4 out of 5

Yeah, yeah, we know the Brubes / Sean drill by now, don’t we?  Shouldn’t we?  We do.  Take a glance at the inside cover cast o’ characters for ‘The Fade Out’ and you’ll spot the nebbish lead, the heavy, the old dirty man, the femme, the innocent with a secret, and so on so on character tropes that this team have been purposefully using and re-using in book after book.  And when a dead body pops up in the first few pages, stumbled across by Charlie, our struggling screenwriter who blacked out last night and can’t remember how he wound up here… well, Ed’s been writing these tales going back to ‘Scene of the Crime.’

As I’ve criticized in other reviews, although I owe Ed a huge credit for really getting me into noir, and introducing me to so much good material (books, movies, TV) through the stuffed back pages in his comics, sometime after his star really took off (with, I’d say, Captain America), I noticed a flavor in his Criminal books that wasn’t really working for me: that he was writing the genre, and not writing the story.  While I maintain that this trait came about as a knee-jerk response to working with the majors, and then Ed got into a successful stride with that style and ran with it, it is evident in even those early works, just less so.  It expresses itself as the asides in those stories, when we step away from the lead for a moment, or when plotlines are tied together in a way that feels completely separate from the character drama you’d thought you’d been reading (which was a constant nit while I was reading Sleeper, though I enjoyed it).  And those elements are here as well.  Within this four issue opening arc, the third issue suddenly drops us in the lap of a different character, just to establish that we’re in old dirty Hollywood, and I get that these notes will pay off at some point or another, but, again, it’s a stylistic flourish that just feels too staged.

However.

If ever there was an era suited to this kind of indulgence – it’s 40s Hollywood.  And that, essentially, is the review.  If you’ve read one Ed / Sean book, you’ve honestly read them all.  That’s not to say there isn’t creativity in the execution or the plotting – there absolutely is, and Sean’s art has expressed itself in suddenly quirky ways depending on the ‘flavor’ of the series.  In ‘Fade Out,’ it has a bit more patient flavor to it at the moment, a bit classier, matching the surface smarm of the setting, and with Elizabeth Breitweiser’s fascinating color approach – surrealistic splashes and blotches, suggestive of lighting but not actually lighting the scene naturally – the series really has a seedy charm to it.  And Ed’s spinning up an effective mystery surrounding that dead girl.  But if you’re like me and you’ve lost the taste for the four-letter-slingin’ no-silver-lining noir Ed has been peddling, ‘Fade Out’ might still work for you, as it’s sort of finally the time and place Ed’s been writing the whole while.

Here’s hoping he sticks to the story and doesn’t get too lost in the genre for the arcs to come.