Monday, July 21, 2014

30 Days of Fatale: The Criminal Element.

Fatale #18
released November 6, 2013
following a five-page preview

Fatale #18 was the eighth and final issue released in 2013, and it finds the amnesiac "Jane Doe" remembering her cursed life as Josephine, but not before releasing her power with deadly results, drawing both the Bishop and the serial killer Wulf.



Twice in this issue, the staid page layout also runs out of control, spilling into angular, two-page spreads.

When we first mentioned the preview for this issue, we noted that it began with "that common conundrum in crime stories: what to do with the body."  The series has all sorts of more mundane crime tropes, including crooked cops and organized crime, and it's worth noticing that this criminal element isn't always introduced by Josephine and her curse.

At the beginning of "The Devil's Business," Miles was working on a desperate (and rather pathetic) plan of scoring some drugs as entry into an exclusive Hollywood party, and at the beginning of this arc, "Pray for Rain," Lance had just committed his first bank robbery to finance his bankrupt band's music video. 

Jo might have caused the criminality to escalate, inducing a jealous Lance to commit a possibly murderous assault during their second robbery, but here she didn't corrupt perfect men.  They were corrupted long before she entered the picture.

Jo's power seemed almost to redeem the anti-hero Miles, who died before the curse took its toll.  In its upcoming final chapter, this arc reveals that her power drove Lance to madness.

Nicolas Lash wasn't evidently a criminal before meeting Jo, being wrongly accused of murder, then escaping custody with the man called Nelson, but he'll probably follow either Miles or Lance to one tragic end or another.

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