What is love?

“Nasty Infections Part Two: Rotten Pot.” Shade the Changing Man #60 by Peter Milligan, Mark Buckingham, and Rick Bryant.

Shade the Changing Man #15

I’ve been slowly rereading my all-time favorite comic book series, Shade the Changing Man. And while I’ve been enjoying it, remembering specific moments but still being surprised by others, it wasn’t until this issue that I was reminded why I loved it so much. Because it was this issue that caused me to fall in love with this title the first time. The cover didn’t mean much to me when I pulled it out of the musty, cat-clawed comic book box and set it on my file cabinet to sit for a week. But when I opened it up and looked at the first page, it all came back to me. Not the story, though. I wasn’t entirely sure yet what the story was going to be about. But the feeling that first page evoked pulled me back to twenty years ago and I remembered instantly: it was this one. This issue. This is when I fell in love.

I’ll admit I was surprised by the amount of Narration Boxing taking place in this comic. But as I pointed out in an earlier New 52 book I was reading (Superman #13, I believe), it turns out my problem isn’t really with the Narration Boxing. It’s with the way a writer handles it. Oh, and the way the writer writes, of course!

This is the first issue that really nails down the future look of the series by Bachalo and Pennington. The art is cleaner, sharper. The characters look like I remember them. Gone is the gritty realism and heavy ink. Now the characters are more expressive, a bit cartoony, and absolutely gorgeous.

This story is about Kathy. The mad, chaotic pop culture themes of previous issues are replaced by stories of humans lost, desperate, and alone. Lenny makes a brief but important appearance. She establishes herself as integral part of this group. She’s a bridge between Kathy and Shade with a foot in both of their existences and probably the most grounded of the three characters. She doesn’t like the role of most normal and responsible but she’ll accept it when the people she cares about need her.

Kathy is struggling to cope with her life sans alcohol, parents, and possibly sanity.

The man Kathy has come to love resides in the body of the man who killed her parents. Shade has manipulated the body to not look like this psycho, this Troy Grenzer, but both Shade and Kathy know a small bit of Troy Grenzer has survived within Shade. And at times he’s taken control. Earlier in the series, Kathy and Shade had sex for the first time. Only it wasn’t Shade at all; it was Grenzer disguising himself as Shade.

Kathy doesn’t know she was with Troy and not Shade. But Shade knows. And he feels hurt and betrayed. He can’t help blaming Kathy. Lenny also knows but she basically forbade Shade from telling Kathy. But Shade, being the sensitive poet he is, can’t keep it inside. Subconsciously, he’s telling Kathy the truth with his Madness Vest. He’s infiltrating her dreams and forcing her to deal with it. He really comes off as impotent and pathetic throughout this series. And he’s the same too sensitive poet in The New 52 Reboot as well where we first see him spending night after night in seedy hotel rooms creating fake Kathy after fake Kathy in his guilt and loneliness.

Kathy meets an old man named Chester while in recovery. He’s seventy years old and still doesn’t know how he’s supposed to live. He doesn’t know how to help himself but he still tries to help Kathy avoid finding herself in the same place in fifty years.

While Kathy is dealing with putting her life back together while it’s still falling apart, Shade is off dealing with The American Scream and his own stupidly hurt feelings.

And then the issue ends with Kathy and Shade (kind of! Subconscious Shade!) confronting the issue. Perhaps tearing their world down is the only way to fix things. Or perhaps this revelation will just cause more turmoil. You’ll have to read Issue #16 to find out!

Justice League Dark #5

Use your spells not your fists!

Justice League Dark begins with a rash of strange occurrences happening across the country. This used to happen every few issues in Shade the Changing Man.

My basement is still flooded with Vic 20s.

In one of her narration boxes, Madame Xanadu admits that it was she who separated June Moon from The Enchantress. How? I don’t know. Why? Probably because it needed to be done for something else to be done to help out some obscure future event that she can see. And at what cost? Cost is something magic types never consider. Or they do consider it and they just don’t care. They’re kind of like modern day pharmaceuticals. They solve one problem while generating a host of crappy symptoms. So Xanadu freed June Moone which caused the whole country to turn to shit. Eh. It couldn’t be helped!

John Constantine appears to help June Moone escape the giant Enchantress made from little Enchantresses. Like a Magic Katamari.

Isn’t John Dee the guy in the first Sandman story who traps all of the people in the diner in the issue called ‘24 Hours’? And Choronzon was a major demon player in Morrison’s The Demon. I think.

June hops into the magic circle with John before the scene cuts to Shade, Deadman, Zatanna, and Xanadu. Their discussion about how to proceed is mostly composed of Deadman shouting at them. Deadman ditches them all to go help June Moone. The rest M-Vest to the Envelope Farm and find themselves in the Rotten Teeth Tornado.

The title of this comic may be Justice League Dark but it’s as much Shade the Changing Man as ever!

The JLD aren’t overpowered by the rotten teeth like those wimps in the normal Justice League were. But each member of the team begins seeing things and start slipping from reality. Shade is brought back to his senses when Zatanna makes out with him. But soon after, Zatanna and Xanadu begin speaking nonsense.

Through speaking with June, Constantine realizes the spell which Xanadu used to separate Moone and Enchantress was the rhyme that June kept trying to remember. Constantine also learned that Moone’s personality being buried inside the Enchantress actually kept the Enchantress sane and in check. June Moone was both sanity and conscious to The Enchantress. Without June, the Enchantress will just destroy the world. So Constantine begins saying the rhyme that will merge the two when Boston Brand shows up trying to be chivalrous.

What is Deadman going to do? Fly through him a bunch of times?

Deadman does try to possess Constantine but finds Constantine’s mind/soul/essence disgusting. Deadman does the ghost equivalent of vomiting and is ejected from Constantine’s body and giving Constantine time to finish up his rhyme. June Moone and Enchantress are once again merged and the chaos ends.

During this, Mindwarp appears in his seizure soul and doesn’t actually do anything. And really, none of them did anything except for Constantine. But none of that was really the point anyway. As I predicted, the whole thing was caused by Xanadu simply to get these people together to stop a certain future from coming true. But once the Enchantress issue is dealt with, none of them stick around anyway. And so Xanadu failed.

But her failure is only going to mean something horrible is coming and that horror will have to be dealt with by the same group of magic folk. They’ll probably realize after the next catastrophe that it might be wise to at least get everyone else’s contact number so they don’t have to spend four issues finding each other.

If these guys were normal Super Heroes, they would have formed a group and thought up a cool name and started wearing matching costumes after their great big semi-success. But it wouldn’t be believable for Constantine or Shade or Mindwarp (probably) to join a group. So they’re going to need at least one more near world ending catastrophe to convince them.

Justice League Dark #4

The Enchantress hit by Deadman and June Moone turned out to be an empty shell. But it still had power. It’s hunting for June Moone. Perhaps Enchantress can’t quite keep her world sane enough to function without June Moone being a part of her. Does that also mean June Moone needs Enchantress? Probably. They probably need to merge to save the world from the destruction Madame Xanadu sees in the future.

Constantine has moved on from Zatanna to Shade and now he finds himself sitting in Deadman’s apartment when Dove walks in. It’s beginning to look like maybe Madame Xanadu should have approached Constantine to collect everyone. He seems to have a better method of locating everyone than that insane M-Vest that just does whatever it wants. I hate clothing like that.

Meanwhile, while these magick types keep running around and acting mysterious at each other, Enchantress’ craziness continues to spread around the country. Kids are killing adults. Songs are driving people crazy. And empty shells of June Moone and Enchantress are killing people in an endless search for the real June Moone.

Enchantress breaks free from her envelope and identifies the solution. Yep. She needs to be reunited with June Moone to regain some semblance of sanity. But she has a problem.

I bet Batman would listen.

Zatanna finally attempts a raid on the envelope farm but it doesn’t work out too well. She randomly teleports away and ends up with Shade. Constantine backtracks his way to the source of all of the trouble: Madame Xanadu. And Deadman and June finally enter Shade’s Madness Doorway.

Characters Cooler Than Superman is actually a pretty long list.

Unfortunately, June doesn’t seem to end up on the correct side of the gateway. That’s the funny thing about Magic Portals. June does, however, end up encountering all of the Enchantress and June Moone simulacra joining each other to become a gigantic Enchantress.

While this is going on, Madame Xanadu and John Constantine are busy slapping each other. I think John will come out on top and get Madame Xanadu to admit she did something bad. Possibly she was the one behind separating June and Enchantress. Maybe they’ll just end up having sex.