Here’s a pinup of Rac Shade, the main character from Steve Ditko’s DC series Shade the Changing Man. I did this as a “thank you” to send to the folks at Hot Sauce Productions who were kind enough to let us screen the recent Jonathan Ross documentary, In Search of Steve Ditko, at Heroes Con ’09. Shade’s color scheme is pretty simple, so I whipped up a quick color version as well:
At some point, I want to do an in-depth post about the whole Shade the Changing Man series, which I think is Ditko’s last great work-for-hire work. Unfortunately, I neglected to spend any time at Heroes rummaging through the 50 cent bins looking for issues seven and eight which I still lack–so, alas my Shade post will have to wait. I did though look through the books I have before drawing this pinup and I was really struck by issue four in particular, which contains some of Ditko’s greatest bizarre, grotesque and abstract imagery. Some of this stuff makes his Dr. Strange work look tame by comparison. Here’s a page from issue four, for example:
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That issue of Shade—the one with the irises growing arms and legs—was actually one of the very first comics I bought as a kid: maybe the third or fourth comic I owned.
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Well, that explains a lot, Isaac! ;-)
Seriously. Between that comic and the big stack of Fourth-World Kirby I was given the following year, many explanations lie.