3 out of 5

Would you believe I collected this entire effing series in single issue form like 25 years after the fact, and just bagged and boxed them, really only “reading” them to claim I’d walked that path?  Sure you would.  ‘Cause I’m a dumbass collector.  And at the time, I was gobbling up all things Milligan.  Surely his big foray into a long-running series was excellent, right?

Or maybe it just exposes all of the aspects of Millie’s writing that don’t work for me.

So Shade was an old Ditko character that was rescued for revamps during the early 90s British invasion.  The original Ditko series is totally dated but also totally Ditko, some batshit visuals matched with a bonkers half-stupid sci-fi plot about the “area of madness” between two world and the madness vest (or m-vest) that lets our lead – Rac Shade – be the only man able to navigate it without going insane.  It still sorta makes him insane, though, which is the hook Peter took for bringing him back… and what an intro it is.  Total credit to Milligan for entering the series with a bang (another reason I could claim that it was a badass read), as Kathy George’s parents and boyfriends are slaughtered by serial killer Troy Grenzer, who upon being electrocuted for this and other crimes “channels” Shade from the madness dimension… and Shade arrives on Earth looking like a serial killer, escaping prison, coincidence allowing him to turn up on Kathy’s doorstep…  The format of the book has the duo (and eventually trio, and eventually quatro) tracking down escaped pieces of the madness around the planet.  So it’s a road trip book with awesome Brendan McCarthy covers which, combined with some of the madness’s excesses, trick you into thinking that this is the second coming of Milligan’s Strange Days work.

Some of that comes through, as it always does.  Peter uses the madness to explore some elements of American history and culture, which is interesting both through his non-American eye and his poetic writing style, which does always trickle over into cheesy, but he normally is smart enough to reel it back with some sarcasm and laugh at himself, a limitation that, later in Shade’s run, is lost, as the other story elements overtake Milligan’s playfulness.  This is a problem with a lot of his longer runs, to me.  Is that he’s plotting them.  Instead of a small idea he can write around and mess with, he has an over-arching storyline that he drops breadcrumbs regarding the whole way, then attaches his other interests onto it.  This describes every comic book, I suppose, but the styles don’t mesh well here.  Milligan’s themes are almost always guilt and love – something he can go to town with, Kathy falling for a mad dude who looks like her lover’s killer – and those themes lend themselves to waxing poetic, which Peter does.  When the originally planned effects of the madness (‘The American Scream’) start to wear off and we get into new storylines, the scales tip and Peter starts trying moreso to develop Shade and Kathy and… yeah.  There’s a pretty obvious attempt late in the game, issue 50 or so, to go back to the earlier style of surrealism the series had, but it feels forced.  Sorry.

I’m glad Peter got to have this for 70 issues, and I’m glad that there is/was a publisher – initially DC, then Vertigo – that was willing to let one of its character properties wander around to the writer’s whim.  It is impressive for its scope and poetry, as are a lot of the longer running Vertigo books, but it was also pretty cheesy and more conceptually interesting than actually fun to read.