The Shade #4 – Review

By: James Robinson (writer), Darwyn Cooke (penciller), J. Bone (inker), Dave Stewart (colorist)

The Story: A cover on Life magazine?  You’ve really made it.

The Review: It’s not usually my style to start off a review with bias, but I’ll make a rare exception to say that this series has one of the freshest voices of all the titles coming out of any publisher right now.  A lot of it has to do with the unique qualities of Shade himself: erudite, wry, witty, and not a little bit of a romantic, a mix you don’t often hear from comics characters.

Even more than that, the title offers a great combination of different tones and running plotlines, making it a grab-bag of genres that can’t be perfectly qualified as just one.  Over the course of the series, we’ve had bits of spy-thriller, romance, supernatural, sci-fi, pulp, mystery, and drama, all of which Robinson weaves together with wonderful credibility.  Furthermore, Shade’s long-lived existence allows for a wide range of periods and settings as well.  In short, this book has the opportunity to tell almost any kind of story it wants in any way it wants.

This time around, we get a WWII tale of conspiracy and patriotism, involving not only the already surprising intervention of the Shade—given his general indifferent to greater world matters in general—but also the two-gun, motorcycle-riding Vigilante and the cross-dressing Madam Fatal, also known as one Richard Stanton.  You’re never going to have a weirder set of characters than that, and that alone makes this issue a standout from the year’s releases thus far.

Honestly, the plot is nothing much, being one of your typical “Who’s the mastermind scheming to kidnap/kill the Figure of Importance in question?”  The reveal of this individual also proves a bit cliché and predictable, both as to his/her identity and how it happens.  What makes it an entertaining read is Robinson’s use of Vigilante and Madam Fatal (and if you’ve never heard of either before, I imagine the surprise will be even greater), and the timing of Shade’s appearances.