Something else I've wanted to talk about is Shade, the Changing Man/Girl/Woman.
"This isn't my real body, see. I'm just using it. It belongs to a woman who's dead."Rac Shade (who is distinct from the Flash villain The Shade) was created in the late 70s by Steve Ditko, who was also responsible for such characters as Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, and The Question, and whose politics directly inspired the character Rorschach.
Steve Ditko's 1970s version of Shade is quite different from the Shade which exists today, but even in this early form Shade was comparable to the dazzlingly creative and surreal mysticism of Doctor Strange, with dystopian sci-fi elements and a focus on madness both as a form of magic and as an invisible force of change in culture.
70s Shade was well before my time and I've only read a bit of that. My introduction to the character came in the 90s with Peter Milligan's run on the character under the mature audiences Vertigo line. Vertigo was for cool goth girls. Sometimes there was a bare butt, or someone would say
fuck, and all of the time characters sat at a table having frank conversations about sex, drugs, death, and the capitalist patriarchy- this was as true in Shade as it was was in Neil Gaiman's Sandman or Garth Ennis' Preacher.
I began reading at issue 26, the Shades of Lenny story which is from the perspective of Shade's lesbian friend Lenny. Lenny is a sassy cool goth girl typified in so many Vertigo books, and was remarkably chill with Shade's surreal antics right up until it began to affect her daughter, and then she was
very much not cool with it at all. 
Shortly after Shades of Lenny, Shade becomes a woman for a while. I wouldn't say the writing there was especially true to Shade's female readership, but I do love Lenny's reaction to everything.
Early on the focus of Shade is collective neuroses of Americana. Often this comes in the form of unraveling a murder mystery by manifesting psychoses in a mystical form of dream interpretation. Shade, you see, is able to perceive, manifest, and shape madness through the power of the ubiquitous M-Vest dreamed up by Steve Ditko. Shade is powerless without madness, and yet is compelled to cure it. Shade hails originally from an authoritarian world scoured of imagination or creativity, and approaches the strange world of American life with the soul of a poet.
As an example of this surrealism, an enduring villain from Shade's earliest issues is The American Scream, a skeletonized Uncle Sam who arises as a collective cognitive dissonance of a festering ugliness in American culture together with idealized romanticizing of the American Dream.
I didn't get to finish Peter Milligan's Shade, as my inlet to comic books at the time was through a girlfriend and our interests eventually changed with college and careers. But recently I was able to pick up the full run at auction, and I'm looking forward to reading what I missed.
More recently, in 2016 Cecil Castellucci brought back Shade with Shade the Changing Girl/Woman, starring a new bearer of the M-Vest, Loma Shade, who is female from the beginning.
This character, Loma Shade, follows a similar vein of triage to American madness through the refreshing eyes of a young lady leaving high school behind to become a woman. The body this Shade inhabits was a terrible bully, and while Shade at first tries to erase that part of herself, she finds that she must have madness, she must embrace her capacity for ugliness, to protect the people she cares about.
And also to hang out with Wonder Woman, whom Loma Shade
clearly has a thing for.
Cecil Castellucci caught some backlash for using DC's New Gods trappings to tell a story of inequality and sexual harassment in Female Furies. I like her work and distinctive voice, which was a terrific fit for a female Shade dealing with the madness of depression, dissociation, body ownership, and the paralysis of outgrowing those who inspired us. Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance, Doom Patrol, and Umbrella Academy said of DC's Young Animal imprint "Shade is my favorite," and I agree.
I'm looking forward to the new mystical offerings at DC with hopes of seeing Loma Shade, or heck, even both Shades in ongoing stories. If you've read this far, or even just found the pictures cool, I hope you'll give Shade a read too.
