The Madness is at the heart of Shade, a vehicle by which American obsessions such as Kennedy and Hollywood can be amplified, in order that Milligan's meditations on them might be brought to bear with more precision. The problem is that, for all his undoubted talents, these meditations sometimes teeter on the borderline between profundity and banality. So, in Hollywood: "Who's the director, the auteur of life? Who writes these utterly absurd screenplays?" Later in the run of Shade, where the focus was more thoroughly personal though no less deranged, Milligan produced genuinely great work. Here, for all the insane power of Chris Bachalo's art, he's hampered by the concentration on slightly amateurish socio-political critique. None of which is to deny that there are some incredibly powerful passages here; the opening issue in particular is a genuinely harrowing, personal portrayal of madness as a young woman named Kathy George prepares for the execution of the man who killed her parents. Shade the Changing Man: The American Scream may not be a great work, but it has sufficient moments of greatness to more than justify this collection. --Alex Sarll

Synopsis
Peter Milligan (X-Statix, Skreemer), Chris Bachalo (Death: The High Cost of Living) and Mark Pennington (Hellblazer) present a fantastic re-imagination of the classic 1970s character! It begins in an explosion of madness, as 23-year-old Kathy George relives the horror of her parents' deaths at the hands of a serial killer...but she is soon swept away from her constant nightmares and the ever-present threat of insanity by a force even stranger! When Shade, a traveller from the Meta dimension, arrives by occupying the body of the serial killer who destroyed Kathy's life, she becomes caught up in Shade's quest - to journey into the collective unconscious of America, as they fight the malevolent force known only as The American Scream!