Review by Frank Plowright
Kathy George was taking a trip to Louisiana with her boyfriend when they encountered serial killer Troy Grenzer. Roger died protecting her and Kathy spent months in a psychiatric ward reliving the terrible experience. Grenzer is unrepentant as he’s sent to the electric chair, but observing outside the jail as the execution takes place Kathy witnesses a psychedelic light show, hears eerie sounds and finds Grenzer in the back of her car claiming to be an alien called Shade who’s possessed the body from an area of madness. The experience has fragmented his memory. Elsewhere a medical student raves about a being called the American Scream, also from the area of madness.
Steve Ditko’s original version of Shade the Changing Man remains one of the weirdest comics DC ever published, sadly only available in expensive hardcovers. The genius of Peter Milligan was in utterly embracing the weirdness and pushing it further. Conceptually, he succeeds in doing so with The American Scream, but narratively he’s not quite there, and nor will he fully gel in the following Edge of Vision as Shade the Changing Man is a series that keeps improving.
This is a tour of American obsessions as seen by a British writer in the 1980s. Milligan mixes the serial killer with conspiracies surrounding the death of President Kennedy, and a tour through Hollywood, but all distorted via the corruption of the American Scream and Shade’s own weaknesses as manifested by the M Vest, intended as his protection. It bends and distorts reality as it attempts to pull him back home, with a middle chapter giving some wooly justification for Shade’s homeworld of Meta and their policies. It reads as obligatory background explanation, a means to an end in which Milligan has no investment.
A heady visual mix is brought to life by then new artist Chris Bachalo, incredibly talented and blissfully imaginative, yet still nowhere near the artist he’d become. He can draw people extremely well, but lacking an emotional presence, although once he settles on a design for Shade himself it’s memorably distinctive with bright red hair and a swirling coat of many colours. While much of the art is hamstrung by the primitive colouring of the 1980s, these aspects are solid.
American Scream was created before online activation was known, but it’s an analogy for the American Scream itself, a disembodied entity that latches onto the disenchanted empowering them in terrifying ways. It’s a perfect combination for outsider strangeness well exploited by Milligan. When at his focussed best, represented by the extended emotional hell of the introductory chapter, Milligan’s writing transcends the decades still presenting something unique and powerful, and an observational intelligence ensures the constancy of memorable phrases. However, the ideas tumble out so rapidly there’s never time to explore anything properly before it’s supplanted.
The American Scream also features in the first Shade the Changing Man Omnibus, which is frankly a better bet as it moves beyond the three paperback collections to the point where Milligan is adding greater direction to his imagination.
