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.
My first exposure to Peter Milligan was his Batman work shortly following the first Tim Burton movie. He did a three part “mini-series within a series” (as they were billed in those days) called “Dark Knight, Dark City” that has recently been reprinted. It blew my 10 year old mind, and when Milligan took over from the staid Marv Wolfman on Detective Comics, I had my mind blown on a monthly basis. These are some seriously weird Batman comics, primarily drawn by the absolutely non-weird Jim Aparo, eleven in total, where Milligan threw out strange new villains (Siamese Twin gangsters, the Golem of Gotham, a teenage Hector Hammond-type, a Alice in Wonderland inspired villainess who collected people’s hearts with a power drill) without much fanfare. There was no through line to any of these stories. You could shuffle them up and read them in any order, and when Milligan’s byline disappeared from Detective Comics, replaced by Chuck Dixon’s, there was no letter column explanation to where Milligan had come from or where he had gone.
I discovered that he was writing the aforementioned Shade the Changing Man, and I picked up the then current issue, number 21, from my local shop, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of the goings on in the book or who the title character was, and what his relationship was to the two ladies traveling across America with him. All of their identities seemed so fluid and uncertain that I can still remember the feeling of reading the comic inbetween issues of Amazing Spider-man by David Micheline and Mark Bagley and Gerard Jones and Ron Randall’s Justice League Europe. Superhero comic books, at least back then, were centered around their character’s identities. There was a comfort in knowing that in any given issue, regardless of what villains or supporting characters might be surrounding him, that Spider-man or Superman--their identities were set. You know who they were. Needless to say, Shade the Changing Man 21 did not turn me into a regular reader of the book--that would come a few months later--but once I was able to find my groove on the series, I realized that that lack of solid identity was the entire point of the series, and probably the main thrust of most of Milligan’s more impassioned work before and since.
I became a regular reader of Shade with issue 31, because it guest-starred Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce. If that isn’t a clue to what a pretentious little snot I had become between seventh and eight grade, then nothing is. Oddly enough, issues 31 & 32 make up the end of the first half of the series. Originally published under the DC comics bullet, with issue 33 it would become part of the initial launch of the Vertigo imprint, and Milligan smartly used the opportunity to completely upend the whole series. This is usually one of the previously mentioned demarcation points for the series. I’ve read many people say this is where the series got really good. I’ve heard others claim that it’s where Milligan lost control of the book and that the first 32 issues are the superior comics.
I don’t really break it down that way. But it is a demarcation point for me. In November of 1992, I was beginning eighth grade, and every month until March of 1996, Shade the Changing Man was the comic I looked the most forward to, the one I poured over the most in the weeks between installments (most of my copies are very well-read looking. Several are missing their covers. It’s why I long for their to be a complete trade paperback collection of the whole series, but there likely never will be, for reasons I’ll get into shortly) Like I said, in those four and a half years, Shade the Changing Man meant more to me than anything else I read, or watched, or listened to. And I spent much of my early twenties driving around New England to every dive-y comic book shop I could locate in my quest to get all the early issues I missed. I located the final issue I needed to complete my collection, #26, in the fall of 2002, nearly ten years to the month that had started reading the book. It was a pretty great feeling--#26 also happens to be one of the best issues in the whole series--but it was also sad, that there would never been any more new Shade comics for me to read.
I think I’ve reread the whole series every summer since then, from issue 1 to issue 70, and each time it’s managed to surprise me with its potency. Over the next few weeks I’ll be writing about the series as I tackle this year’s reread, in attempt to get to the bottom of why the book has meant so much to me for so much of my life.
No comments:
Post a Comment