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A review by unladylike
Shade, the Changing Man: The American Scream by Steve Ditko, Mark Pennington, Peter Milligan, Chris Bachalo
3.0
This series has been on my to-read list for so many years, but it's hard to find. I've finally been able to use InterLibrary Loan to order the trades to my library, but I'm not super impressed.
The cover art reminds me that I love those early Vertigo covers more than almost anything since, so that's great. This was one of the first series to launch with that publishing imprint (which has now been swallowed into the main DC universe) which also made such legends as Sandman, Hellblazer (John Constantine), The Invisibles, and other quirky stories filled with lots of woo-woo and written by white guys from the UK. So it comes as no surprise that the writing by Peter Milligan is similarly ambitious and plagued by flowery purple prose. Sure, in comics, [good] purple prose can be enjoyable and feel like it's elevating the medium at times. But between the repeated poetic phrases and themes amidst a corny 80s sci-fi plot involving an amnesiac alien whose real body is connected to something called the M-Vest (M always stands for Madness in this book), I was rolling my eyes and setting this down quite a bit while saying out loud, "Well shoot, this is just boring."
I'm still giving it 3 stars and continuing through the series in hopes that it improves (as did Sandman and Invisibles) and by considering it in its historical context.
The cover art reminds me that I love those early Vertigo covers more than almost anything since, so that's great. This was one of the first series to launch with that publishing imprint (which has now been swallowed into the main DC universe) which also made such legends as Sandman, Hellblazer (John Constantine), The Invisibles, and other quirky stories filled with lots of woo-woo and written by white guys from the UK. So it comes as no surprise that the writing by Peter Milligan is similarly ambitious and plagued by flowery purple prose. Sure, in comics, [good] purple prose can be enjoyable and feel like it's elevating the medium at times. But between the repeated poetic phrases and themes amidst a corny 80s sci-fi plot involving an amnesiac alien whose real body is connected to something called the M-Vest (M always stands for Madness in this book), I was rolling my eyes and setting this down quite a bit while saying out loud, "Well shoot, this is just boring."
I'm still giving it 3 stars and continuing through the series in hopes that it improves (as did Sandman and Invisibles) and by considering it in its historical context.