SHADE: "Welcome to the Madhouse"

There has been lots written about the “British Invasion” of the mid to late 1980s into the halls of (primarily) DC Comics. Following the success of Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing and Watchmen, editor Karen Berger did a talent search in the UK for like-minded writers. (Most of this talent search seemed to involve poaching talent from 2000AD.) But while this has been covered in the numerous books and magazine articles written about the careers of Grant Morrison and Neil Gaiman, Pete Milligan rarely gets mentioned as another British creator discovered from this effort.
The seeming purpose was to give these “quirky British writers” neglected or forgotten DC properties to revive. Morrison obviously started out with also-rans Animal Man and Doom Patrol, Gaiman Black Orchid and Sandman. The stories of how each writer picked and pitched their titles have been well documented.
    Milligan’s selection of Shade the Changing Man, not so much. A character created by Steve Ditko right before the DC Implosion of the late 70s, Shade is not someone many other writers would have picked. Or was he offered to Milligan? Under Ditko, Shade was an outlaw on the planet Meta, and controlled an M-vest that somehow let him change matter or something like that. None of  Ditko’s short seven issue run took place on planet Earth, and ended unceremoniously without every resolving its final cliffhanger. It seems an unlikely book to relaunch. But as I said, there is very little that I’ve seen written about the genesis of this book. But rereading this first arc, it doesn’t seem like Milligan had identified much of anything inherently interesting in Shade besides being a vehicle to allow Milligan to comment on the outsider’s perception of America.

    After the first issue (which establishes the basic premise of the series, and to which I’ll return in a bit) the format of the book’s first year is introduced: Shade and his traveling companion Kathy journey to some part of America (while on the run from Federal authorities interested in exactly who or what Shade is) and encounter some part of the American myth given grotesque life by the “Madness” that has either Shade has followed to Earth or that is following him. It is dubbed the American Scream, and Milligan uses that for all the thematic heft he can. Issues 2 and 3 feature the JFK Sphinx, whose Oedipean riddle is “Who Killed JFK?” 5 and 6 take on Hollywood. In the second trade collection, Shade battles a trash monster possessed by the spirit of America’s homeless, hippies on Haight-Ashbury, and a perverse Cleaver-style family. Near the end of Milligan’s 18-issue “American Scream” mega-arc, Shade encounters the ghost of a bloated Elvis, and the fact that it is dealt with in the course of a handful of panels (and is told in flashback as Shade fills Kathy in on what he’s been up to) highlights that even Milligan realized that if the series was going to focus on a deconstruction of Americana, it was a narrative dead-end. The second year of the book wraps up the “Scream” storyline while trying to reposition the book into something else entirely.
    Luckily for Milligan, the first issue of Shade--one of the best single-issue first issues I’ve read--does a brilliant job of introducing the character of Kathy George. It’s kind of a standard story trope: introduce an audience identification character to not only ask the questions that the readers themselves have (“What planet did you say your were from? How did you get here?” ) but also to help humanize the eponymous alien character. The first page of the first issue is a full page illustration of Kathy George, carrying a bag of groceries as weird indistinct figures swirl around her and costumed creatures seem to melt either into or out of the street behind her. “I’ve never felt so crazy in all my life,” she tells us, “and I have, in my time, been pretty crazy.” The first two story pages take place in the present, before Kathy goes back to explain how we all got to this point, but during those first two pages, Kathy George tells us a lot about herself, including her plans to murder the man in the hotel room she is en route to. “Do you ever wish you were someone else? You shouldn’t wish for anything,” she warns us. As she zig-zags around all the weirdness, she finally puts on her sunglasses, and the narration tells us “My name is Kathy George. I wish it wasn’t but it is. Yesterday was my 23rd birthday. Today’s the day the man in my motel room was executed.”
    It’s quite a hook for the beginning of the story--the man in her motel room was executed but she’s on her way to murder him--but more interesting is how Kathy articulates her concerns about the nature of identity, how she wishes she were someone else but also knows that it’s dangerous to wish for anything. Whether intentional or not, this will eventually become the thematic crux of the whole series.
    Kathy’s back story begins on page three: she is traveling to her parents’ house in Lousiana with her new black boyfriend Roger in tow. Roger has some concerns about how he will be received by her parents (“I’m starting to feel like Sidney Poitier,” he says.) They stop in a field to make love on the way before arriving at her parents’ home. Her parents, of course, are dead. Murdered by the serial killer, Troy Grenzer. The decision to stop along the way will continue to haunt Kathy for much of the rest of the series, in a perfect illogical way. Unlike Peter Parker’s failure to stop the burglar who later kills his uncle, how Kathy would have prevented her parents’ murder by arriving earlier (instead of just becoming another victim herself) is never really clear. But there is something perfectly human about her reaction and her guilt.
    What’s equally effective is the way that Milligan and Bachalo layout this scene. The page preceding the big reveal of Troy Grenzer standing over the mutilated bodies of Kathy’s parents is made up six repeated panels of Kathy entering her parents’ home. Usually repeat panels come across as a lazy shortcut (presumably Bachalo only drew the panel once) but there are a couple of things that make it powerful. First, Kathy’s dialogue, “Mom, Dad, it’s me” is repeated in each panel, while her narration provides some context about her sometimes thorny relationship with her parents. The repeated dialogue calls attention to itself, because clearly Kathy did not announce herself six times in a row.  One of the tricks the American Scream uses throughout the first eighteen issues is to trap Kathy in the moment of her parents’ murder (seriously, this happens several different times) but this pages makes it explicit: Kathy is already trapped in the moment of her parents’ murder, it’s a groove on the record that skips over and over again, which is why the Scream’s attempts to break her ultimately fail.
    The repeated panel also features splattered blood on both the walls and the backside of the door Kathy is opening. If you actually “read” each panel (by which I mean you not only read the new text, but also look at the repeated artwork in each panel) eventually the blood becomes less shocking and even less mysterious. There have probably been hundreds of comic panels where an unsightly splatter or pool of blood before the page turn has been used to build tension. But by repeating the panel six times it does build tension (although perhaps of a different kind) but it also suggests the inevitability of the situation. By the sixth time we “read” the bloody panel, we know that Kathy’s parents are dead, we know that it’s too late.
    This also might be a good time to point out the work of series artist Chris Bachalo. Bachalo is probably one of the most distinctive popular artists working in mainstream comics today. Opinions on his work vary wildly (I really enjoy it) but I don’t think it’s unfair to say that modern Bachalo doesn’t really look like much else, and he’s inspired a number of imitators that can’t really seem to capture the energy or expression he uses. What’s interesting is that Bachalo basically was allowed to develop as an artist almost completely in the pages of Shade. I don’t think there is any way that someone looking at his current work and his work on the first issue of Shade would ever guess in a million years that it’s the same artist, and I would argue that the same could be said about the artwork he was producing when he left the book after issue 50. It looks like an entirely different artist. Usually artists in mainstream comics wander through some Alpha Flight fill-in issues and terrible summer annuals while they are developing, but Bachalo did it in one book, from issue one. I’m sure I’ll kick myself once I type this, but I can’t think of another major artist who developed from young artist to mature artist in one mainstream comic series.
    That having been said, his artwork in the first few issues of Shade can often be a little rough. It’s also not helped by the style of coloring that DC’s mature readers books utilized in the early 90s. But while some of his figure work is uncertain, Bachalo has a fantastic handle on the storytelling aspect of comics in these early stories. (Which is ironic, since confusing and unclear layout is often the criticism leveled against him these days, not always unfairly.) But the two page sequence that follows the title page, in which Grenzer lunges out the front door at Kathy, only to be tackled by Roger while Kathy stands almost serene looking in at her parents, is brilliant. The police arrive, and seeing a black man wrestling a white man, open fire on Roger, shooting him through the head. Kathy’s sole narrative caption says simply, “It was still the South.”
    The rest of the issue plugs away efficiently. Grenzer is an unrepentant killer. “Do you know why I do it?” he asks. “Cause I want to. Period.” He’s convicted and sentenced to be executed. (There’s a really nice moment where, after bragging about how unafraid and excited he is to be electrocuted, he suddenly has a change of heart and starts begging for mercy in his final moments. Too often, fiction writers create this amoral super-killers and Grenzer’s all-too human reaction both deflates that convention, as well as establishing that the Grenzer who shows up later in the series is really only Kathy’s conception of Grenzer as amoral super-killer.) In the moment that the flip is switched, Shade jumps into Grenzer’s body and levitates him out of the electric chair. “I’m not the person you think I am. My name is Shade. I’m only using this body.” Inexplicably, Kathy offers the man inside the body of her parents’ killer a ride away from the penitentiary, and away from the authorities who are hunting for him.
    I say it’s inexplicable, and I don’t mean that from a storytelling point of view. Milligan and Bachalo present a Kathy so dead and numb (there is a two page sequence that covers what Kathy is up to while the legal process trudges along with the Grenzer case: after a brief stay in an institution, she basically drinks and sleeps her way across America. “I was scared if I stopped moving, I’d fall to pieces.” The fact that Kathy has no idea why she goes along with Shade’s pleas for her help is not because the story demanded that she do so and Milligan couldn’t come up with a plausible reason. It’s because, as she makes clear in the first couple of pages, she has no more sense of self or identity. Back in the motel room, holding the knife that she plans to use to murder Shade, she talks about her abuse of alcohol. “I read that alcohol makes you a different person. I thought ‘Great! That’s for me!’ But you always wake up or sober up the same person.”
    Shade lives up to his moniker over the course of the rest of the series: he constantly changes, sometimes with only the slightest thread to the character we had read about before. What he’s looking for is exactly the opposite of what Kathy is looking for. He wants to wake up the same person, just as she wants to wake up someone different. The trip they take together towards the center of those two extremes makes up the thematic drive for the series, at least until the 50th issue, if not all the way until the end.
    As I’ve mentioned, Milligan and Bachalo initially use the series to comment on the myth of America until they seemingly realize the limitations of that raison d’etre. Vertigo has on a few occasions attempted to start a trade paperback library for Shade, usually in conjunction with a new Milligan project (in 2002 when he was writing both Human Target for Vertigo and X-Statix for Marvel and again in 2009 when he took over the reins of Hellblazer) but without much success. I’d guess it’s because outside the first issue, the early Shade seems kind of disjointed and episodic. There are great weird moments in each of them, but it isn’t until the second year of the series when Milligan returns to the theme of identity and makes the relationship between Shade and Kathy (and Lenny, who we’ll talk about next time) the prime mover of the series, that the book really becomes the one I adore.

(You can pick up a copy of the first trade of Shade here.)