It's a mad, mad, mad, mad world. And the only people who can fight it are an alien in the body of a serial killer and the slightly insane girl whose parents he murdered. That sums up the basic idea of Shade's first volume, and if you get the idea from that synopsis that the book is more than a little weird, well you're getting the right idea. I know that Morrison is generally credited with being the big auteur of the weird, but for my money Milligan does it better, and Shade the Changing Man has The Filth beat all to hell in terms of coherency, although granted the ideas aren't quite as out there. This is the long, long-awaited printing of one of the Vertigo series that launched the imprint, and it is my hope that this will be volume one in a series, because it is great stuff.
Milligan and Bachalo give Shade a sort of restrained weirdness. There are psychedelic landscapes, bizarre twists of logic and some truly mad ideas, but there's also a focus in the characters of Shade and Kathy and a goal that is made clear if not in every issue than at least at the beginning and end of each arc. Shade was originally printed in 1990, and there are a few fundamentals at work from that time that aren't as common now. One is the sense that each issue ought to offer some sort of complete read, and while each issue in this volume leads into a larger tapestry of story, each one of them also generally provides a beginning, middle and end all its own, something that many of the "weird for weirdness sake" books don't do.
Another fundamental is that even if you're writing a story about insanity and twisted perceptions, it should be comprehensible to those with sane, normal perceptions. OK, maybe it's not as artistic and out there, but it's a damn sight more entertaining, and I thought the story of Shade did a great job of having strange, sometimes hard-to-discern elements (like figuring out the layers of hallucinations, for instance) while making everything clear in the end. Milligan and Bachalo put a lot of effort in at the very beginning to establish the key underpinnings such as the murder of Kathy's parents and boyfriend and the injection of madness into the world, so that when we see it all played out in longer form later we know what's being referred to.
While this first volume isn't an example of Chris Bachalo at his best, it does demonstrate once and for all that his shift in style has made his art less attractive to me than it was when he was just starting out. Though he has the ability to do surreal, evocative landscapes and has plenty of imagination in his work, the completely inscrutable panel arrangements of something like Steampunk are nowhere to be found here. Instead, Bachalo's work is easy-to-read while still conveying all the bizarre elements of Milligan's scripts and the intangible, ever-shifting nature of the madness that Kathy and Shade live in.
To read this review, you might think that my biggest compliment comes in the book's coherency. However, the real draw here is to be found in Milligan's ideas and his examination of American culture. The JFK conspiracy theory makes way for the larger question of how America treats its heroes, and that theme continues into the Hollywood story. Whether the idols are political or in the entertainment industry, the nature of American culture is to tear them down, even as we wish they were better than we are, a dichotomy that speaks of the madness that drives the American Scream, the titular villain of this piece. Along with these somewhat weighty examinations of cultural madness is a more personal story of how two slightly off-kilter people who have both lost so much can find comfort in one another.
Having read some of the post-Vertigo issues of Shade (it began as just a DC Universe series), I know that the book only gets better later on. Deeper relationships, bigger ideas, a growth in both writing and art and various other factors combine to make this not just a great book, but a classic pillar that forms the foundation of the Vertigo imprint. With any luck, we'll be seeing more of it on a regular basis.
