Shade the Changing Man is a monumental arsehole

It took me decades to get all the Shade comics, but it only took a little over a week to read them all.

The art - starting with the ever evolving Chris Bachalo and continuing with the surprising solidity of Glynn Dillon, Mark Buckingham and Richard Case - maintains a high quality throughout, and it's always beautiful to look at. It makes the story by Peter Milligan so much easier to swallow as it goes to a lot of different places, not always pleasant. 

There are several distinct eras in the comic - the American Scream malrkey, the Hotel Shade nonsense and the Post-Kathy despair - and there is a lot of madness going on. But one thing that becomes painfully clear in all these comics is that Shade is undoubtedly an absolute dickhead. 

He's a moody fucker, self-absorbed and a terrible friend. He leaves enormous pain in his wake and doesn't give a shit. Just another miserable wanker who even parrots anti-abortion bullshit at one awful point, and when he literally gives up his heart in the later stages of the series, he really cranks up the obnoxiousness.

It is almost marvellous how unrepentant the comic is about it, and it's genuinely funny when the shit comes down on him, and he's realized that he's been deluded, or dead. It's not really a surprise when a group of wronged women combine together towards the end to destroy the fucker, once and for all.

The real heart is in those characters that get swept up in his insanity - the comic really does lose its center when Kathy departs; there is always something interesting going on with Lenny's energy and unexpected depths, and all the rest that come and go, but leave an impression on some kind.

And through it all, Shade is just a dick. Milligan has brought him back a couple of times since the series finished, and he's been as big an arsehole every time. Shade got 70 issues of his own series in the end, but he didn't ever get more likeable, bless him.