I’m a fan of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips. As a team I hope they continue working together because what they bring to comics is amazing. You may be familiar with some of their past works in the Criminal series, Incognito and Sleeper. All incredible reads. Fatale keeps the crime noir feel that these two have brought to us in past works and add a new element in the way of Lovecraftian horror. If you haven’t read Fatale until now I do recommend doing so if you are a fan of the Brubaker and Phillips or just the style of comic mentioned above. The first two volumes focuses on Josephine who is cursed to make men desire her. By desire I mean they are willing to forego anything and everything to be with her. Men will fight and kill each other to be with her. Then there is the fact that Josephine is being hunted by a cult. Added to her curse is that as time goes on Josephine does not age. Eventually she will leave you and any that survive her love remain obsessed ’til the end of their days.
In Fatale: West of Hell we get to see more Josephine but also we get a glimpse into the past. Mainly Josephine’s predecessors. There is Mathilda from 13th century France who has been hunted, tortured and finally burned at the stake as a witch. But death escapes her when it turns out the fire couldn’t kill her. The men who came to see her die have all been murdered. She makes her escape and finds an older man living alone in the wild. He takes her in and allows her to heal. Things seem to be going fine until a certain familiar cult makes an appearance. The next character we meet is Bonnie who we learn was once a good girl but regrettably she somehow became an outlaw in the old west. Bonnie gets hunted and captured by a man who can completely resist her powerful charm over men. She gets delivered to another person named Professor Waldo Smythe who is also immune to her charms. Professor Smythe is very familiar with Josephine’s abilities and is after something very specific. The bible belonging to the cult who hunt those like Bonnie. He’s a scholar of the occult and is after one of their bibles to add to his collection. But getting this close to the cult that possesses the book is easier said than done.
Fatale volume three was different from the previous volumes in that Josephine wasn’t the only focus. This time we get to see other women with the same curse but from different eras. And with that we get to learn learn a bit about the mystery of what exactly is this curse that Josephine, Mathilda and Bonnie have. Ultimately you have more questions but you feel like a path has been opened in a sense. I found myself preferring volume three over the previous two volumes but at the same time I want to go back and re-read the one and two just to see if I missed anything. Ed Brubaker knows how to write a great crime story and now we know he can pull off horror as well. Sean Phillips is superb. He has the art style I love to look at. I wish I could see it all in black and white before color gets added. Why don’t comics do this more often? Some artist just deserve to have their works seen before color is added. I’d love to read all of this in black and white. But that’s not to say the colors in this book are bad. Far from it. These colors compliment the story beautifully. The colors are by Elizabeth Breitweiser and Dave Stewart. Check out their works, you may be surprised you’ve already seen some of the works they’ve done in the past.
These books are a lot of fun and I’ll make sure to make another read through before Halloween just to get that holiday started. It’s a noir/horror title in an age dominated by superheroes comics. It’s refreshing to see this type of work so well done. Thinking on it now I’d love to see a return to Slam Bradley by Ed Brubaker with Sean Phillips doing the art. Yeah I know, fat chance of that happening. But a guy can dream and at least there was the Catwoman series that gave me a taste of it.