Comics Review: "The Fadeout" #1

- by Ninja Ross, 21 August 2014

You wake up in an apartment that isn’t yours after a long night of hard drinking. You light a cigarette, take a leak and check yourself in the mirror. There’s lipstick in the corner of the mirror. You try to piece the night together but don’t get very far. That’s when you spot the dead woman on the floor. This is not the best way to start a day, especially with a hangover. But this is how our hero, Charlie Parish, starts his.

Charlie is a Hollywood screenwriter in 1948. The dead woman is an actress named Valeria Sommers. So far, it’s a pretty simple, almost predictable premise. It’s similar to the famous “Black Dahlia” case and has been done on more than one occasion.

Charlie remembers a party that got a little crazy, as Hollywood parties do. He remembers having to pick up his drunken “friend,” Gil Mason. He remembers meeting Valeria at a party. He does not remember anything else. As mentioned, this is a simple premise using the amnesia cliché but it’s told extremely well.

And that’s how Image Comics’ new comic book series The Fadeout, by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, kicks off. 

While it does feel stale at first, it continues to gain momentum when Brubaker begins to explore the similarities between the movie industry of the era to the mafia. With that, he introduces a couple of twists that make the story feel like much more than your average thriller.

The story obviously features more than just three characters. Brubaker introduces each one of them throughout the book, revealing only bits of their relationships with each other.

Oops.

Since there’s so little time to introduce every character in a first issue, it’s difficult to get a good grasp on each character’s motivations and personality. But Brubaker puts in enough to keep you interested and make each character feel unique. Some of them do come off as a bit stereotypical, but there’s enough there to suggest that there’s more to them.

I’ve never really liked any of Brubaker’s mainstream superhero work, other than Gotham Central (which doesn’t really count), but he has always been pretty fantastic when it comes to this kind of story. The man has a fantastic grasp on the genre and clearly has a love for it.

Gil's a good friend.

He keeps the story moving at a perfect pace, making sure nothing is revealed too early while still making sure you don’t get bored. When you re-read the first half of the book, the stale parts feel much more natural when put in context with the rest of the book.

And Sean Phillip’s art work is a perfect match for Brubaker’s plot. That makes sense, since they’ve been working together for fifteen years. Everything meshes perfectly.

Every character he draws is distinct and interesting, and he keeps the tone nice and dark, without things becoming too grim and depressing. The body language shown by Phillip’s art helps accentuate Brubaker’s story even more. His experience on crime comics is evident in every single panel he draws.

Elizabeth Breitweiser’s [you may remember her from "Outcast" - Ed.] colours deserve special mention here. She helps enhance Phillip’s art better than I think any colourist could manage. Every scene feels even more alive and her use of colours is never jarring or unwarranted. She’s the perfect match for this duo.

Movies and the Mafia.

Overall, it’s one of the best comics I’ve read in quite a while. It feels very much like a classic noire thriller but with enough modern elements to avoid too many clichés.

While it’s difficult to judge how an entire series is going to turn out by the first issue, the set up of this first issue promises that this will be one of the best noire books in a long time, right up there with the likes of Blacksad.


Have you read “The Fadeout” #1? How did you like it? Sound off in the comments!

Tagged: comics, Reviews.

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