Sunday, July 06, 2014

30 Days of Fatale: 13 Reasons to Buy the Single Issues.

Just more than half of Fatale's 24 issues will have an essay in the back as an extra feature not found in the trade paperback collections.  

If it hasn't felt as if there were that many essays in the latest series, the essays were front-loaded a bit:  seven of the first eight issues had an essay, while only three of the last eight will include an essay.  In issue #5, the comic spilled far past the standard 24 pages to 27, leaving only one interior page for Ed Brubaker's note to his readers; issues #8 and #23 had reader letters, and issue #16 printed the four-page "trailer" for Velvet, Brubaker's new collaboration with Steve Epting.  For other issues, Brubaker relayed that they didn't want to cause further delays by including the extra essay.

The final Fatale is an extra-length issue at 48 pages, and Brubaker has told A Criminal Blog that the issue will include 34 pages of story, which will leave plenty of room for extras.  One of those extras will be an essay by Jess Nevins, and Sean Phillips has posted two images of original artwork that will accompany the essay.




From November, 2011, to June, 2012, Sean Phillips contributed to a group blog called What Not, featuring assorted artwork from "a varied group of artists," including Cliff Chiang, Mark Chiarello, and Phil Noto.  It's an interesting blog to browse, and for one entry on the theme of authors, Phillips posted the gorgeous art for the first arc's essays, which are also worth another look.

Together the thirteen essays comprise a very strong reason to collect the single issues of Fatale, and we're happy to list them here for readers' reference and (we hope) for their eventual inclusion in a page on Wikipedia.

  1. H.P. Lovecraft and the Horror of the Unseen, by Jess Nevins, in issue #1
  2. Edgar Allan Poe: Reality as a Grotesque Deception, by Jess Nevins, in  issue #2
  3. Dan J. Marlowe: Echoes of a Hard-Boiled Past, by Charles Kelly, in issue #3
  4. The Real Philip Marlowe, by Stephen Blackmoore, in issue #4
  5. Horror and Mystery Fiction Part 1: Ontranto to de Grandin, by Jess Nevins, in issue #6
  6. Horror and Mystery Fiction, Part 2: The Weird Menace Pulps, by Jess Nevins, in issue #7
  7. The Devil Inside Me: Devil Pulp, by Jess Nevins, in issue #10
  8. The Lonely Doll, by Megan Abbott, in issue #12
  9. Strange Stories, by Jack Pendarvis, in issue #13
  10. Aleister Crowley, by Jess Nevins, in issue #15
  11. Cthulu Lives! On the Afterlife of H.P. Lovecraft, by Jess Nevins, in issue #18
  12. Cults in Fiction, by Jess Nevins, in issue #21
  13. Leaping the Fence: Fallen Heroes and Redeemed Villains, by Jess Nevins, in issue #24 

They make great reading, at they put Brubaker and Phillips' horror noir in its larger literary context.

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