Superheroes get surreal in this Shade, The Changing Girl #1 exclusive
DC’s Young Animal imprint made its big debut with last month’s Doom Patrol #1, a very strange new take on the Doom Patrol property that felt more like a classic Vertigo book than most of the actual new Vertigo titles released in the last few years. The Young Animal weirdness keeps coming with this week’s Shade, The Changing Girl #1, which takes inspiration from both the DC and Vertigo iterations of Shade, The Changing Man as it tells the story of an alien inhabiting the body of 16-year-old bully. Writer Cecil Castellucci’s extensive work exploring female adolescence in both prose and comics makes her particularly well suited for this new interpretation of Shade, but these preview pages show that she’s also fully embracing the peculiarity of the concept and the vast storytelling opportunities it creates.