had a chill all of its own. The block-shaped tiers of council flats cast odd shadows that slipped across alleyways in a manner that struck Greg as being subtly wrong, like an illustration where the perspective is off or the light sources contradictory. The graffiti wasn’t the ’80s hip-hop style he knew from his own area, elaborate signatures to absent works of art, but was bluntly, boldly blatant, embroidered only by the occasional swastika (invariably drawn the wrong way round), football club symbol or Union Jack scratch.

CHELSEA FC FOREVER. KILL THE COONS! NF NOW. GAS THE YIDS! UP THE GUNNERS. FUCK THE IRISH MURDERERS! HELP STAMP OUT AIDS—SHOOT A POOF TODAY. And the names of bands he had read about in Searchlight, the anti-fascist paper: SCREWDRIVER, BRITISH BOYS, WHITEWASH, CRUSADERS. There was a song lyric, magic markered on a bus stop in neat primary school writing: “Jump down, turn around, kick a fucking nigger. Jump down, turn around, kick him in the head. Jump down, turn around, kick a fucking nigger. Jump down, turn around, kick him till he’s dead . . .”

You would have thought that the Nazis had won the War, and installed a puppet Tory government. The estate could easily be a ’30s science-fiction writer’s idea of the ghetto of the future, clean-lined and featureless buildings trashed by the bubble-helmeted brownshirts of some interplanetary axis, Jews, blacks and Martians despatched to some concentration camp asteroid. This wasn’t the Jubilee Year. Nobody was even angry any more, just numbed with the endless, grinding misery of it all.

Eventually, more or less by wandering at random, he found Harry Lipman’s flat. The bell button had been wrenched off, leaving a tuft of multi-coloured wires, and there was a reversed swastika carved into the door. Greg knocked, and a light went on in the hall. Harry admitted him into the neat, small flat, and Greg realized the place was fortified like a command bunker, a row of locks on the door, multiple catches on the reinforced glass windows, a burglar alarm fixed up on the wall between the gas and electricity meters. Otherwise, it was what he had expected: bookshelves everywhere, including the toilet, and a pleasantly musty clutter.

“I’ve not had many people here since Becky died”—Greg had known that Harry was a widower—“you must excuse the fearful mess.”

Harry showed Greg through to the kitchen. There was an Amstrad PCW 8256 set up on the small vinyl-topped table, a stack of continuous paper in a tray on the floor feeding the printer. The room smelled slightly of fried food.

“I’m afraid this is where I write. It’s the only room with enough natural light for me. Besides, I like to be near the kettle and the Earl Gray.”

“Don’t worry about it, Harry. You should see what my studio looks like. I think it used to be a coal cellar.”

He put down his art folder, and Harry made a pot of tea.

“So, how’s Dr Shade coming along? I’ve made some drawings.”

“Swimmingly. I’ve done a month’s worth of scripts, giving us our introductory serial. In the end, I went with the East End story as the strongest to bring the Doctor back . . .”

The East End story was an idea Harry and Greg had developed in which Dr Jonathan Chambers, miraculously not a day older than he was in 1952 (or in 1929, come to that) when he was last seen, returns from a spell in a Tibetan Monastery (or somewhere) studying the mystic healing arts (or something) to discover that the area where he used to make his home is being taken over by Dominick Dalmas, a sinister tycoon whose sharp-suited thugs are using violence and intimidation to evict the long-time residents, among whom are several of the doctor’s old friends. Penelope Stamp, formerly a girl reporter but now a feisty old woman, is head of the Residents’ Protection Committee, and she appeals to Chambers to resume his old crime-fighting alias and to investigate Dalmas. At first reluctant, Chambers is convinced by a botched assassination attempt to put on the cloak and goggles, and it emerges that Dalmas is the head of a mysterious secret society whose nefarious schemes would provide limitless future plotlines. Dalmas would be hoping to build up a substantial powerbase in London with the long-term intention of taking over the country, if not the world. Of course, Dr Shade would thwart his plots time and again, although not without a supreme effort.

“Maybe I’m just old, Greg,” Harry said after he had shown him the scripts, “but this Dr Shade feels different. People said that when I took over from Donald, the strip became more appealing, with more comedy and thrills than horror and violence, but I can’t see much to laugh about in this story. It’s almost as if someone were trying to force Dr Shade to be Donald’s character, by creating a world where his monster vigilante makes more sense than my straight-arrow hero. Everything’s turned around.”

“Don’t worry about it. Our Dr Shade is still fighting for justice. He’s on the side of Penny Stamp, not Dominick Dalmas.”

“What I want to know is whether he’ll be on the side of Derek Leech?”

Greg really hadn’t thought of that. The proprietor of the Argus would, of course, have the power of veto over the adventures of his cartoon character. He might not care for the direction Greg and Harry wanted to take Dr Shade in.

“Leech is on the side of money. We just have to make the strip so good it sells well, then it won’t matter to him what it says.”

“I hope you’re right, Greg, I really do. More tea?”

Outside, it got dark, and they worked through the scripts, making minor changes. Beyond the kitchen windows, shadows crept across the tiny garden towards the flat, their fingers reaching slowly for the concrete and tile. There were many small noises in the night, and it would have been easy to mistake the soft hiss of an aerosol paintspray for the popping of a high-powered airgun.

AUSSIE SOAP STAR GOT ME ON CRACK: Doomed schoolgirl’s story—EXCLUSIVE—begins in the Comet today.

THE COMET LAW AND ORDER PULL-OUT. We ask top coppers, MPs, criminals and ordinary people what’s to be done about rising crime?

BRIXTON YOBS SLASH WAR HERO PENSIONER: Is the birch the only language they understand? “Have-a-Go” Tommy Barraclough, 76, thinks so. A special Comet poll shows that so do 69% of you readers.

DEREK LEECH TALKS STRAIGHT: Today: IMMIGRATION, CRIME, UNEMPLOYMENT.

“No matter what the whingers and moaners say, the simple fact is that Britain is an island. We are a small country, and we only have room for the British. Everybody knows about the chronic housing shortage and the lack of jobs. The pro-open door partisans can’t argue with the facts and figures.

“British citizenship is a privilege not a universal right. This simple man thinks we should start thinking twice before we give it away to any old Tom, Dick or Pandit who comes, turban in hand, to our country, hoping to make a fortune off the dole . . .”

WIN! WIN! WIN! LURVERLY DOSH! THE COMET GIVE AWAY GRID DISHES OUT THREE MILLION KNICKER! THEY SAID WE’D NEVER DO IT, BUT WE DID! MILLIONS MORE IN LURVERLY PRIZES MUST GO!

This is BRANDI ALEXANDER, 17, and she’ll be seen without the football scarf in our ADULTS ONLY Sunday edition. BRANDI has just left school. Already, she has landed a part in a film, Fiona Does the Falklands. The part may be small, but hers aren’t . . .

CATS TORTURED BY CURRYHOUSE KING?: What’s really in that vindaloo, Mr Patel?

DID ELVIS DIE OF AIDS?: Our psychic reveals the truth!

GUARDIAN ANGEL KILLINGS CONTINUE: Scotland Yard Insiders Condemn Vigilante Justice.

The bodies of Malcolm Williams, 19, and Barry Tozer, 22, were identified yesterday by the Reverend Kenneth Hood, a spokesman for the West Indian community. The dead men were dumped in an underpass on the South London Attlee Estate. Both were shot at close range with a smallbore gun, execution-style. Inspector Mark Davey of the Metropolitan Police believes that the weapon used might be an airgun. The incident follows the identical killings of five black and Asian youths in recent months.

Williams and Tozer, like the other victims, had extensive police records. Williams served three months in prison last year for breaking and entering, and Tozer had a history of mugging, statutory rape, petty thieving and violence. It is possible that they were killed shortly after committing an assault. A women’s handbag was found nearby, its contents scattered. Witnesses report that Williams and Tozer left The Flask, their local, when they couldn’t pay for more drinks, and yet they had money on them when they were found.

The police are appealing for any witnesses to come forward. In particular, they would like to question the owner of the bag, who might well be able to identify the “Guardian Angel” executioner. Previous appeals have not produced any useful leads.

A local resident who wishes to remain anonymous told our reporter, “I hope they never catch the Guardian Angel. There are a lot more n*gg*r b*st*rds with knives out there. I hope the Angel gets them all. Then maybe I can cash my pension at the post-office without fearing for my life.”

Coming Soon: BRITAIN’S NEW-OLD NEWSPAPER. CHURCHILL’s FAVOURITE READING IS BACK. DR SHADE WILL RETURN. At last, the EVENING has a HERO.

—From the Daily Comet, Monday July the 1st, 1991

Saturday mornings were always quiet at comics conventions. Every time Greg went into the main hall there was a panel. All of them featured three quiet people nodding and chuckling while Neil Gaiman told all the jokes from his works-in-progress. He had heard them all in the bar the night before, and kept leaving for yet another turn around the dealers’ room. They had him on a panel in the evening about reviving old characters: they were bringing back Tarzan, Grimly Feendish and Dan Dare, so Dr Shade would be in good company. At the charity auction, his first attempts at designing a new-look Dr Shade had fetched over £50, which must mean something.

He drifted away from the cardboard boxes full of overpriced American comic books in plastic bags to the more eccentric stalls which offered old movie stills, general interest magazines from the ’40s and ’50s (and, he realized with a chill, the ’60s and ’70s), odd items like Stingray jigsaws (only three pieces missing, £12.00) and Rawhide boardgames (£5.00), and digest-sized pulp magazines.

A dealer recognized him, probably from an earlier con, and said he might have something that would interest him. He had the smugly discreet tone of a pimp. Bending down below his trestle table, which made him breathe hard, he reached for a tied bundle of pulps and brought them up.

“You don’t see these very often . . .”

Greg looked at the cover of the topmost magazine. Dr Shade Monthly. The illustration, a faded FitzGerald, showed the goggled and cloaked doctor struggling with an eight-foot neanderthal in the uniform of an SS officer, while the blonde Penny Stamp, dressed only in flimsy ’40s foundation garments and chains, lay helpless on an operating table. INSIDE: “Master of the Mutants” a complete novel by REX CASH. Also “Flaming Torture,” “The Laughter of Dr Shade” and “Hank the Yank and the Hangman of Heidelberg.” April, 1945. A Badgerfield Publication.

Greg had asked Harry Lipman to come along to the con, but the writer had had a few bad experiences at events like this and said he didn’t want to “mix with the looneys.” He knew Harry didn’t have many of the old mags with his stuff in, and that he had to buy these for him. Who knows, there might be a few ideas in them that could be re-used.

“Ten quid the lot?”

He handed over two fives, and took the bundle, checking the spines to see that the dealer hadn’t slipped in some Reader’s Digests to bulk out the package.

No, they were all Dr Shades, all from the ’40s. He had an urge to sit down and read the lot.

Back in the hall, someone was lecturing an intently interested but pimple-plagued audience about adolescent angst in The Teen Titans and X-Men, and Greg wondered where he could get a cup of tea or coffee and a biscuit. Neil Gaiman, surrounded by acolytes, grinned at him and waved from across the room, signalling. Greg gestured his thanks. Neil had alerted him to the presence of Hunt Sealey, a British comics entrepreneur he had once taken to court over some financial irregularities. Greg did not want to go through that old argument again. Avoiding the spherical Sealey, he stepped into a darkened room where a handful of white-faced young men with thick glasses were watching a Mexican horror-wrestling movie on a projection video. The tape was a third- or fourth-generation dupe, and the picture looked as if it were being screened at a tropical drive-in during the monsoon.

“Come, Julio,” said a deep American voice dubbed over the lip movements of a swarthy mad doctor, “help me carry the cadaver of the gorilla to the incinerator.”

Nobody laughed. The video room smelled of stale cigarette smoke and spilled beer. The kids who couldn’t afford a room in the hotel crashed out in here, undisturbed by the non-stop Z-movie festival. The only film Greg wanted to see—a French print of Georges Franju’s Les Yeux sans Visage—was scheduled at the same time as his panel. Typical.

On the assumption that Sealey, who was known for the length of time he could hold a grudge, would be loitering in the hall harassing Neil, Greg sat on a chair and watched the movie. The mad doctor was transplanting gorilla hearts, and a monster was terrorizing the city, ripping the dresses off hefty senoritas. The heroine was a sensitive lady wrestler who wanted to quit the ring because she had put her latest opponent in a coma.

Greg got bored with the autopsy footage and the jumpy images, and looked around to see if anyone he knew was there. The audience were gazing at the screen like communicants at mass, the video mirrored in their spectacles, providing starlike pinpoints in the darkness.

He had been drawing a lot of darkness recently, filling in the shadows around Dr Shade, only the white of his lower face and the highlights of his goggles showing in the night as he stalked Dominick Dalmas through the mean streets of East London. His hand got tired after inking in the solid blacks of the strip. Occasionally, you saw Dr Chambers in the daytime, but 95% of the panels were night scenes.

There was a glitch on the videotape, and the film vanished for a few seconds, replaced by Nanette Newman waving a bottle of washing-up liquid. Nobody hooted or complained, and the mad doctor’s gorillaman came back in an instant. A tomato-like eyeball was fished out, gravyish blood coursing down the contorted face of a bad actor with a worse toupee. Stock music as old as talking pictures thundered on the soundtrack. If it weren’t for the violence, this could easily have been made in the ’30s, when Donald Moncrieff’s Dr Shade was in the hero business, tossing mad scientists out of tenth-storey windows and putting explosive airgun darts into Bolshies and rebellious natives.

Although his eyes were used to the dark, Greg thought he wasn’t seeing properly. A corner of the room, behind the video, was as thickly black as any of his panels. To one side of the screen, he could dimly see the walls with their movie posters and fan announcements, a fire extinguisher hung next to a notice. But the other side of the room was just an impenetrable night.

He had a headache, and there were dots in front of his eyes. He looked away from the dark corner, and back again. It didn’t disappear. But it did seem to move, easing itself away from the wall and expanding towards him. A row of seats disappeared. The screen shone brighter, dingy colours becoming as vivid as a comic-book cover.

Greg clutched his Dr Shades, telling himself this was what came of too much beer, not enough food and too many late nights in the convention bar. Suddenly, it was very hot in the video room, as if the darkness were burning up, suffocating him . . .

A pair of spectacles glinted in the dark. There was someone inside the shadow, someone wearing thick sunglasses. No, not glasses. Goggles.

He stood up, knocking his chair over. Somebody grumbled at the noise. On the screen, the Mexico City cops had shot the gorilla man dead, and the mad doctor—his father—was being emotional about his loss.

The darkness took manshape, but not mansize. Its shadow head, topped by the shape of a widebrimmed hat, scraped the ceiling, its arms reached from wall to wall.

Only Greg took any notice. Everyone else was upset about the gorilla man and the mad doctor. Somewhere under the goggles, up near the light fixtures, a phantom white nose and chin were forming around the black gash of a humourless mouth.

Greg opened the door, and stepped out of the video room, his heart spasming in its cage. Slamming the door on the darkness, he pushed himself into the corridor, and collided with a tall, cloaked figure.

Suddenly angry, he was about to lash out verbally when he realized he knew who the man was. The recognition was like an ECT jolt.

He was standing in front of Dr Shade.

The Jew fled through the burning city, feeling a clench of dread each time a shadow fell over his heart. There was nowhere he could hide. Not in the underground railway stations that doubled as bomb shelters, not in the sewers with the other rats, not in the cells of the traitor police. The doctor was coming for him, coming to avenge the lies he had told, and there was nothing that could be done.

The all-clear had sounded, the drone of the planes was gone from the sky, and the streets were busy with firemen and panicking Londoners. Their homes were destroyed, their lilywhite lives ground into the mud. The Jew found it in his heart to laugh bitterly as he saw a mother in a nightdress, calling for her children outside the pile of smoking bricks that had been her house. His insidious kind had done their job too well, setting the Aryan races at each other’s throats while they plotted with the Soviet Russians and the heathen Chinee to dominate the grim world that would come out of this struggle. Germans dropped bombs on Englishmen, and the Jew smiled.

But, in this moment, he knew that success of the Conspiracy would mean nothing to him. Not while the night still had shadows. Not while there was a Dr Shade . . .

He leaned, exhausted, against a soot-grimed wall. The mark of Dr Shade was on him, a black handprint on his camelhair coat. The doctor’s East End associates were dogging him, relaying messages back to their master, driving him away from the light, keeping him running through the night. There was no one to call him “friend.”

A cloth-capped young man looked into the alley, ice-blue eyes penetrating the dark. He put his thumb and forefinger to his mouth and gave a shrill whistle.

“’Ere, mateys, we gots us a Yid! Call fer the doc!”

There was a stampede of heavy boots. Almost reluctant to keep on the move, wishing for it all to be over, the murdering filth shoved himself away from the wall and made a run for the end of the alley. The wall was low, and he hauled himself up it onto a sloping roof. The East End boys were after him, broken bottles and shivs in their hands, but he made it ahead of them. He strode up the tiles, feeling them shift under his feet. Some came loose and fell behind him, into the faces of Shade’s men.

Using chimneys to steady himself, the stinking guttershite ran across the rooftops. He had his revolver out, and fired blindly into the darkness behind him, panic tearing him apart from the inside. Then, he came to the end of his run.

He stood calmly, arms folded, his cloak flapping in the breeze, silhouetted sharply against the fiery skyline. The thin lips formed a smile, and the child-raping libellous Israelite scum knew he was justly dead.

“Hello, Harry,” said Dr Shade.

—Donald Moncrieff, “Dr Shade, Jew Killer”
(unpublished, 1942)

“Hello, Harry,” said Greg, jiggling the phone in the regulation hopeless attempt to improve a bad connection, “I thought we’d been cut off . . .”

Harry sounded as if he were in Jakarta, not three stops away on the District Line. “So there I was, face to goggles with Dr Shade.”

He could make it sound funny now, hours later.

“The guy was on his way to the masquerade. There are always people in weird outfits at these things. He had all the details right, airgun and all.”

Greg had called Harry from his hotel room to tell him about all the excitement the Return of Dr Shade was generating with the fans. Kids whose parents hadn’t been born when the Argus went out of business were eagerly awaiting the comeback of the cloaked crimefighter.

“Obviously, the Doc has percolated into our folk memory, Harry. Or maybe Leech is right. It’s just time to have him back.”

His panel had gone well. The questions from the audience had almost all been directed at him, and he had had to field some to the other panelists so as not to hog the whole platform. The fans had been soliciting for information. Yes, Penny Stamp would be back, but she wouldn’t be a girl reporter any more. Yes, the Doctor’s Rolls Royce “Shadowshark” would be coming out of the garage, with more hidden tricks than ever. Yes, the Doctor would be dealing with the contemporary problems of East London. When someone asked if the proprietor of the paper would be exerting any influence over the content of the strip, Greg replied “well, he hasn’t so far,” and got cheers by claiming, “I don’t think Dr Shade is a Comet reader, somehow.” Somebody even knew enough to ask him to compare the Donald Moncrieff Rex Cash with the Harry Lipman Rex Cash. He had conveyed best wishes to the con from Harry, and praised the writer’s still-active imagination.

At the other end of the line, Harry sounded tired. Sometimes, Greg had to remind himself how old the man was. He wondered whether the call had woken him up.

“We’ve even had some American interest, maybe in republishing the whole thing as a monthly book, staggered behind the newspaper series. I’m having Tamara investigate. She thinks we can do it without tithing off too much of the money to Derek Leech, but rights deals are tricky. Also, Condé Nast, the corporate heirs of Street and Smith, have a long memory and still think Moncrieff ripped off The Shadow in the ’30s. Still, it’s worth going into.”

Harry tried to sound enthusiastic.

“Are you okay, Harry?”

He said so, but somehow Greg didn’t believe him. Greg checked his watch. He had agreed to meet Neil and a few other friends in the bar in ten minutes. He said goodnight to Harry, and hung up.

Wanting to change his panelist’s jacket for a drinker’s pullover, Greg delved through the suitcase perched on the regulation anonymous armchair. He found the jumper he needed, and transferred his convention badge from lapel to epaulette. Under the suitcase, he found the bundle of Dr Shade Monthlies he had bought for Harry. He hadn’t mentioned them on the phone.

Harry couldn’t have got back to bed yet. He’d barely be in the hall. Greg stabbed the REDIAL button, and listened to the clicking of the exchange. Harry’s phone rang again.

The shadows in the room seemed longer. When Harry didn’t pick up immediately, Greg’s first thought was that something was wrong. He imagined coronaries, nasty falls, fainting spells, the infirmities of the aged. The telephone rang. Ten, twenty, thirty times.

Harry couldn’t have got back to bed and fallen into a deep sleep in twenty seconds.

You also couldn’t get a wrong number on a phone with a REDIAL facility.

The phone was picked up at the other end.

“Hello,” said a female voice, young and hard, “who’s this then?”

“Harry,” Greg said. “Where’s Harry?”

“’E’s got a bit of a problem, mate,” the girl said. “But we’ll see to ’im.”

Greg was feeling very bad about this. The girl on the phone didn’t sound like a concerned neighbour. “Is Harry ill?”

A pause. Greg imagined silent laughter. There was music in the background. Not Harry Lipman music, but tinny Heavy Metal, distorted by a cheap boombox and the telephone. Suddenly, Greg was down from his high, the good feeling and the alcohol washed out of his system.

“Hello?”

“Still here,” the girl said.

“Is Harry ill?”

“Well, I’ll put it this way,” she said, “we’ve sent for the doctor.”

Evidence has come to light linking Derek Leech, the man at the top of the pyramid, with a linked chain of dubious right-wing organizations here and abroad. A source inside the Leech organization, currently gearing up to launch a new national evening paper, revealed to our reporter, DUNCAN EYLES, that while other press barons diversify into the electronic media and publishing, Derek Leech has his eye on a more direct manner of influencing the shape of the nation.

“Derek has been underwriting the election campaigns of parliamentary candidates in the last few by-elections,” the source told us. “They mostly lost their deposits. Patrick Massinghame, the Britain First chairman who later rejoined the Tories, was one. The idea was not to take a seat, but to use the campaigns to disseminate propaganda. The Comet has always been anti-immigration, pro-law-and-order, anti-anything-socialist, pro-hanging-and-flogging, pro-military spending, pro-political-censorship. But the campaigns were able to be rabidly so.”

Leech, who has regularly dismissed similar allegations as “lunatic conspiracy theories,” refused to comment on documents leaked to us which give facts and figures. In addition to funding Patrick Massinghame and others of his political stripe, Leech has contributed heavily to such bizarre causes as the White Freedom Crusade, which channels funds from British and American big business into South Africa, the English Liberation Front, who claim that immigrants from the Indian Sub-Continent and the Caribbean constitute “an army of occupation” and should be driven out through armed struggle, the Revive Capital Punishment lobby, and even Caucasian supremacist thrashmetal band Whitewash, whose single “Blood, Iron and St George” was banned by the BBC and commercial radio stations but still managed to reach Number 5 in the independent charts.

Even more disturbing in the light of these allegations, is the paramilitary nature of the security force Leech is employing to guard the pyramid that is at the heart of his empire. Recruiting directly from right-wing youth gangs, often through advertisements placed in illiterate but suspiciously well produced and printed fanzines distributed at football matches, the Leech organization has been assembling what can only be described as an army of yobs to break the still-continuing print-union pickets in docklands. Our source informs us that the pyramid contains a well-stocked armoury, as if the proprietor of the Comet and the forthcoming Argus were expecting a siege. Rumour has it that Leech has even invested in a custom-made Rolls Royce featuring such unusual extras as bullet-proof bodywork, James Bond-style concealed rocket launchers, a teargas cannon and bonnet-mounted stilettos.

Derek Leech can afford all the toys he wants. But perhaps it’s about time we started to get worried about the games he wants to play . . .

—Searchlight, August 1991.

*

The minicab driver wouldn’t take him onto the estate no matter what he offered to pay, and left him stranded at the kerb. At night, the place was even less inviting than by day. There were wire-mesh protected lights embedded in concrete walls every so often, but skilled vandals had got through to them. Greg knew that dashing into the dark maze would do no good, and forced himself to study the battered, graffiti-covered map of the estate that stood by the road. He found Harry’s house on the map easily. By it, someone had drawn a stickman hanging from a gallows. It was impossible to read a real resemblance into the infant’s scrawl of a face, but Greg knew it was supposed to represent Harry.

He walked towards the house, so concerned for Harry Lipman that he forgot to be scared for himself. That was a mistake.

They came from an underpass, and surrounded him. He got an impression of Union Jack T-shirts and shaven heads. Studded leather straps wrapped around knuckles. They only seemed to hit him four or five times, but it was enough.

He turned his head with the first blow, and felt his nose flatten into his cheek. Blood was seeping out of his instantly swollen nostrils, and he was cut inside his mouth. He shook his head, trying to dislodge the pain. They stood back, and watched him yelp blood onto his chest. He was still wearing his convention tag.

Then one of them came in close, breathed foully in his face, and put a knee into his groin. He sagged, crying out, and felt his knees going. They kicked his legs, and he was on the ground. His ribs hurt.

“Come on, P,” one of them said, “’e’s ’ad ’is. Let’s scarper.”

“Nahh,” said a girl—the one he had talked to on the telephone?—as she stepped forwards. “’e’s not properly done yet.”

Greg pressed his nostrils together to stanch the blood, and realized his nose wasn’t broken. There was a lump rising on his cheek, though. He looked into the girl’s face.

She was young, maybe fifteen or sixteen, and there was blonde fur on her skull. Her head was lumpy, and the skinhead cut made her child’s face seem small, as if painted on an Easter egg. He had seen her the last time he was here. She wore Britannia earrings, and had a rare right-way-round swastika tattooed in blue on her temple.

“Come on . . .”

P smiled at him, and licked her lips like a cat. “Do you need telling any more, Mr Artist?”

The others were bunched behind her. She was small and wiry, but they were like hulks in the shadows.

“Do you get the picture?”

Greg nodded. Anything, just so long as they let him alone. He had to get to Harry.

“Good. Draw well, ’cause we’ll be watching over you.”

Lights came on in a house opposite, and he got a clearer look at their faces. Apart from P, they weren’t kids. They were in the full skinhead gear, but on them it looked like a disguise. There were muffled voices from the house, and the lights went off again.

“Kick ’im, Penelope,” said someone.

P smiled again. “Nahh, Bazzo. ’e knows what’s what, now. We don’t want to hurt ’im. ’e’s important. Ain’t ya, Mr Artist?”

Greg was standing up again. There was nothing broken inside his head, but he was still jarred. His teeth hurt, and he spat out a mouthful of blood.

“Dirty beast.”

His vision was wobbling. P was double-exposed, a bubble fringe shimmering around her outline.

“Goodnight,” said P. “Be good.”

Then they were gone, leaving only shadows behind them. Greg ran across the walkway, vinegar-stained pages of the Comet swirling about his ankles. Harry’s front door was hanging open, the chain broken, and the hallway was lit up.

Greg found him in his kitchen, lying on the floor, his word processor slowly pouring a long manuscript onto him. The machine rasped as it printed out.

He helped Harry sit up, and got him a teacup of water from the tap. They hadn’t hurt him too badly, although there was a bruise on his forehead. Harry was badly shaken. Greg had never seen him without his teeth in, and he was drooling like a baby, unconsciously wiping his mouth on his cardigan sleeve. He was trying to talk, but couldn’t get the words out.

The phone was ripped out of the wall. The printer was scratching Greg’s nerves. He sat at the desk, and tried to work out how to shut it off without losing anything. He wasn’t familiar with this model.

Then, he looked at the continuous paper. It was printing out a draft of the first month of new Dr Shade scripts. Greg couldn’t help but read what was coming out of the machine.

It wasn’t what he had been working on. It wasn’t even in script form. But Harry had written it, and he would be expected to draw it.

Unable to control his shaking, Greg read on.

“I’m sorry,” said Harry. “It was Him. They brought Him here. He was here before Donald started writing Him. He’ll always be here.”

Greg turned to look at the old man. Harry was standing over him, laying a hand on his shoulder. Greg shook his head, and Harry sadly nodded.

“It’s true. We’ve always known, really.”

Beyond Harry was his hallway. Beyond that, the open door allowed Greg to see into the night. The shadowman was out there, laughing . . .

. . . the laughter faded into the noise of the printer.

Greg read on.

He thought for a moment before selecting the face he would wear tonight. The Chambers identity was wearing thin, limiting him too much. These were troubled times, and stricter methods were required. He considered all the people he had been, listed the names, paged through their faces.

Sitting behind the desk at the tip of the glass and steel pyramid, he felt the thrill of power. Out there in the night cowered the Crack dealers and the anarchists, the blacks and the yellows, the traitors and the slackers. Tonight they would know he was back.

The press baron was a useful face. It had helped him gain a purchase on these new times, given him a perspective on the sorry state of the nation.

He thought of the true patriots who had been rejected. Oswald Mosley, Unity Mitford, William Joyce, Donald Moncrieff. And the false creatures who had succeeded them. This time, things would be different. There would be no bowing to foreign interests.

He fastened his cloak at his throat, and peeled off the latest mask. Smiling at the thin-lipped reflection in the dark mirror of the glass, he pulled on the goggles.

The private lift was ready to take him to the Shadowshark. He holstered his trusty airgun.

Plunging towards his destiny, he exulted in the thrill of the chase. He was back.

Accept no pale imitations. Avoid the lesser men, the men of wavering resolves, of dangerous weaknesses.

He was the original.

—Rex Cash, “The Return of Dr Shade” (1991)

Greg was at his easel, drawing. There was nothing else he could do. No matter how much he hated the commission, he had to splash the black ink, had to fill out the sketches. It was all he had left of himself. In the panel, Dr Shade was breaking up a meeting of the conspirators. African communists were infiltrating London, foully plotting to sabotage British business by blowing up the Stock Exchange. But the Doctor would stop them. Greg filled in the thick lips of Papa Dominick, the voodoo commissar, and tried to get the fear in the villain’s eyes as the shadowman raised his airgun.

“Did you hear,” P said, “they’re giving me a chance to write for the Argus. The Stamp of Truth, they’ll call my column. I can write about music or politics or fashion or anything. I’ll be a proper little girl reporter.”

Crosbie told him Derek Leech was delighted at the way the strip was going. Dr Shade was really taking off. There was Dr Shade graffiti all over town, and he had started seeing youths with Dr Shade goggles tattooed around their eyes. A comics reviewer who had acclaimed Fat Chance as a masterpiece described the strip as “racist drivel.” He hadn’t been invited to any conventions recently, and a lot of his old friends would cross the street to avoid him. Greg’s telephone rang rarely, now. It was always Crosbie. To his surprise, Tamara had cut herself out of the 10% after the first week of the Argus and told him to find other representation. He never heard from Harry, just received the scripts by special messenger. Greg could imagine the writer disconsolately tapping out stories in Donald Moncrieff’s style at his Amstrad. He knew exactly how the other man felt.

He had the radio on. The riots were still flaring up. The police were concerned by a rash of airgun killings, but didn’t seem to be doing much about them. It appeared that the victims were mainly rabble-rousing ringleaders, although not a few West Indian and Asian community figures had been killed or wounded. Kenneth Hood, a popular vicar, had tried to calm down the rioters and been shot in the head. He wasn’t expected to live, and two policemen plus seven “rioters” had died in the violent outburst that followed the attempt on his life. Greg imagined the shadowman on the rooftops, taking aim, hat pulled low, cloak streaming like demon wings.

Greg drew the Shadowshark, sliding through the city night, hurling aside the petrol-bomb-throwing minions of Papa Dominick. “The sun has shone for too long on the open schemes of the traitors,” Harry had written, “but night must fall . . . and with the night comes Shade.”

Early on, Greg had tried to leave the city, but they were waiting for him at the station. The girl called P, and some of the others. They had escorted him home. They called themselves Shadeheads now, and wore hats and cloaks like the doctor, tattered black over torn T-shirts, drainpipe jeans and steel-toed Doc Martens.

P was with him most of the time now. At first, she had just been in the corner of his vision, watching over him. Finally, he’d given in and called her over. Now, she was in the flat, making her calls to the Doctor, preparing his meals, warming his single bed. They’d pushed him enough, and now he had to be reassured, cajoled. He worked better that way.

Derek Leech was on the radio now, defending the record of his security staff during the riots. He had pitched in to help the police, using his news helicopters to direct the action, and sending his people into the fighting like troops. The police were obviously not happy, but public opinion was forcing them to accept the tycoon’s assistance. Leech made a remark about “the spirit of Dr Shade,” and Greg’s hand jumped, squirting ink across the paper.

“Careful, careful,” said P, dipping in with a tissue and delicately wiping away the blot, saving the artwork. Her hair was growing out. She’d never be a Comet Knock-Out, but she was turning into a surprisingly housewifely, almost maternal, girl. In the end, Shadeheads believed a woman’s place was with her legs spread and her hands in dishwater.

In the final panel, Dr Shade was standing over his vanquished enemies, holding up his fist in a defiant salute. White fire was reflected in his goggles.

The news was over, and the new Crusaders single came on. “There’ll Always Be an England.” It was climbing the charts.

Greg looked out of the window. He imagined fires on the horizon.

He took a finer pen, and bent to do some detail work on the strip. He wished he had held out longer. He wished he’d taken more than one beating. Sometimes, he told himself he was doing it for Harry, to protect the old man. But that was bullshit. They hadn’t been Reggie Barton and Hank Hemingway. Imaginative torture hadn’t been necessary, and they hadn’t sworn never to give in, never to break down, never to knuckle under. A few plain old thumps and the promise of a few more had been enough. Plus more money a month than either of them had earned in any given three years of their career.

Next week, the Doctor would execute Papa Dominick. Then, he would do something about the strikers, the scroungers, the slackers, the scum . . .

A shadow fell over the easel, cloak spreading around it. Greg turned to look up at the goggled face of his true master.

Dr Shade was pleased with him.