The (exceptionally late) beginning of act two delivers a major clue as to why starlet Valeria Sommers was knocked off in the form of retired Victory Street Pictures cofounder and psychotic pervert Al Kamp. If you can’t quite recall what happened in previously in “The Fade Out” because it was released 4 months ago, luckily you can pick up the first trade and have all 4 issues fresh. Don’t let that stop you though, “The Fade Out” #5 is still as good as Brubaker and Phillips have ever been.
WRITTEN BY: Ed Brubaker
ART BY: Sean Phillips
PUBLISHER: Image
PRICE: $3.50
RELEASE: April 15, 2015
This issue has a really interesting “begin at the end” structure to it. We begin with Gil in the bar while Charlie narrates where he is and how he got there. Charlie explains that Gil was instructed to stay put and wait for his call, but of course “listen” and “stay” are not two commands that Gil ever learned. Instead he finds himself drunk in a bar being a loud mouth. Unfortunately the aforementioned senile Al Kamp happens to be at the same bar demonstrating profound lunacy when studio enforcer Brodsky shows up and recognizes Gil.
We transition to an earlier time in the day through a convention I hope is repeated in this series: we see a brief scene in the film: all black and white panel in “widescreen” format, and then the same scene with Maya, Valeria’s replacement, not in color and in the present delivering new lines with a lot less edge and grace to them. The juxtaposition is profound and does a lot of story telling without having to spell it all out. These guys always seem to find new ways to impress me, and I’d have to say this is my favorite moment in the issue.
The issue plays with time a little bit more, as Charlie remembers back to when the scene was first shot with Valeria, and the seemingly fateful run in with Al Kamp in the woods tying a naked girl to a tree. Valeria does the wrong thing and intervenes, seemingly sealing her fate. Charlie walks back to the lodges with Maya while she flirts and calls Gil, discovery he is not there and catapulting us back to the bar with Brodsky.
Brodsky reveals that while he had to intimidate Tyler Graves into ending his homosexual affairs by barging into one of his rendezvous and beating the bejesus out of his current consort. Unbeknownst to Brodsky, Tyler responds to this by getting hammered and driving recklessly. It all plays out in this brilliant back and forth between past and present where Brodsky is narrating while Ty is drinking and taking off in his new car. The interplay between past and present in this issue can almost be a thesis for the entire series. Nostalgia is an idealized perception of the past, “The Fade Out” represents the opposite of that. The Golden Age is anything but golden.