Shade, The Changing Man #1
Publisher: DC Comics
June/July 1977
Cover Price: 35 cents

Story & Art: Steve Ditko
Dialogue: Michael Fleisher
Colors: Liz Berube
Editor: Jack C. Harris

This week, we look at Shade, The Changing Man #1. This is the first appearance of the Steve Ditko-created hero for DC. It’s a sci-fi book if there ever was one. It’s also another brick in the wall that makes me not want to read comics pre-1984.

The first two pages lay out the whole deal with the Earth-Zone, the Meta-Zone, and the Zero-Zone, and is some of the hardest reading I’ve ever had to do in comics. Essentially, there’s earth, another dimension, and limbo.

Shade is a human who was framed and ends up with a bunch of other criminals in limbo (the Zero-Zone). He uses some sort of sensor implant to navigate back to earth where he dons an illegal M-Vest that distorts his image when he’s under stress, thus scaring his enemies into surrendering.

It looks like the gimmick here is that one criminal in each issue will escape to earth, he’ll defeat them, come one step closer to proving his innocence while still coming one step closer to being captured and “negated.”

It’s a sci-fi superhero detective story, and it should be awesome. However, it suffers from the silver/bronze-age “I am doing this now. If I do this, this will happen. Exposition exposition exposition.” Exposition by thought balloon will always be a pet peeve of mine, never mind how “classic” the book or writer is, and is likely a reason why comics have long been seen as a kids’ medium (and why kids don’t read them anymore now that the story-reinforcing thought balloons are gone. Just a thought.).

I’ll dig a gem up for you kids next week.