Cover of the collected edition (of the first six issues) with art by Chris Baccalo (fair use)

(9) PETER MILLIGAN –

SHADE THE CHANGING MAN (1990-1996)

“Sometimes I think that if I wasn’t crazy…I’d go crazy”

Peter Milligan is another British comics writer that started as writing for 2000 AD, most notably with Bad Company – a future war story in which a bizarre company of soldiers fight humanity’s bizarre war against the alien Krool.

However, contrary to my characteristic preference for 2000 AD, my favorite is his work for DC Comic’s Vertigo imprint label for more mature graphic novels outside the publishing restrictions of mainstream comics. Milligan came to Vertigo towards the end of the first wave of the so-called British invasion or ‘Britwave’ of British writers into American comics – and like his fellow British writers for Vertigo, he revamped an obscure DC Comics character, Shade the Changing Man.

The focus of the series is Shade, an interdimensional traveler to Earth from the parallel world of Meta, with the reality-warping ‘power of madness’ (which seems to be part of Metan technology) – he resembles another of my favorites, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, but with power born of madness instead of dreams. But then, what are dreams if not a little madness in our lives?

In other words, it starts off weird and gets weirder – a psychedelic fantasy and odyssey. The initial narrative has the most defined plot structure, as Shade was sent to Earth to defeat a dangerous manifestation of madness and the American psyche or collective unconscious, the American Scream. After that, it is the personifications from Shade’s own psyche that are dangerous, as well as other beings born from the Area of Madness – which after all extends to the land of dreams and the dead, angels and the Devil. Shade himself dies, but is reborn through the power of madness – jumping bodies and on one occasion gender as Shade the Changing Woman (anticipating the more recent reboot of a female Shade).