Perhaps the most significant clues come from the villain’s private musings: “ La Sangre. With tantalizing pith yet obvious import, Robinson continues to brush away layers of mystery surrounding the Inquisitor, only for us to encounter even more questions beneath. Died of cancer in ’68.” In a few sentences, Robinson gives a compelling impression of a man whom you never see, yet gets you interested in him anyway. He fought crime from the 1940s through the next couple of decades. ‘Quixote’ was the nickname everyone called him. Robinson manages to fill whole pages of nothing but talking heads and still make it gripping, largely because of the almost poetical turn of his writing: “Commissioner Cervantes’ father. You can feel that same effect in the script here. At my grad school commencement, we had a very petite London lady deliver a speech, and I remember the entire audience was held spellbound by her rich choice of vocabulary, her sparkling accent, her class, and most of all, the even rhythm of her dialogue. Why, I’ll have you know…some of my best friends are sodomites.” Only timing and context hint at the threat veiled within the joke.Īnother quality that reveals the Britishness of the writing is how easy and enjoyable it is to read even the exposition. For example, to the raging Inquisitor, he remarks, “How very uncivil, sir. Shade comes from an earlier, much more reserved period, so no matter what the situation, his voice rings with a light, even airy timbre that is at once amusing, perceptive, and intelligent, never clearly showing emotion. Yes, yes, the title character is of English origin, and his proud Victorian foppery gives him away long before he even begins to speak, but that’s not it-not entirely.Ĭompare with Paul Cornell’s Knight and Squire in that series, the pride of British culture was on full display, but a very modern, sarcastic, bombastic type of culture, where even as the characters engage in that famous understatement, they reveal the heat of their feelings nonetheless. I say all this because The Shade may be one of those rare exceptions, a title that reads with an inescapably British flavor. Ultimately, too, the distinction is somewhat irrelevant as the variety of writing styles among the Brits and Yankees is so broad that you can’t really tell them apart by text alone. It’s not something you think of often, since they spend all their time writing American characters in American settings with an American audience in mind anyway. The Review: Every now and then I’m reminded with a start just how many British writers there are in the comics business. The Story: There seems to be some bad blood between you two… By: James Robinson (writer), Javier Pulido (artist), Hilary Sycamore (colorist)
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