Powered and protected by his "Madness-vest," mind agent Shade journeys to Earth from his home dimension Meta to research the prophesied "changes," which will threaten the orderly, tightly-controlled Metan universe. Between Earth and Meta lies the Area of Madness, chaos given form and fueled by humans' uncontrollable, emotional nature.

At first his visits are brief three hour affairs undertaken in his own Metan body. But as the Madness threatens his home, Shade must remain on Earth for an extended period of time to confront the chaos directly. To accomplish this, he occupies the body of convicted serial killer Troy Grenzer at the moment of his execution by electrocution! Though Shade's persona supersedes Grenzer's sociopathy, echoes of the murderer remain. Through his vest, Shade can project his dreams and visions, literally warping the reality around him.

In a bizarre but believable twist, Kathy George, daughter of Grezner's last victims, befriends Shade. The pair journey across the country confronting and often containing the Madness, now represented as the American Scream, a physical embodiment of the failed American dreams of the previous thirty years.

Milligan and Bachalo wisely relied on surreal imagery and non-linear storytelling for this imaginative, allegorical series. At the time, these methods were unusual, as was the prominent portrayal of controversial topics such as capital punishment, interracial relationships, and transgenderism. The series developed a cult following and lasted an amazing 70 issues (through 1996).

The third title to emerge from the first wave of DC's own British Invasion, the previous being Neil Gaiman's Sandman and Grant Morrison's Animal Man, Shade, the Changing Man re-envisioned the original concept created by Steve Ditko in 1978. In the original incarnation, which ran for eight issues, Metan Rac Shade, using a stolen vest that enabled him to project a illusion of a large grotesque version of himself, escaped to Earth after being framed for treason.

Milligan and Bachalo discarded all references to the prior history and most of Ditko's concepts, incorporating only the bare bones. Their series existed generally outside the established DC Comics continuity, though John Constantine from Hellblazer and The Endless from Sandman made appearances.

Unlike Sandman and the Morrison-written Animal Man, whose entire runs are available in trade paperback editions, only two Shade, the Changing Man collections exist: The American Scream (issues 1-6; originally compiled in 2003) and Edge of Vision (issues 7-13; published for the first time in November, 2009). I hope that more collections are forthcoming. After nearly a decade of terrorism scares, war, and economic decline, Americans once again need the unique perspectives of Shade, the Changing Man.