The Shade #9 – Review

By: James Robinson (story), Frazer Irving (art)

The Story: Aren’t you guys too old to be playing the Egypt Game?  (And yes, that is a reference to the Zilpha Keatley Snyder children’s novel, which is awesome.)

The Review: For anyone wondering why of all characters DC would choose the Shade to star in its first wave of miniseries, the last eight issues should’ve given you the answer: this foppish, elegantly-spoken man is quite unlike anything you see in comics nowadays, and his life and history is filled to the brim with interest.  If he was real, I have no doubt in my mind he’d be advertising for Dos Equis right now—and selling twice as much as Jonathan Goldsmith.

Yet the one area where Goldsmith beats out Shade is in brevity.  As a lover of words, I can’t help but admire the top-hatted man’s turns of phrase, so elaborate they practically have lace on the edges.  Even so, I can see where his particular voice, a mixture of Henry James’ highly involved syntax and Oscar Wilde’s sardonicism, can become a weary fog to navigate through.  But it’s precisely the loaded nature of Shade’s narration that allows him to offer exposition, character, and action all at the same time.  In other words, Shade himself knows how to tell a story.