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Anyone
who has followed SHADE with an intimate eye over the last fifty episodes,
or even those who have jumped gaily aboard midway through our journey,
might have understood the truth: that the real theme of this book is not
madness, nor love, nor hatred, nor loss...though all of these have had
their place. The real theme of SHADE, THE CHANGING MAN is...
Hair. Hair
styles, to be exact. 
And though this might sound glib, it has a serious intent, for was it not
Shakespeare who suggested that to comprehend the fashion of hair is to
comprehend the world? Though we have
intertwined with this vital theme the story of Shade and Kathy (he: a man
from another planet possessing at first the body of a psychopathic killer
and finally, a madman, and she: a woman trying to overcome the trauma of
seeing her parents slaughtered, battling against alcoholism and 
madness
and eventually dying shortly after giving birth to Shade's child) and while
we have included characters like Lenny, one-time lover of Kathy, and Pandora,
one-time lovemaker with Shade, we have never been diverted from the real,
follicular aim of this book: to use hair to examine and dissect these times
in which we live, love, comb and die.
From the early mid-seventies blind barber pastiches of Chriss Bachalo
,
through to the orangtan floor mop look favored by Colleen Dorqan, our series
has been a fearless investigation of the human hair condition. Bryan
Talbot amused us with his 
Thatched
Cottage look, and then the divine Glyn Dillon paraded before us the quiff
and sideburns which, it has been suggested, I occasionally sport myself.
Bachalo, of course, rewrote the map of human hair as Shade's rug grew,
apparently by the 
second,
until it finally resembled nothing less than a mutated Joshua tree, lifting
its withered arm toward the empty sky. I
only point this out because as we pass number fifty and head onward into
uncharted chort-back-and-sides, you are about to witness a new hairstyle,
on that encapsulates the grieving Shade, deprived of Kathy and of hope,
but I hope not of you, dear reader. Because seriously, all joking
apart, it has been a wonderful, sometimes frustrating and sometimes illuminating
experience working on this book, and I would like to take this opportunity
to thank all of you who continue to read and support it. If I lost
all of my hair tomorrow, you, my friends, would be my wig. --
Peter Milligan
