I don’t think if you asked me at any point in the past eighteen years what my favorite comic series was I would have ever answered with anything other than Shade the Changing Man. I think most days I would name that as the most important piece of art in terms of its influence on my life. But still it’s one of those series that is remembered by most fondly and dimly. There’s usually the caveat that it gets better/it gets worse after issue 20, issue 33, issue 50. I’ve never seen anyone write at any length about the series, despite its longevity (70 issues during the 90s, a rough period for interesting or challenging books) , despite the fact that it launched the career of Chris Bachalo (and not in an insignificant way--he was the primary artist for the first 50 issues), despite the fact that writer Pete Milligan has consistently been hovering around mainstream comics (if you had told me when I was 13 that Milligan would one day write the main X-Men book I would’ve simultaneously creamed myself and disbelieved you.) --despite all that, it’s a book that basically exists in some kind of weird vacuum of comics culture. Maybe if Milligan had been able to translate his mainstream superhero comics work into the zeitgeist the way Grant Morrison did with Justice League and X-Men, we’d have a set of Shade trades kept constantly in print, the way Morrison’s Invisibles and Doom Patrol have been.
