Shade the changing man

(Cover art by Steve Ditko, all rights with current holder)
Shade the Changing Man isn’t a big-name series. It’s definitely been overshadowed by the later Vertigo series of the name which took a few of the concepts and sent them in a wildly different direction. But the obscurity is a shame, as it’s easily Steve Ditko’s best work after the 1960s (maybe since he left Marvel).
Rac Shade is a former government agent on Meta, a world existing in another dimension, reachable to and from Earth across the dimensional gulf called the Zero Zone. As the story starts, he’s locked up in prison, but gets tossed into the Zero Zone as a side effect of Meta’s top “crimesters” teleporting out of jail. Escaping to Earth he recovers the M-Vest, a high-tech chestplate that generates a protective force-field and also causes his appearance to shift, horribly in response to emotional situations (e.g. combat). Hence the title.
Part of what makes the book good is that Ditko didn’t waste any time with drawn-out decompressed storytelling. In the eight issues it ran, Shade is busy taking down the crimesters who also reached Earth, and hunting down the traitors who framed him as a criminal. Since he’s still a wanted Metan, he also has to duck his former colleagues who are out to hunt him down, plus the crimesters working for SuDe (the Supreme Decider) who would also like him dead. Even his former fiancee Mellu is out to bring him in dead and alive, due to his big crime being (supposedly) that he crippled both her parents to stop her father’s investigations into the underworld. There were also plenty of seeds thrown out for the future. We learn the scientist who developed the M-Vest was working against a suspected alien force trying to break through the force-field around Meta’s solar system (all planets come with force fields in this universe).
On top of that, the characters are good. Mellu, for instance, is a fully competent agent who can handle crimesters quite effectively herself. She’s tormented by her love for Shade mixed in with her desire for revenge. Not that this is a groundbreaking take on character, but it works.
And the stories, too, are entertaining. One of my favorite bits is where Mellu falls into the Zone of Madness which drives everyone who passes through it insane until their heart gives out from screaming. With the help of a friendly scientist, Shade manages to drain Mellu’s nightmarish illusions into his own brain (he’s the only person who’s ever survived the Zone) even though it almost kills him (it’s watching this that convinces one of his former colleagues Shade isn’t the bad guy).
Ditko’s art of course is well-suited to drawing weird alien dimensions (he was, after all, the original Dr. Strange artist). Although his fashion sense seems locked in the 1950s—the gangsters with their suits, ties and fedoras all look out of date.
The series ended with one of the criminal groups invading Earth and Shade heading across the Zero Zone to stop them. Several years later it wrapped up in DC’s Suicide Squad, very anticlimactically (it’s a common problem with minor series) after which Shade worked with the Squad until the Vertigo series took the name.
Your life is unlikely to suffer if you never read Shade. But it is worth the reading.