By Harry Kassen — Hello and welcome back to Comics Anatomy. This will be the last of the charity commissions and I wanted to thank you all for reading these. I hope you all enjoyed this series-within-a-series (to crib a DC marketing term) as much as I have. It’s been an interesting challenge starting with the title and finding something to write about as opposed to starting with both of those things already. I also want to thank the people who donated money and chose books for me, both for giving money to people in need and also for choosing such an interesting array of books for me to write about.

This month’s article is a request from Thomas Maluck, a comics critic and public librarian, who asked me to cover Milk Wars, the DCU/Young Animal crossover miniseries. Because of the splintered nature of this series, I asked Thomas if there was a particular issue he wanted me to focus on. He chose the Shade, the Changing Girl/Wonder Woman Special. This is an issue, and a series to be honest, that I didn’t think much of the first time I read it, and didn’t think about much afterward. Revisiting both Shade and Milk Wars changed all of that.

While I definitely noticed more things in the regular Shade, the Changing Girl series, because it’s significantly longer and more independent, I did spend quite a bit of time digging into the Milk Wars issue as well.

The biggest thing I noticed in Shade/WW was the use of ethereal or ghostly elements, for lack of a better word, to convey what is hidden in various scenes. What I mean by ethereal here is that elements that do not actually exist in the world are depicted on the page. We are able to see more of the world than the characters get to see themselves. The simplest example of this is in the middle of the issue when Shade is starting to see through the Retconn facade and remember that Wonder Wife is really Wonder Woman (Milk Wars is tough to explain). She sees a poster of Wonder Wife, but superimposed on the poster is a faint outline of Wonder Woman striking the iconic crossed bracelet pose.

Now obviously that’s a pretty superficial use of this sort of ethereal art, but other scenes from this issue show that this kind of thing can be used to help reinforce the themes of a book. 

For most of the book, Loma Shade is not one person but actually a collection of people, each of whom represents a specific emotion. Together they are the Shade Force.

One of these Shades (Happy or “Haps”) starts to see that their reality is not as it seems, including the above image of Wonder Woman’s ghostly outline. At one point, she has a vision of her whole self, Loma Shade, with all of those emotions united within her. She is shown as a single figure with ghostly Shades branching out from her, each a single color/emotion like their Shade Force counterparts. What is important here though, is that the single figure shown as the central shade is wearing the rainbow Madness Coat, showing a full range of colors and emotions.

These two scenes are the backbone of the visual representation of one of the book’s major themes, depicting at varying times the atomized individualism of the homogenized Retconn world and the unified collectivism of the real world as it should be.

What does this have to do with the depiction of the ethereal though? That requires new examples. Toward the end of the book, Wonder Wife and the Shade Force are attending a Women’s Rally. Two of the Shades at the rally are showing emotions quite strongly, and to go with those emotions, they are sending out floating donut shapes, a staple of Shade comics. The sad one, dressed in blue, is sending out blue circles, and the angry one, dressed in red, is sending out red circles.

Later in the book, one of the Shades reminds Wonder Wife that she’s really Wonder Woman, and Wonder Woman remembers for the first time who she really is. Accompanying this revelation is a cascade of those colored circles. What’s different about them here is how they’re colored. Instead of each one being a single color, they’re all a rainbow, much like the combined Shade with the Madness Coat from earlier.

Those circles exist to us since we can see them on the page, but they do not exist within the perception of the characters. This makes them a perfect example of what I called the ethereal earlier. While nobody would accuse this comic of being subtle in its themes and messages, these ethereal images take a secondary role to the primary, more directly representational art, but still help to reinforce those ideas. In a medium so untethered from the constraints of reality, and especially in a series that intentionally seeks to flaunt those limitations, there is no reason to not bend those rules to add depth to the story and the ideas present in it.

Thomas Maluck writes reviews for School Library Journal and No Flying No Tights. He can be found on Twitter @LiberryTom.

Harry Kassen is a college student and avid comic book reader. When he’s not doing schoolwork or reading comics, he’s probably sleeping. Catch his thoughts on comics, food, and other things on Twitter @leekassen. You can support his writing via Ko-fi.