Reviewer: Tim Stevens
Story Title: The Stealer Part 1
Written by: Peter Milligan
Art by: Cliff Chiang
Colored by: Lee Loughridge
Lettered by: Clem Robins
Editor: Karen Bergin
Publisher: Vertigo
Peter Milligan first got the ball rolling on the same, but all different Human Target in a miniseries. If you like this series, I highly recommend seeking it out.
Anyway, in this mini, Milligan also introduced Tom McFadden, Christopher Chance’s apprentice. Unlike Chance, McFadden was a family man with a loving wife and young son. Sadly, like Chance, he had great difficulty dealing with the identity shifts. In fact, his difficulties seemed to be even more extreme and deeper than his mentor’s. When we last saw McFadden, he had stepped away from the biz after so immersing himself in the job that his “real” life disappeared from his own mind.
Milligan brings him back here and, sadly, retirement has not treated McFadden kindly. He has become a wanderer. He does not allow himself to think about his wife and child, claiming they belong to a different man. He assumes identities for no purpose at all, except perhaps to avoid being himself, a self that he says, “really scares him.”
Chance is a seriously messed up individual in his one right, there is no denying that. Milligan once again does an excellent job of displaying Chance’s neuroses while still making it clear that they are a part of his life; Something as noteworthy to himself as waking up in the morning. Chance’s domestic situation with “wife” Mary, (he impersonated her then husband, ended up truly falling in love with her and the two have, off and on, tried to make that work), allows Milligan the perfect forum to demonstrate this. Chance discusses his (somewhat correct) paranoia about being followed and people want to kill him with an almost comic ease. Similarly, his “excitement” over a recent job, while disturbing enough on its own, is spun by Mary to reveal a gaping crater in their relationship. The “job” gets him excited in a way that she once did, but can now, seemingly, no longer get close to.
However, as screwed up as Chance is McFadden is still worse off. At his heart, Chance is a fairly normal, decent man. His “gift” has skewed his perceptions up and left his head on a bit cockeyed, but he is no psychotic. McFadden, on the other hand, possesses a diseased mind. He could have possibly lived his life as an upstanding citizen, perhaps not. However, in attempting to be Chance’s apprentice, McFadden sealed his own fate. The act of becoming others left him unstuck and the ugliness within him bubbles through his “true” identity to infect all the others he attempts to take on.
It’s all very dark, intense subject matter and well told. This makes the dark humor that Milligan twists through his script all the more impressive and welcome. This issue could have easily been utterly depressing, but Chance (when springing from Milligan’s pen) is such a wiseass both inside his own head and in conversation that you cannot help but laugh at the foibles of the world alongside him.
