Reading “The Fade Out”#3 is like sitting in your Studebaker drinking scotch from a flask, listening to jazz, and waiting for your wife’s lover to leave work so you can stab him in the parking lot. And I mean that in the sexiest way possible. C.S. Lewis used the word Sehnsucht to describe a nostalgia for something we never experienced. Woody Allen talks about golden age thinking in his film “Midnight in Paris”. When I read “The Fade Out” I long to live between the pages, to rub elbows with the Hollywoodland elite, to get caught up and swept away their world, and to embrace the seedy dark truth of it all beneath the surface. “The Fade Out” transcends the medium for me. I’ll try my best to talk about it in more certain terms
WRITTEN BY: Ed Brubaker
ART BY: Sean Phillips
PUBLISHER: Image
PRICE: $3.50
RELEASE: November 12, 2014
Reviewed By Eric Switzer
The scope of this series gets wider in this issue as new characters are introduced and their darkness is exposed. Characters in Brubaker/Phillips books can be described by their weaknesses. Their defining characteristics are the things their flaws, which more often than not turn out to be fatal ones. Maya is hired to replace Val in the film and has had to do some pretty shocking things to get where she is now, as evidence by her reaction to Thursby using a secret door to invade her dressing room. I wouldn’t be the first to call Brubaker a feminist, so in the golden age of film industry misogyny, I think there is a lot here to unpack thematically, but I’ll save that for a future essay.
Discovering who Val was through the different perspective of each character is not unlike unravelling Laura Palmer. It feels like Brubaker is making us slowly fall in love with a dead girl, and if she turns out to really be like Laura, the rug will be pulled out from under us in the most earth shattering of ways. Brubaker has that capacity.
“Fatale” gave Sean Phillips and opportunity to color outside the panels, and I think he is taking some of that expression and energy to the pages of “The Fade Out”. I am in love with his imaginative panels. The mark of a great artist is in how their art enhances or expands the themes, narrative, and characters. Phillips work is beyond comparison.
My only issue with this series is the inconsistent release schedule. Quality takes time obviously, but too much time and it necessary to start the series over every time an issue comes out. Not that I’m complaining, I’m pretty sure I have designated “The Fade Out” as my desert island book already.
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Eric Switzer is an aspiring filmmaker and screenplay writer living in Los Angeles. His work tends to focus on the lighter side of entropy, dystopic futures, and man’s innate struggle with his own mortality. He can be found on twitter @epicswitzer or reached via email at ericswitzerfilm@gmail.com.