Tom Shapira

… Or, to use its full name, Shade the Changing Man by Peter Milligan and Chris Bachalo Omnibus Volume 2. That is a mouthful. That is also as clear a case of caveat empetor and caveat lector rolled into one. This collection, the first time the well-regarded Vertigo reinvention of an old Steve Ditko concept has been fully composed between two covers, contains a major lie right there on the cover. There is, comparatively, little Chris Bachalo in this volume.

“It was a golden age, a time of high adventure, rich living, and hard dying … but nobody thought so.” The opening line of Alfred Bester’s classic (and I mean "classic," not just "old") science fiction novel is probably as good a description of American comics publishing in the late 1970s as one could find. The old world was dying and a new world was struggling to be born.

It is a universally acknowledged truth that a man in possession of a comics pitch would probably do something with H.P. Lovecraft. Either the man, or any of his many-tentacled creations. One would think that we have gone past that zenith long ago. But I can assure you that one cannot throw a stone in a comics-oriented space without hitting a fish-person or one of the avatars of Nyarlathotep.