Peter Milligan begins a dark new path for 'Shadowman'

• Peter Milligan joins %22Shadowman%22 as series writer beginning in December
• The writer also has worked on %22Constantine%22 and %22Justice League Dark%22
• The new story line finds Jack Boniface struggling with the voodoo loa attached to his soul

Jack Boniface's got his groove, got his mojo, but maybe the New Orleans antihero known as Shadowman hasn't got the right tune yet.

Enter Peter Milligan, a guy who knows a thing or two about exploring comic books' darkest characters.

Beginning with Shadowman No. 13 in December, Milligan takes over as writer on the Valiant Comics series and joins artist Roberto de la Torre (Daredevil), who's making some alterations to Jack's garb to reflect his next journey into horror.

"We're going for something that combines the high-drama aspects of a darker mainstream book with the post-punk weird and psychologically edgy qualities of Vertigo," says Milligan, the former scribe of Hellblazer, Shade, The Changing Man and Justice League Dark.

The new Shadowman issue kicks off Valiant's "Must Read Valiant" campaign that unleashes story arcs for books such as Eternal Warrior and Harbinger that act as natural jumping-on points for readers trying out the comics for the first time.

Milligan's first story line finds Jack waking up in an alleyway covered in blood and realizing that the voodoo loa inside him that gives him powers may be doing some bad stuff when he's not conscious. So, he goes in search of how to rip this loa from his soul, which Milligan says will switch up their "hitherto cozy relationship."

He reveals that his first arc will attempt to dig up some dirt, dislodge some skeletons and find out what's really going on with this new Shadowman.

"I'm not throwing everything out with the bath water — I'm just making the bath water a bit more grimy and, hopefully, unpleasant," Milligan explains. "Something is wrong with Jack and to find out what it is, he'll need to face some terrible truths about himself and make some big changes in his life."

Like Hellblazer, the Shadowman series has some inherent occult elements but is not tied to any strict interpretation of magic. So Milligan is making up his own set of rules where voodoo is just the starting point.

"The dark voodoo of the human heart — especially a young one with the kind of traumatic background that Jack Boniface has had — is the occult I'm more interested in," Milligan says.

He finds Jack Boniface a fascinating character mainly because Milligan couldn't really understand him: "He didn't quite seem to add up, this orphaned young man with the terrible loa attached to him. No one could be as normal as he seems, with that past and that terrible spirit attached to him."

Milligan also will be exploring Jack's childhood going from foster home to foster home — his dead father was also a Shadowman — and how emotions fostered during that time manifest themselves in his powers now.

"I've known a few people who spent chunks of their childhood in homes," Milligan says. "Many of these emerge scarred, or suffering from some kind of trauma. Some are damaged for life. It can do horrible things to people.

"Before Jack can be the Shadowman that his father was, he has to face the ghosts and demons from those earlier days, after his mother abandoned him. A man suffering any kind of trauma is surely a man unfit to carry such a powerful entity as the Shadowman loa."

Jack's also dealing with his allies and teachers in the Abettors not exactly pleased with his progress, and he'll see a "different and less benign" attitude from them, according to Milligan — this leads to conflicts of loyalty for Alyssa, one of the Abettors.

The Shadowman writer also wants to "recalibrate" the way Jack interacts with the otherworldly Deadside, which houses all manner of supernatural creatures: "Going to the Deadside shouldn't be like popping out to the grocery store to buy a pint of milk. This is a scary and difficult place, and it imposes a terrible price. Just what this price is is something Jack — and we — learn in my first arc."

Another threat is revealed in the form of a mambo woman from deep in the boondocks "who turns out to be very different from what Jack expects and hopes for," Milligan says, as well as a being living in the New Orleans slums who's every bit as old as the Shadowman loa. "It's a moot point who's most dangerous to Jack: the mambo, the ancient thing in the slums, or his own alter ego."

Milligan hopped on Shadowman the same reason he did so with Hellblazer: Both Jack Boniface and John Constantine are the kind of messed-up characters he loves best, those who find themselves in the edge and in trouble.

"That's how I've felt myself sometimes," the writer says. "Putting this at the center of Shadowman just makes for something that's more psychologically harrowing and twisted. It seems to me that there are probably more monsters and demons inside Jack's head than there are in the Deadside."