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”.

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.

SHADE "How It All Started"

 
    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.