The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 52: 1602 #6, March 2004

This issue opens with a conversation on the Moon between Doctor Strange and The Watcher. In which all the things that the Gaiman avatar in the previous issue's opening tells us are, in a far more organic way, revealed. I am still mystified as to the need for that opening in yesterday's issue. Ah well, I'll let it go, I suppose.
I need to also add a caveat to my promise to have music to link to on Sunday. Only 4 verses of the Ballad of the Fantastick have been released so far in the series, so it might be a very short bit of music. I'd considered trying to write a couple more verses myself, but, to be honest, I'm writing and studying an awful lot these days, so adding more to my plate seems like a great way to have a nervous breakdown. (Which might make for some interesting posts, but at what cost...AT WHAT COST!!???)

Anyway, on to today's comic.

I'm noticing a trend of sorts when I'm writing about runs or series of comics in this project. By about this point in a run, I'm running out of things to say. I mean, 1602 is still really good, but I think I've addressed the problems I have with it, and pointed to the things about it that I like, yet, including today's issue, I've got 3 more days of trying to find something to say about it. Perhaps now is as good a time as any to address whether or not this series was really the big deal it was made out to be at the time. A quick look at the GCD shows that this was Gaiman's first major comics work, really, since the end of The Sandman. I remember when it was solicited and then released that it marked Gaiman's "triumphant" return to the medium, but I wonder if the story was overshadowed by the man at this point. Not that I'm saying that it's a bad story. It's actually very good, and a very creative way of using these characters, aside from the heavy-handed exposition I've already complained about. But is it of Sandman calibre? No. It really isn't. I think I actually prefer Gaiman's next Marvel project, The Eternals, to this one, but again I wonder if it's because there was so much hype around this series and I'm not entirely sure it lived up to it.

Ah, is this another trend? The further I get into a series, the more critical I get? I shudder to think what's going to happen when I hit up Milligan's Shade. By the time I hit issue 70, I'll just hate it through and through. (That will never happen with Shade, by the way.)

Okay, that's enough of that. Tomorrow and Sunday we continue on with the rise of the Marvels in the seventeenth century. What I'm starting to think on is whether or not this series, aside from the sequels it spawned, has any real ramifications for the Marvel Universe, or, if not, whether or not it could have. See you tomorrow.

(Oh, actually, can I mention one other thing? I'm sooooo glad that there is no frickin' Wolverine in this series. Finally a Marvel comic that doesn't feel the need to use the most over-used [next to Batman] character in superhero stories to bump up its sales. Okay, rant over.)

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 33: Shade, The Changing Man v.1 #8, August-September 1978

All things must end, I guess. At least, in a lot of ways, we have a decent closure here, which I was not expecting. Shade is tasked with another mission, and is still considered a traitor, but he has allies, and a deal to clear his name after another trip into the Zero Zone on the way to Earth to stop Dr. Z.Z. These are adventures that, sadly, we won't get to see, but this trip into the zone does manage to segue very nicely into Peter Milligan's run.

This issue, as the last one, is in large part exposition, this time filling in some of Shade's back story, specifically the story of how he gained the M-Vest. There's also quite a lot of cutting across the Zero Zone from Meta to Earth to witness the various scenes taking place in either zone. One of the lovely things about this issue is the transition panels that Ditko inserts where we have a snippet of dialogue from whichever zone we have just read and a snippet from the zone that the action is moving into, and in between there are bizarre illustrations of the inhabitants of the Zero Zone. Creepy and weird, a little trite, but nicely executed.

There's also a long-awaited reunion, which I won't spoil, since the series, if you can find a copy of it, is well worth a read. I'm glad I decided to take this detour into Ditko-Land. It was wild and wonderful, and I'm now looking forward to discovering some more of his work deeper in the collection (there's definitely some of his Charlton work kicking around in there) and to re-reading Peter Milligan's wonderful Vertigo take on Shade.

Shade shows up a few more times in the DCU and Vertigo Universes. For the ten year anniversary of Vertigo, Milligan and Mike Allred did a short Shade story based on the Vertigo version of the character. As I've mentioned before, the Ditko-Shade shows up in Suicide Squad in the 1980s, and then an interesting amalgam of the two makes an appearance in the Flashpoint crossover, and is catapulted into the New 52 DCU in the Milligan-penned Justice League Dark. None of these later appearances measure up to his original and re-visioned Vertigo iterations.

This Ditko run of Shade suffered, I think, in its resemblance to a superhero comic, which it most certainly isn't. There's no evidence that it takes place in the mainstream DCU, and had DC thought ahead here and changed the branding on the comic in order to show that it wasn't a superhero comic, it might have helped draw in readers. That said, the series still might not have survived the "DC Implosion," so perhaps branding is a moot point.

I wasn't sure what to read tomorrow. I don't think I'll move on to the Vertigo Shade yet. It's a 70-issue series, so I'd be reading it for few months. I'm not sure I'm up to it quite yet. In my database, Paul Pope's 100% is next in the reading order, but I'm not sure I'm ready right now to jump into so dense a work.

Here's a thought, though I'm not promising anything. If you're reading this, and I have irrefutable statistical proof that people are at the very least looking at the page, if not reading it, anyway, if you're reading this, and you have a suggestion of a series or character, or publisher, or decade, or genre, let me know, and I'll do my best to fulfill the suggestion from my collection. Again, I won't promise I'll do it every time, but once it a while it might be fun to get some public input.

See you tomorrow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 32: Shade, The Changing Man v.1 #7, June-July 1978

This issue bounces back from the less-dynamic quality of the previous issue, but in a fairly novel way. Left comatose at the end of the previous issue, Shade literally spend this story floating in mid-air changing colour (hey, it was the seventies!). Instead of Shade's adventures, the dynamic quality of the story is carried over to following the supporting characters in their attempts to deal with the criminal and political maneuverings of the series so far. We are also given some interesting information on the origins of Shade's "M-Vest," an origin which also fleshes out a little more the nature of the multi-dimensional cosmos within which the Meta-Zone, the Earth-Zone, and the Zero-Zone exist. I hold out hope that this information will be expanded upon in the next, and final, issue, but the likelihood, I'll admit, is low. What I found quite masterful about this issue is that, really, it's a whole 22 pages of exposition that doesn't even remotely feel like exposition. It does a wonderful job of reminding us that Shade's adventures are taking place in a dynamic environment, and the ramifications of his and his enemies' actions spread far and wide. I would liken it to the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in that, ostensibly, Buffy is the main character, but it becomes clear after a little while that the people surrounding her are every bit as important to the show, regardless of their names not adorning the title screen.

The Cloak also shows back up in this issue, though I was somewhat disappointed with the fact that he spends most of the issue invisible. However, this invisible portrayal once again calls attention to his similarity in design to the typical rough-sketch of a human figure, and so lends a strange air of meta to Meta.

Last issue tomorrow, and then on to new things on Monday. Not sure what yet, but I'm sure it'll be a comic.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 31: Shade, The Changing Man v.1 #6, April-May 1978

Back to our regularly-scheduled program. Closing in on the end of the Shade run, and I found this issue to be the least interesting so far. Completely set on Meta, which is not in and of itself a bad thing, but it seems that with the ostensible closing of the first storyline (though said closing didn't really offer much in the way of resolution) that the narrative is beginning to wander a bit. While we were introduced to Khaos briefly in the previous issues, he seems little more here than a replacement, albeit in different garb, for the far more interesting Sude who was our antagonist on Meta for the first 5 issues. And while Shade's innocence seems to be coming more and more to light with his former friends and allies, the resolution of that storyline seems not to be nearing. I suppose that it feels like that cinematic quality that I wrote about in previous posts on Shade is beginning to feel a bit too drawn out, which is of course the problem one runs into with a serialized, and ongoing, comic series. The first five issues had the feeling of being well-wrought in advance of becoming the comics I've read. This one feels more like a creator trying to figure out where the story can go now.

That said, there are indeed many threads left dangling from the initial storyline, and perhaps that too is why this issue feels a little forced. I'm more interested in Sude and his plans, and why the person who is Sude is doing what they are doing (please forgive some bad grammar for the sake of not spoiling things). The set-up of Shade so far has focussed so much on a particular set of problems that to introduce new ones muddies the waters in a way that does not help with the appeal of the series. I wonder if this is, in part, perhaps why, 3 issues later, the series gets cancelled.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 29: Shade, The Changing Man v.1 #5, February-March 1978

I was four years old when this comic came out. I don't know if it's just me, but I struggle, not intellectually but emotionally, to reconcile the fact that life, and lives, were still happening, just the way they are now, when I was barely a conscious creature.

Page 10 of this issue has another couple of those Ditko panels that are just a remarkable feat of motion in a static medium. Mellu and Sgt. Barak leap from a building into the air, and you can see the muscles tense and then release in the run up to the jump and the jump itself. It's the same sort of motion the panel I highlighted in Amazing Fantasy manages to achieve, and it's certainly not something that all comics artists have mastered.

The story continues to hurtle along at a rapid pace. Though I could definitely see this work as a long-form graphic novel, Ditko definitely deftly places exciting moments that are used as cliffhangers in the serial that could easily be translated to climactic high-points if the work were a singly-published work. If that makes any sense. I guess what I'm trying to get at is that each cliffhanger ending keeps me wanting to come back for the next issue, but they're not contrived.

Something that I'm kind of fascinated by in this comic so far is its focus on the criminal elements of both the Meta-Zone and the Earth-Zone. While on Meta we do get glimpses of the security forces, the criminal elements are definitely the focal characters, or focal cultural settings, of the story. I guess it could be argued that this is because Shade has been wrongly included in this segment of the culture, so we're seeing contrasts between wrongly and justly accused criminals. What's truly fascinating is that the actions of Shade and the criminals are not particularly different, only the motivations and justifications for those actions. And then only in the eyes of the beholder. Shade sees what he's doing as just, but those pursuing him see his actions only as criminal. It's people like Sgt. Barak, Dr. Sagan, and finally, in this issue, Mellu, who shift into that grey area of not really understanding Shade's actions, or more properly of questioning what his motivations must be.

I wonder about the cancellation of this title. The story really is quite spectacular, and Ditko seems to know precisely where it's going. Perhaps if it had been billed as a maxi-series or something similar, it wouldn't have been cancelled, though I can see, unless the story wraps up and a new arc begins, how it might have lost the interest of the reading public. My sense of the comics industry at this time is not great, though Wikipedia claims the cancellation was a result of the "DC Implosion." At least one can suppose that it was due to market forces, and not lack of interest, that the title did not get the chance it deserved.

So it's officially been 1 month since I started this project. I've decided that at the beginning of each new month I'm going to write up a comic that has been particularly important to me. So tomorrow we'll take a brief break from Shade, the Changing Man, and have a look at issue #5 of Grant Morrison's run on Animal Man, which, I've often said, is probably the single best single issue comic I've ever read. Hopefully my review tomorrow will do it some justice.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 28: Shade, The Changing Man v.1 #4, December-January 1977/1978

I love that cover. The guy facing Shade with the gun totally looks like he's got the drop on him until you realize there's a giant force-field foot about to stomp down on him. The cover's interesting for a couple of reasons. Mellu's outfit is reminiscent of Ditko's Dr. Strange work, the weird patterning and colours, and reminds me of Clea's outfits that curdled my pre-pubescent brain. It's also the first one to not feature the little sequence of three boxes down the left-hand side giving us an inset action piece to on the cover. I think those boxes are an interesting design characteristic, but not necessarily a successful one. Yesterday's sequence looks like it's playing in reverse, and I'm not sure what the point of it is. The cover of a comic needs, I think, to be simple. Eye-catching, yes, but not something that can't be sussed out in a single, brief glance. This one is simple. Title, action piece, interesting colours and costumes.

What else can I say about this story so far? I'm shocked with each issue that it's taken me so long to finally get around to reading it. It's really good. I think I've finally figured out who the major villain is, the supporting characters are expertly fleshed out in Fleisher's dialogue, we get new revelations (like finally seeing the "Zone of Madness" this issue), and, of course, Ditko's art is superb. I only hope that the story, or at least this initial arc, has a chance to play out in the 8 extant issues. The series was cancelled, though the 9th issue appeared in an issue of Cancelled Comics Cavalcade. If I can find a good scan/download of it, I might include it as one of my daily comics.

Four more days of Shade! Will we find out who the villainous Sude actually is? Will Mellu ever forgive Shade? Will I end up reading another 70 days of Shade in Milligan's run because each time I read one of these issues, I remember how great it is? Time will tell.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 27: Shade, The Changing Man v.1 #3, October-November 1977

A short one today. This issue of Shade does all the things I've noted in the last couple of days. It still feels like I'm reading a serialized film. In fact, the more I keep this in mind, the more I can see this story as a movie. It would probably be pretty badass, as long as one could get Ditko to do all the design work.

My favourite bit of this issue is the introduction on page 11 of "The Cloak," the crazy villain of the issue. The Cloak laughs each time he is gifted with dialogue, even in his thoughts, which really makes me feel like he's the Joker of Meta. But here's a cool thing: See how he's depicted on the cover? This looks a bit like a crude sketch of a human figure, something roughed out before the details are added. This is what his invisibility power looks like. So if he turns invisible by losing his pencilled in details, and he's in a dimension called "Meta," is something really cool and metafictional happening here? Maybe.

But my the real treat of The Cloak is his design:

That's got to be on of the coolest character designs I've ever seen. I'm sad that he spends so much of the issue invisible, because I'd love to see more angles and poses. But I live in hope, as, unlike the villains of the first two issues, The Cloak is not "negated" by the issue's end. Hopefully there'll be more of him next time.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 26: Shade, The Changing Man v.1 #2, August-September 1977

The second issue of Shade continues the manic pacing and style laid down by the introductory issue. Ditko is obviously interested in telling a lightning-fast story about a man trying to prove his own innocence in a very limited amount of time. This gives the comic a very cinematic feel, as if we're looking at the first act or two of a film. It would be a very weird film.

I'm impressed by Fleisher's dialogue. According to the introductory writings at the end of the comic, Fleisher "reads over Steve's carefully prepared plots and puts in the actual words into the mouths" of the various characters. I'm fairly certain this is what was once referred to as "The Marvel Method." What I'm curious about is whether or not Fleisher saw any of the layouts or sketches before putting in the dialogue. I suppose he must have. If Ditko plotted the book, he likely drew it and then sent it to be dialogued. It's an interesting way of creating, as it really puts someone who would traditionally be called the writer of the work on a significantly lower level that the person who would traditionally be called the artist. Fleisher doesn't have a great deal of creative freedom in the project. Yet his dialogue is smooth and natural. It's a 70s comic, so it does suffer from "Claremontitis," i.e., ridiculous amounts of exposition ensconced in thought bubbles, but even that seems a lot less stilted than Colossus' internal monologues of the 80s Uncanny X-Men.

One strange quirk of the book is that, so far, on the covers Shade is seen wearing only his M-Vest, yet within the pages of the comic, he tends to wear the vest under street clothes. I'm assuming this is because the vest resembles a superhero costume, and that superhero fans are the demographic at which the book was aimed. But it certainly doesn't read like a superhero book. Shade is on the run, playing mobsters against one another in order to clear his name, and really only tangentially saving anybody. As a DC comic in the 1970s, one would have expected a guest appearance by Superman or Batman at the least by now, but Shade and his antagonists seem to exist in a world all their own. I'm curious as to whether we'll see him enter the DCU proper within Ditko's truncated run on the book, or if he was simply pasted into the DCU after his own book was cancelled. Answers forthcoming, either way, I guess.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 25: Shade, The Changing Man v.1 #1, June-July 1977

As I suggested yesterday, I'm going to dive headlong into the weird world of Steve Ditko. I've owned this run of Shade for some time now, and have never really had the inclination to read through it, maybe because I hold Peter Milligan's reinterpretation in such high esteem. I had once thought of doing a similar thing with Shade that I've done with Animal Man, in that I will buy up any (and I do mean any) appearance that the character makes any time in his history. Animal Man takes up two full short boxes by now (which could make a nice half-year's worth of Animal Man posts...hmmmm....), but, if I'm to be honest, a lot of Shade's other appearances (in 80s Suicide Squad, for example) are kinda, well, mediocre. We'll see if my week of reading his original adventures changes things.

Yesterday I talked about the dynamism of Ditko's art in Amazing Fantasy #15, and it's definitely in full force in this initial issue of Shade. But, as I was reading, there was something different that I initially had trouble identifying. It could be, I suppose, that there's a 15-year gap between the two works, and that Ditko's art has changed and matured. That's definitely an aspect of it. But more than that, the panels in Shade, when compared to the Spider-Man origin story, are jam-packed with detail. The backgrounds seem to have just as much detail and motion as the characters in the foreground. It took a bit of adjustment to read this way. Even with something like Dave Sim's Cerebus, where Gerhard's backgrounds are incredibly detailed, the characters take precedence over their setting. In Shade, the separation is not quite so explicit. As I'm reading through, this is something I want to keep in mind. Is it something to do with the story itself? We get very little idea of the relationship between Meta and Earth in this first issue, but does the dynamism of the backgrounds say something about the fictional relationship between these beings from Meta and their physical relationship to the environments with which they interact on Earth?

(That's a big thought for this early in the morning on a Saturday.)

As for Shade himself, I'm intrigued by him. Milligan's Shade is a proto-Emo slacker (which is probably why I loved that run so much), but this Shade is a wrongly (according to him, anyway) convicted traitor to his state, on the run from the woman whose parents he crippled. Again, never having read this series, I was unaware of the parallels with Kathy George's family in Milligan's run, so that lineage is nice to see.

One other thing I'll say before this becomes a lengthy (-ier) essay is that Ditko's design work in this book on the Metans is amazing. Shade's "M-Vest" is a super-cool costume, and all of the Metan fashion is weird and wonderful to look at. Both the design and the colour of the costumes are lovely. The final panel of this issue has a brief peek at the villain that will, I assume, show up next issue, and it's creepy and weird, and has me wanting to jump ahead. Which actually brings me to a problem I had foreseen, but still haven't figured out how to handle: what if I want to take a whole run and just read it? Do I count them as my daily comic for the week? Let's be honest. At this point, I don't have time to read much more than one comic a day. I'll wait to deal with this problem until I'm living in that perfect world of mine.

Tomorrow I'll try to say a bit about the dialoguer of the series, Michael Fleisher, whose comics encyclopedia work I've found really interesting.