Shade, the Changing Girl, Vol. 1: Earth Girl Made Easy

One of the best-loved heroes from Vertigo’s 1990s heyday is back with a different gender and a lot of modern twists as written by YA novelist Castellucci. Alien girl Loma is sick of her home planet, Meta. She steals the original Shade’s dimension-bending Madness Coat, using it to transplant herself into the body of a human girl on Earth. Sixteen-year-old Megan Boyer was the captain of her school swim team before a strange accident left her in a coma. Loma tries to slip into her life unobtrusively, but becoming Megan is not so easy; Megan’s teammates hate and fear her in equal measure, her ex-boyfriend wants to patch things up, and her parents seem ambivalent, at best, about her surprise recovery. Castellucci has woven a successful tale of intrigue and identity, and the layouts by Zarcone (Effigy) are wildly experimental, reflecting the strangeness that bleeds out of Shade’s coat and into every other facet of her life. (July)