Shade the Changing Man 2: Ego Games

By the end of the first trade paperback (issues 1-6) Milligan and Bachalo have fleshed out the basics: Rac Shade, an overly sensitive young poet from the planet Meta has been tricked into joining some kind of revolutionary group that sends him to the planet Earth, where his spirit jumps into the body of serial killer Troy Grenzer at the exact moment of Grenzer’s execution. Shade manages to hook up with the grieving daughter of Grenzer’s last victims, Kathy George, and the two of them set about on a cross-country journey in search of something called “The American Scream”.

As I’ve said before, this conception of the book seems a bit limited, and once we get to the end of the first trade the formula is already well in place. Aside from the two origin issues (1 and 4) the rest of the first six issues comprise two distinct stories, the JFK Sphinx and the Hollywood Babble On. In each case, some aspect of Americana is explored through some kind of literal manifestation that is later deflated by Shade and Kathy. The conspiracy theorist who’s obsession with the Kennedy assassination powers the JFK Sphinx is “defeated” when our heroes force him to accept that his real question isn’t “Who killed JFK?” but instead “why did my daughter have to die?” Something similar happens in Hollywood when the actors filming a zombie picture are forced to deal with the chasm between their true selves and the personas they have constructed or have had constructed for them.
The second trade continues along this path. It’s a bit more successful, in part because Bachalo is becoming a more confident artist. His artwork in these issues (7-9, 11-13) becomes more distinctive, and you can see flashes of the style he would use in the later part of Shade (as well as the Death miniseries and his later work in Generation X) start to develop here. But it’s also successful because Milligan begins to use the formula to develop the relationship between Kathy and Shade. Issue 7, “The Nameless” tackles the issue of the homeless and what I imagine was a then current concern about the sheer amount of trash produced in American cities. This trash monster cannot be stopped until the name of the homeless person whose spirit is powering it is discovered. Both Shade and Kathy are dragged into fantasies (if that’s the right word) of homelessness. I imagine this was done for the plot purpose of separating them from one another--the romantic tension between the two characters appears early and it seems Milligan was developing plans for  this aspect that meant keeping Kathy and Shade away from each other for a bit--but it also succeeds in moving the two characters forward on their, at this point, very divergent paths.
Shade uses his time inside the homeless fantasy to work backwards, to follow the thread through the nameless vagrant’s life to see not only what lead him to his ultimate fate, an unknown corpse on a trash barge, and in doing so discovers his name, which dissipates the trash monster that is terrorizing New York and frees Shade from the fantasy.
Kathy, instead, seems to move forward, and witnesses her own life progress into a pit of alcoholism and homelessness. What this reinforces is the difference between this two characters: Shade is seeking an identity for himself (which is how he is able to discover the homeless man’s name--but sublimating himself in the man’s identity) while Kathy is unable to let go of her sense of identity, regardless of how much she wants to. That is why when brought into the homeless fantasy of the Nameless, Kathy is unable to divorce herself from it--she becomes a homeless person because of it. In the following issues where Shade is drawn to San Francisco while Kathy remains in New York, she cannot shake the self that developed inside the Trash Monster, sleeping on the street, getting drunk, wandering around the city in search of people she knows there. It is during this separation that Kathy meets Lenny, the performance artist/petty thief/bon vivant who will completely change the series going forward.



Shade, meanwhile, is trapped in some kind of hippie commune run by someone named Arnold Major, and he keeps slipping between the layers of fantasy the commune represents. Most of these involve lots of free love with nubile young flower children, and eventually Shade does succumb. The revelation that this fantasy doesn’t represent American hippie sub-culture so much as it does the singular fantasy of Arnold Major (at one point a man inside the commune points out that he is gay, but since Arnold Major is not, gayness doesn’t exist inside the commune, and he is forced to have sex with all these young girls more or less against his will.) Shade is able to unmask Arnold Major (literally, at one point; he takes off the sunglasses that Major wears continually) and exposes him as a young boy who never got over being cross-eyed and constructed a fantasy world in which women always wanted him, despite his lazy eye. “These are all your ego games,” Shade tells Major, who at this point has crucified himself on a cross made of eyeballs. (don’t ask.) This makes the point more explicitly than before, that accepting other people’s fantasies is a trap that is nearly impossible to escape from. 
    From this point on, it seems that Milligan had been given the green light for the series to continue beyond its first year, and he begins its second with a more serious sense of purpose. He brings back Troy Grenzer as a villain for the series, revealing that some aspect of Grenzer remained in his body when Shade absconded with it, and he has now found a way to manifest himself in the real world. The serial killer aspects scream of early 90s mature readers comics (Gaiman was covering similar territory over in the Doll’s House arc of Sandman at about the same time) but it does give Milligan the opportunity to bring together Shade and Stringer, the Federal agent who has been pursuing him. (The fact that he needs Shade to try and catch the serial killer is really the only way we could believe that Stringer wouldn’t try to capture and imprison Shade) It also allows Milligan to move Shade and Kathy’s relationship to the next level while still addressing the theme of identity.

    While Shade leaves his body to try and find Grenzer, Grenzer takes control and seduces Kathy. Kathy sleeps with Grenzer believing he is Shade, and when Shade returns to discover that Grenzer has found the ability to assume control over the body he doesn’t even take one second of relief that Grenzer did not physically hurt Kathy. Instead he is consumed by jealousy that he has been cuckolded by himself. In the issues leading up to this, any attempt Kathy and Shade made towards sleeping together was thwarted, usually by some form of the madness. (Indeed, it’s almost made explicit at the end of the Arnold Major story that Shade deliberately manifests these distractions, perhaps because he is too nervous or frightened to consummate his relationship with Kathy.) When Shade commits suicide at the end of issue 12 by shooting himself in the head, he has been so despondent about the idea of Kathy sleeping with Grenzer that it is easy to believe he does so in despair, instead of as a ploy to defeat Grenzer. (although I was not reading the series monthly at this point, I was still a lowly 8th grader when I was collecting this issues and I would trundle down to my local comic shop whenever I’d found a couple of bucks and buy whatever issue of Shade I could find in the back issue bins; this meant that there was at least a week or so gap between reading issues 12 and 13 for me, and I certainly believed that the suicide was “real” in between.)
    Shade is able to confide in Lenny before he does himself in (initially this might have been the point of Lenny: she allowed the two main characters someone to talk to about the other) and Lenny does a good job of immediately poking through Shade’s bullshit. “She’s been wrong, she’s been violated, not you…And don’t kid me it’s Kathy you’re feeling sorry for because we both know it isn’t.” Shade recognizes this, and in the moments before he takes his own life, he constructs a Kathy of his own. “I make Kathy so I can feel good about her for a moment in a way I couldn’t feel right now if she were real. I know I’m a writhing mass of pettiness and demons and jealousies, but what can I do?” They kiss briefly, Shade and his imaginary Kathy, before he vanishes her, afraid that this could be better than the real thing. “I could end up living my whole life with a projection of my own mind fuelled by the power of madness.”
    This ultimately provides the method by which is he able to defeat Grenzer, but more importantly it establishes the through line that had been (seemingly) missing from the series so far. Shade will again and again use his power to fuel his own fantasies and each time it will lead to tragedy. He is able to deflate the ego games of Arnold Major, he is able to transcend identity to learn the name of the nameless, but once he falls in love with Kathy he is no longer able to completely reject the power and fatality of his own fantasies.