Shade, the Changing Man #9

This March 1991 DC Vertigo-era series continues its psychedelic journey with a cover by Brendan McCarthy that is genuinely arresting — a pallid, green-tinged figure clutches a small yellow flower while dissolving into swirling ribbons of neon pink, electric yellow, and deep violet, with a grotesque creature lurking at the bottom of the composition. The handwritten cover text — "Pink Heaven that You Painted Black — that You Pointed Fingers at" — feels less like a story tease and more like a fever-dream poem scrawled across the image itself. With interior work by the Milligan, Bachalo, and Pennington team, issue #9 of Shade, the Changing Man is the kind of unsettling, visually inventive comic that reminds you how bracingly strange superhero-adjacent storytelling could get in 1991.