Tied To The 90s

Given all the talk about “Meta” this week, I decided to finally go off and read all of Shade: The Changing Man, one of the classic 90s Vertigo titles (and one of the few big series that isn’t out in a complete run of graphic novel collections). And…my, did I hate it by the end. I’ll admit that reading seventy issues of it in a day instead of six years probably is part of that, but my, is it a book filled with relentless depictions of violence, rape, and mutilation, especially directed towards women.

You see it in a lot of Vertigo titles from this time — e.g. Hellblazer and House of Secrets suffer from it too, and that’s before you get to things like Preacher and how badly parts of Transmetropolitan have aged in light of what Ellis did behind the scenes, but it’s really taken to nasty levels in Shade.

(I have Milligan’s Enigma coming in a couple of weeks, and I’m suddenly a little apprehensive about it, but hopefully eight issues versus seventy go a long way to not making it as traumatic a read)

And somehow it’s pretty much November. Below freezing temperatures this upcoming week, and I’ll be turning the heating on for the first time since February. Oh, and a booster shot next Saturday!