And, while I'm having another of those breaks in the logjam:
* 1924-1945
The Shadow (CBS Radio, 1930): Pulp publisher Street & Smith created this character to host a radio show based on their Detective Story Magazine; when confused customers' requests for "that Shadow magazine" led to confused newsagents, Street & Smith decided to meet demand by giving the Shadow his own adventures in a twice-monthly magazine. Great War ace Kent Allard had learned the art of hypnotism in the Mysterious East; now, he turned his prodigious mental powers to fighting the evil that lurks in the hearts of men. The character influenced vigilantes both fictional (National Periodicals' Bat-Man, first published in 1939) and real (Joseph "The Stalker" des Champs, active in New Orleans in the early 1940s, who in a 1975 Playboy interview cited the Shadow and the Bat-Man as influences).
* 1982-1990
"If I Had a Blaster Rifle" (True North Records, 1984): Canadian singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn wrote this plaintive, angry song after a visit to a refugee camp in Mexico, where he heard the stories of those who had fled the atrocities of the Lopez Hoyo regime in Guatemala.
* 1991-1999
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Bloomsbury, 1997; Scholastic, 1998): This first volume in J.K. Rowling's story of a young wizard's magical education, set in a parallel world where mages exist in secret and other supers only in fiction, is an excellent book in its own right, and probably would have succeeded even if it hadn't been published as the Mage Age was dawning. Many critics saw parallels between the open magical warfare of the later volumes and the real-world progress of World War III; Rowling admitted to having drawn details from real life, but made it clear that the Wizarding War had been her plan from the start.
* 1924-1945
The Shadow (CBS Radio, 1930): Pulp publisher Street & Smith created this character to host a radio show based on their Detective Story Magazine; when confused customers' requests for "that Shadow magazine" led to confused newsagents, Street & Smith decided to meet demand by giving the Shadow his own adventures in a twice-monthly magazine. Great War ace Kent Allard had learned the art of hypnotism in the Mysterious East; now, he turned his prodigious mental powers to fighting the evil that lurks in the hearts of men. The character influenced vigilantes both fictional (National Periodicals' Bat-Man, first published in 1939) and real (Joseph "The Stalker" des Champs, active in New Orleans in the early 1940s, who in a 1975 Playboy interview cited the Shadow and the Bat-Man as influences).
* 1982-1990
"If I Had a Blaster Rifle" (True North Records, 1984): Canadian singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn wrote this plaintive, angry song after a visit to a refugee camp in Mexico, where he heard the stories of those who had fled the atrocities of the Lopez Hoyo regime in Guatemala.
* 1991-1999
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Bloomsbury, 1997; Scholastic, 1998): This first volume in J.K. Rowling's story of a young wizard's magical education, set in a parallel world where mages exist in secret and other supers only in fiction, is an excellent book in its own right, and probably would have succeeded even if it hadn't been published as the Mage Age was dawning. Many critics saw parallels between the open magical warfare of the later volumes and the real-world progress of World War III; Rowling admitted to having drawn details from real life, but made it clear that the Wizarding War had been her plan from the start.