By: James Robinson (story), Jill Thompson (art), Trish Mulvihill (colors)
The Story: Yeah, I’d say a drug-addicted demon summoner defines a bad romance.
The Review: One thing that’s come into focus over the course of this series is that the Shade has a much more complicated acceptance of his own nature than we’ve been led to believe. In fact, he himself doesn’t seem aware of how troubled he is at heart about what he’s become. Although he puts on a cool show of lackadaisical whimsy, as if he couldn’t care less about anything even remotely linked to his former humanity, all his actions demonstrate otherwise.
This issue centers on that particular contradiction in the Shade’s character. He emphasizes more than once that he wanted only to “distance myself from the sad thing I now regarded my prior humanity to be,” and yet he can’t seem to stop himself from diving in headfirst when anything related to his prior humanity appears. Like a mafia boss, he may be capricious, “murderous even at times,” but his loyalty to his family is undeniable.
It doesn’t seem like coincidence that the Shade came upon his powers as he did, and so there’s a distinct air of fate that he continues to run into his descendants at critical stages of his and their lives. Just as his encounter with great-grandson Darnell in #4 just happened to occur when the Shade was beginning to embrace his villainous persona, his run-in with grandson Albert comes just when he claims that nickname. It’s a clear pattern; life won’t allow the Shade to forget whom and what he once was.
It’s interesting that on each of these little family reunions, Shade gets to show off the extent of his powers. Here, he deals with an errant homunculus with hardly a sweat, despite the vicious appetite of his opponent. These displays of power feel almost like challenges to the reader, questioning if he can truly be human at all when he’s capable of such impossible feats. But these seem like acts of denial to me. By now it’s pretty obvious that the Shade’s affection for his family is deep and abiding, and yet he won’t allow himself to indulge in these feelings. When Albert leads him to his former wife, he refuses to meet her face to face—yes, to save her from grief, but also to save himself from pain as well. As he watches her from a distance, he calls it a “reward…a gift,” but his reaction makes it seem more a bit of masochistic punishment.
The conclusion to leap to here is the Shade has become such a being that nothing can really hurt him (neither Deathstroke, nor Bete-Noire, nor demons of significant standing), that the only person who can really bring him harm is himself. This may be Robinson’s ultimate aim: to have the man who claims to have no heart be made vulnerable by his heart. We’ll see if that pans out in the remaining issues.
Thompson’s work has shades—heh, heh—of Eduardo Risso in her bare style and fleshy and sketchy figures. She portrays the male characters in a rather effete way, emphasizing the Shade’s lashes and Albert’s theatrical gestures, but given the context of the story, this works very well. Luckily, she’s not asked to depict much action, as her posture and movements look clumsy and awkward, but she has a gift for dramatic expressions; you have quite a few panels where the Shade doesn’t speak, and yet you can see everything he’s thinking and feeling in his face.
Conclusion: It’s hard to believe we only have four issues left. Robinson has introduced so many fascinating elements to his story and star that you can stay engrossed for much, much longer.
Grade: B+
– Minhquan Nguyen
Some Musings: – Robinson doesn’t mess around when he portrays pure evil. Consider the demon’s words to a traumatized mayor: “Your wife is already [in Hell]. My brothers all take turns with her, two at a time. Barbed and scaly they may be—and screams? Oh, how your wife cries…”
– It’s pretty disturbing how in the DCU, demons can send anyone to Hell, even if they don’t deserve to be there. We’ve seen this kind of thing in Demon Knights as well.