The Way of Shadow

The story of this role playing game book involved an investigator who was looking into murders and kidnappings believed to be the work of ninja. To suggest this, I showed him picking up a shuriken (a throwing star). The true situation was actually much worse, involving sinister forces that could drive the investigator mad and turn him into a pawn of evil. Though it is not an actual scene in the book, I felt that it would convey the paranoid, disturbing mood of the story if I had his own shadow coming alive menacingly, manifesting itself into one of the spectral entities known collectively only as "the Shadow." The author agreed.

AEG's graphic designer employed what I felt was a very appropriate "ghosting" of the edges, to add to the creepy, ethereal feeling. The investigator's hand is inside his kimono simply because that is something I saw characters doing in some samurai films.

Acrylics, 1998