Creative Team:
Writer: James Robinson
Artist: Cully Hamner, Javaier Pulido, Frazer Ivring, Darwyn Cooke, Jill Thompson, Gene Ha
What They Say:
James Robinson returns to the world of his acclaimed STARMAN series in this new graphic novel starring the antihero known as The Shade! An attack at the Starman museum kicks off a globe-hopping, centuries spanning quest that will irrevocably change The Shade’s life, and ultimately shed light on his true origin!
THE SHADE features art by some of comics’ most acclaimed talents, including Darwyn Cooke (DC: The New Frontier), Frazer Irving (Batman & Robin), Gene Ha (Superman: Action Comics) Jill Thompson (The Sandman), Cully Hamner (RED) and Javier Pulido (Spider-Man). A must-have for any fan of STARMAN!
The Review:
After an instrumental role in the Starman series that James Robinson wrote to much acclaim many years ago, The Shade gets himself his own book for a twelve issue series that tells a pretty engaging tale with a variety of very talented artists. I had read some of Starman way back when it first came out in single issue form, but had lost the series during my lapse from comics and sadly have not returned. With this being a self contained book after all of those events, and a few others as well, I was pretty excited to get my hands on a book involving this character and his world to see how it was all being drawn together. Thankfully, it’s not one that requires an expansive knowledge of the character himself or the stories that have come before. In fact, after the first few pages where he’s chatting in Opal City with Mikaal, everything is pretty self contained, though it plays more as a murder-mystery of sorts where the murder didn’t happen and the supposed victim is investigating how it was all put together.
The kick off for the series has us getting acquainted with a very melancholy Richard Swift, aka the Shade, as October is the month of his creation as this persona. One that has changed a lot over the years since he first walked that path back in 1838 as a new immortal. While he’s feeling this, and dealing with some interpersonal problems with a lover of his, a hit has been placed on him that’s about to be executed as he walks through the park. With someone hiring Deathstroke to do it, you know they’re serious about it and it’s a brief but good fight as each of them uses their abilities well. But it’s one that’s also amusing as Deathstroke did a substitution of himself along the way in order to trick Shade, but Shade did the same thing before the fight even began. So it was pretty much a fight by proxy more than anything else. But with a little knowledge gained elsewhere, it simply confirms for him that someone has hired a hit on him and he has quite a rogues list – and family list – to go through to figure out who is behind it.
What the book does is basically spend the next ten or so chapters doing standalone tale that brings Shade into contact with all sorts of people, heroes, villains, support characters, that he’s known across the length of his life to see what information he can glean. Some of it is helpful, some of it not so much. But what these tales do, sometimes with exploration of his past lives and what he did during those first decades of being an immortal, is to help us to understand the man behind the name. It’s a layered tale in how these things unfold, getting touches on his family at times, lovers at other times and some of those that he’s fought with or against. There’s also a really great two chapters spent dealing with La Sangre, an adoptive daughter of sorts that’s a vampire. The two have a strong bond in the past when he saved her as a baby from a dark ritual, though it turned her into a vampire and added a bit of darkness to his makeup as well. He’s refused to call her daughter over the years since she calls him father, but having the two of them work together at this time in Spain where she’s pretty revered after a century of defending it allows the two to grow together well. Particularly since it comes at a time where the more he sees of his own family, past and present, he starts to realize some of the pain he’s caused over the decades and is trying to atone for it where he can.
The individual tales work well when telling the larger narrative, though some of it can be a bit frustrating since it goes for various lettering scripts that may not always be easy to read or take you out of the story more than they should, and we see just how Shade operates in a lot of ways. His abilities feel a bit limitless in a way, but we do come to understand how he didn’t grasp a lot of them himself until decades later. And we also get a bit of an exploration about how he’s done his bit of criminality over the years but has largely moved past there. With so much of his personality wrapped up in telling stories, it’s not a surprise that a good bit of what we get here deals with him being rather verbose at times and going on about the little details. Which are quite interesting since it builds an engaging narrative overall. You really start to get a feel for Shade as it progresses and definitely with how he’s trying to make amends with some of his family after he realizes some of the impact he’s left on them over the decades.
When the book moves towards its closing act, and the main villain behind it is revealed, everything goes to a pretty grand scale. There’s almost a surreal aspect to it in a way since it goes so big with some ancient creatures that are being controlled and used in an effort to eliminate Shade, but it lets the scope of the series expand in a really big way. And it’s useful and connects well to his past as there’s that element where he’s learned more about his powers over the years and the real uses of them, such as how he’s able to simply move across spaces, that finding him dealing with something as epic as this makes sense. It’s a little odd for the scale though since the creatures are so powerful, but what helps to make it work in a lot of ways, beyond the great visuals, is the dialogue. Shade has just such a way of carrying himself throughout this with a certain confidence and self-respect that his mannerisms alone make it fun to see how he deals with such troublesome foes.
In Summary:
Coming into this book with some very outdated impressions of the character from far too many years ago, I was really pleased to see how accessible it was. Though not the villain he once was in a lot of ways, and reformed in style over the last couple of decades, the tale we get here reconnects him to his humanity, explores the vast and intriguing years through which he’s lived and the kinds of offspring he has, natural born and adoptive. Seeing him going from his melancholy aspect in at the start to investigating who is trying to kill him to them dealing with something world ending nature is ideal for a character like this as he is just that versatile. But it takes the right kind of writer, and definitely a good team of artists, to bring it together in a way that can be engaging. While some of the dialogue and references flew over my head, I still found myself very much rooting for him in a number of ways and eager to see what new depths of his past and present would be plumbed to get a new understanding of him. It’s not an easy read, it’s a bit challenging at times, but it’s the kind of book that’s very much worth the effort.
Grade: B+
