Steve Ditko’s “Shade the Changing Man” was first published back in 1977 and 1978. I was ten and eleven years old back then and I never read it. I was a Marvel Comics kid and Shade was published by DC Comics. I may have overlooked it but there is just a good a chance that I never saw it at all. There were only eight issues of it published and they were only published once every two months so it easily could have slipped by me.
I’m not sure when I learned of Shade’s existence but it was probably not long after it was published. I didn’t have a lot of DC comics but I remember seeing adds for the “DC Explosion” in some of their comics. Those ads showed a lot of new comics that DC was publishing back in 1977-1978. I remember Shade being in those ads.
The only two DC Explosion books that I ever bought were “Firestorm: The Nuclear Man” and “Steel: the Indestructible Man.” There were only a handful of issues for both of those books as DC Comics hit hard times in the late 1970s and cancelled a lot of their line of comics. That event became known as the “DC Implosion” for obvious reasons.
It was also around 1977 that I became a Steve Ditko fan. I didn’t have access to any of the original issues of Spider-Man or Dr. Strange but I was able to get some Pocket Books reprints of Amazing Spider-Man and a Fireside Books reprint of some Dr. Strange stories. I enjoyed these 1960s comics drawn by him.
I don’t remember Steve Ditko drawing many comics in the late 1970s and into the 1980s. I had one “First Issue Special” story that he drew about The Creeper, at least one Hulk annual, some Micronauts, and some Rom, but other than that I can’t remember much of his work from that time period. As I grew older I read some more of and liked Ditko’s 1960s work but not much else. I couldn’t be bothered to track down any of his stuff from DC in the 1970’s.
In the 1980s I did manage to get some of Ditko’s work on “The Creeper” which was more of his 1960s work for DC. It was fine. I enjoyed it but not as much as his Marvel work. In 2010 when an Omnibus was released of Ditko’s “The Creeper” I was finally able to read the whole series. Solid stuff.
This led me to purchase another Ditko Omnibus the following year. This was another Omnibus published by DC and it had various comics by Ditko in it including all eight issues of Shade plus a ninth unpublished issue. I don’t even think I got around to reading it right away. I think it may have sat around for a year or two before I got around to it. I bought it back in September of 2011 and it’s now December of 2024 so my memory isn’t exact.
After finally reading Shade in that Omnibus I really liked it. It was good stuff. Much better than the other Ditko comics from the late 1970s that I read in my youth. Sure it was a product of its time and maybe not as sophisticated as a comic made today but it was still really good. It even made me think about buying the original issues just to have them. But I never did.
I’m writing about Shade and Ditko because this week I picked up the Omnibus and decided to read Shade again. I think it has only grown on me. I liked it even better this time around. Maybe it’s nostalgia, maybe it’s because Ditko has died since I first read it back in 2011, or maybe it’s just a really good comic.
What I like about Shade is the amount of imagination that Ditko put into it. His art and creativity really shine. In the world of the Changing Man there are three realms. We have Shade’s planet that’s called Meta. It’s a planet that’s in another dimension but is somehow connected to our planet Earth. In order to get from Meta to Earth you have to pass through a dimension called The Zero Zone. That’s not an easy place to get to or through. You need big old machines and stuff to even try. So it’s not like everyone on Meta has access to Earth.
The Zero Zone is kind of like a lot of the magical realms in Ditko’s Dr. Strange. It exists in the same type of visual space that comes from Ditko’s imagination. All sorts of strange creatures live there and there are also people and the empires of said people. Some of those people are bad and you don’t want to cross through their territory. All this is drawn with a lot of imagination.
Also fueling the imagination of Ditko is the M-Vest. This is the all purpose weapon that Shade wears that gives him super powers. Strength, force fields, and the such. One side effect of the M-Vest is that it distorts the way Shade looks as he’s fighting. He looks monstrous as he fights and that makes people afraid of him. Their fear, in turn, makes him look more monstrous. This gives Ditko a lot of fun stuff to draw and he does so with style and imagination.
I like the plot and characters of Shade too. Ditko is famous for his philosophy that heroes should be excellent examples of human beings and good should be good and bad should be bad with no grey in there. But in this comic he has a lot of people with a lot of different motivations. The good people are still good in general but often they have bad information.
For example Shade was framed as a traitor to Meta. He was under a death sentence but escaped. As a consequence he is under a “Shot on sight” order and all security officers are duty bound to shoot him. This includes his ex-fiancé who is a security officer. She also thinks Shade betrayed her and permanently injured her parents so she really hates Shade despite the fact that we know he is innocent.
There are numerous characters in Shade with a lot of different motivations. Some are bad guys but even the bad guys have shifting alliances and motivations. The good guys also have shifting motivations as they get new information. There is a lot of imagination and constantly moving parts to the plot and characters. It’s good stuff.
One of the things I’ve come to a conclusion about with Shade is that it might be the last great example of Steve Ditko as a creator in mainstream comics. He did work for Marvel and DC for a couple of decades more but I would say most of that stuff was as an artist. He was drawing a lot of other people’s ideas. I don’t think it has the same level of creativity as his previous work.
Ditko also did a lot of work on his own for many years and that is creative stuff but not in the mainstream the way that Shade is. The creator owned comics he made were more personal and less universal than Shade, Dr. Strange, and Spider-Man. This may have been his last hurrah trying to give his all to make a popular comic book for the world of corporate comic books.
After rereading Shade in the Omnibus this time I did go to eBay and ordered the original series. I got some mid-grade copies for about three dollars a piece. The paper is yellowed and the colors not as pleasingly bright as they could be (or are in the Omnibus) but I still want to give them a read. You should too.