“The Shadow: Leviathan” is one of those stories that takes the cloaked, gun-toting, mind-controlling crime fighter out of the 1930s and ’40s of his creation and places him in modern times.

As with other efforts to modernize The Shadow, “Leviathan” has mixed results.

The Shadow seems perfectly suited for throw-back tales fighting Nazis and 1930s gangsters but he can at times seem like an anachronism set in the 21st century. Howard Chaykin and other creators updated The Shadow in the 1980s but often in a satirical manner that mostly worked but not always.

The further we move away from the 1930s, and now close in on a century removed from that era, the less The Shadow seems to fit the times.

Possibly because he seems so unchanged, in terms of look, method and back story.

Whether, it’s the 1930s, the 1980s or 2020s, The Shadow is the same man. Whereas other comic book characters have been altered with more recent birthdays (for example, Reed Richards and Ben Grimm were originally World War II veterans when they were introduced in the 1960s “Fantastic Four” but have been altered through the years so they are no longer WWII veterans but characters born decades after the war). But The Shadow has never aged, or at least he’s clouded all of our minds to give the appearance he hasn’t aged. So, he’s more than 100 years old and still jumping from rooftops, etc.

In “Leviathan,” even the character framing the story wonders about his age. After decades of absence, The Shadow reemerges to fight crime. And possibly he is getting old and slipping. 

A hospitalized man is horribly burned. We meet him through a young woman studying to be a doctor. Through her, the story evolves as she follows the injured man who takes to the streets as The Shadow.

But even “Leviathan” doesn’t seem to know exactly what to do with The Shadow in the modern era, even with flashbacks to the 1930s. The conclusion of this story arc is predictable and underscores the uncertainty of what to do with a character that’s out of his time.