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Shade, The Changing Man, Vol 3: Scream Time

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Artists: Chris Bachalo, Bryan Talbot, Mark Pennington

Collects: Shade, The Changing Man issues 14 -19

Published under VERTIGO

And now, we come to the third and final (at least till date) volume of Peter Milligan’s Shade, The Changing Man. The inevitable confrontation between Shade and The American Scream does occur here, and we learn a few secrets about Shade, Kathy, Wizor, the American Scream, the zone of madness and the Madness Vest.

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Categories Aalok, Bryan Talbot, Chris Bachalo, DC, Deciphering DC, Jamie Hewlett, Mark Pennington, Peter Milligan, Shade The Changing Man, Vertigo

Shade the Changing Man Vol 2: Edge of Vision

13 Aug

Writer: Peter Milligan

Artist: Chris Bachalo

Collects: Shade, the Changing Man issues 7-13

Published under Vertigo

Welcome back to another long overdue edition of Deciphering DC. Continuing with the original series on Shade, The Changing Man, (read the review of Vol 1 here) who currently appears in Flashpoint: Secret Seven and is slated to appear in one of the DcnU 52 titles, Justice League Dark.

Shade and Kathy continue their road trip through America in their quest to circumvent the madness stream and the American Scream. The issues here start having more of a surrealistic flavour than the preceding ones.

The first issue focuses on a very realist, down to earth topic – garbage. Probably the best issue of this series (yet) this one features a man in search for the identity of a homeless derelict he buried some time ago. In large cities, garbage abounds, but not all of us can see the small places it escapes to. When the madness stumbles onto a man who buried a man whose name he did not know, chaos results. All the garbage of the city comes out, and the writer succeeds in inducing a very claustrophobic feeling.

Next comes a two parter inspired by the hippie era of ‘totally rad’ communes. The madness stumbles upon a man whose goal is to unite the country with love. Of note is the absurd number of communes and their nature – a few I can remember fondly are the Pink Heaven commune, the soppy sleepyheads commune and the crack in the bathroom ceiling commune. Of note is a long running character, Lenny, who is introduced here. She’s a devil may care person who Kathy runs into, and travels with Shade and Kathy here onwards. While over the top and absurd, it all feels good.

The Madness stream takes our heroes to a town out of Norman Rockwell where to be different is analogous to being taken over by aliens. If a person takes coffee without milk, or writes with his left hand, he is taken to a ‘correction’ machine. With the flavour of a sci fi flick, this one works well as a one and done short.

Up next is the three part ‘Edge of Vision’ where Shade becomes involved in a murder mystery, with Stringer, who has been following them from the beginning. The identity of the murderer must remain a mystery, and he’s definitely someone who we have seen before. We also get a view of Shade’s scattered (shattered?) psyche, and all multiple personalities are out for everyone to see. Plus, Kathy makes love to Shade, but it’s not the Shade she (or we?) know.

Peter is traversing really weird territory here, and writes a very different comic. Chris Bachalo is doing some wonderful work here, especially on the Commune issues here.

Rating: 9.5 on 10. Peter Milligan’s knocking ‘em out of the stadium here. I feel this is Chris Bachalo’s career best work

Full covers, 19.99 US$

Next Week:

SHADE, THE CHANGING MAN VOL 3: SCREAM TIME

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Categories Aalok, Chris Bachalo, DC Comics, Deciphering DC, Peter Milligan, Shade The Changing Man, Vertigo

Shade, The Changing Man Vol 1: The American Scream

23 Jul

Artist: Chris Bachalo

Collects: Shade, the Changing Man issues 1-6

Review by Aalok Joshi

Welcome back to another edition of Deciphering DC. Right now, we’re moving out to the fringes of the DC Universe. In the late 80s/early 90s, there were a lot of experimental titles, most of them treading new genres (remember, Vertigo as an imprint wasn’t around back then) like The Question, Suicide Squad, The Spectre, Green Arrow, Skreemer, Time Masters, Doc Savage, Sandman, Hellblazer, The Books of Magic among others.

Shade, as such wasn’t a new title – neither was Sandman. But like Neil Gaiman, up & coming writer Peter Milligan chucked the original character created by Steve Ditko out of the window, and created something…..else. He did keep the original character history in an……innovative way, but all of what he created didn’t depend on that in any way. However, Shade, while a very critically acclaimed title never got the sales it deserved, and fell below the radar for most of it’s run (70 issues, not very less than Sandman which was 75 issues plus Specials. This run, never before collected in paperback beyond the 1st six issues, suddenly becomes significant, as we see Shade appear in recent issues of Hellblazer, and is currently appearing in Secret Seven, slated to appear in Justice League Dark, all written by Peter Milligan.

The story opens with a mentally “disturbed” girl, Kathy entertaining thoughts of killing the man in her hotel room, but not without having a drink first. The man in her room appears to be her parents’, as well as her husband’s murderer. Troy Grenzer is as sick as they come. Brilliantly epitomised by the line “I’m not mad. I get mad, but I’m not mad.” This guy is a perpetually talking nutcase who is actually looking forward to the electric chair. Waiting outside the penitentiary, where he was supposed to be executed Kathy starts seeing weird things, like a walking electric chair with the hood actually smiling at her.

Meanwhile, through a disturbance in the fabric of reality, an entity possesses Troy’s body, making it levitate and find it’s way out to Kathy’s car, whereupon it urges her to drive away. Kathy wants her revenge on Troy, and so plays along. The entity claims to have possessed Grenzer’s body through the electric current, and is from the planet Meta, having come here through the power of something called the M-vest or Madness vest, or so he claims. The real Troy is gone…well, almost.

/* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:”Table Normal”; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:””; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:”Calibri”,”sans-serif”; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Shade claims he’s here to stop the madness from taking over the earth, which is spreading from the Zone of Madness, between Earth & Meta. After reconciliation with Kathy, wherein she kills the personification of Troy Grenzer, Shade and Kathy set out to stop the madness, wherever possible. Meanwhile, the madness is slowly making itself known, through the possession of affected individuals.

Further, Shade elaborates of his life on the planet Meta, establishing himself as a hopeless romantic, and we see as Shade is trained in astral projection to go to Earth to combat the madness by Wizor & the Changemasters (it’ll all make sense when you read it) who have devised how to keep an agent indefinitely (earlier they could do it only for 3 hours) on Earth.

The entity of the Zone of Madness, the American Scream, is the personification of the madness who claims that Wizor has betrayed Shade, his original body is dead in the zone of madness and there’s no way back to Meta. Slowly but surely, Shade settles himself to life on earth.

On the way, Shade and Kathy encounter the Kennedy Sphinx who threatens to eat all of America until it’s question, “Who killed J.F.K.?” is answered and a movie camera, which is possessed by the Madness. These stories are too weird and trippy to elaborate further. Suffice to say, they read very well on multiple readings.

Peter Milligan writes weird, maybe on the same level of Grant Morrison, but with Milligan I feel that it’s just not ‘weird for the sake of weird’ which unfortunately Grant falls prey to sometimes. Milligan is weaving a wonderful story around, which does make sense, and it’s all before the collected editions era,so it doesn’t read like it’s written for the trade, rather reads like single issues. Chris Bachalo’s artwork is wonderful, and though it isn’t his signature style (yet) Bachalo is well suited to drawing a lot of detail, as well as experimenting with different styles. The covers by Brendan McCarthy are just too good for words, which is why I include all the six covers (TPB cover is the original cover to issue 5), also the original cover to the 1st collection in this article. It’s printed on non glossy paper, which I just love and adore.