Wednesday, September 16, 2015

THE FADE OUT Issue #9 and Volume 2 In Stores Today!

Ed Brubaker confirms what Sean Phillips suspected when he got his comp copies last week, that the latest issue and trade paperback of The Fade Out are both in stores this week, beginning today.

The Fade Out Act 2 collects issues #5-8 and, like the first collection, it retails for a little less than the total price of the monthly issues, albeit without the excellent back matter.  Comicosity includes the book in this week's "Trade Waiting" feature, which highlights five new collections each week, and a tweet from Pulp Fiction Comics shows that the book has a striking blue spine that complements the red spine from Act 1.


The Fade Out #9 begins Act 3, and Comic Book Resources just posted a four-page preview.  The text description appears to be for Mark Kidwell's zombie comic '68, but the preview images are correct.

New readers can quickly catch up with the series, as the danger continues to heat up.

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Friday, September 04, 2015

A Criminal Collage, Deluxe Fatale Volume 2, and Phillips' Return to the Criterion Collection!

We've been making a few changes to the blog's appearance for both conventional web browsers and mobile browsers: for the former, we have a new banner image, and for the latter, we've updated the background collage.

The most recent banner image has used the first panel from the two-page preview of the 2011 story, "The Last of the Innocent."  The new banner uses the striking standard cover to this year's Special Edition one-shot.

The mobile site's original collage -- which we mistakenly described as a montage -- featured the thirty bordered images for Fatale, namely the 25 covers to the 24 monthly issues and the covers for the five trade paperback collections.  We're now using the six final covers for Image's Criminal reprints, which we've finally assembled into a nearly 1000x1000 JPEG image that readers can see below and save to their own folders.




On the subject of Fatale, last month we reported on Ed Brubaker's hint that the second and final deluxe edition was soon to be solicited, and the volume has since been included in Image Comics' November solicitations.

FATALE: DELUXE EDITION, VOL. 2 HC
STORY: ED BRUBAKER 
ART / COVER: SEAN PHILLIPS & ELIZABETH BREITWEISER 
NOVEMBER 11 / 432 PAGES / FC / M / $49.99 
This Deluxe Edition presents the conclusion of Brubaker and Phillips's bestselling horror-noir series FATALE in a gorgeous hardcover edition filled with insightful extras and behind-the-scenes artwork. This is the book for serious Brubaker and Phillips collectors! 
Collects FATALE #11-24 


ComicConverse recently posted a review of the entire series, for those who haven't yet dived into the horror-noir mashup.

With this upcoming release, all of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' previous major collaborations will have been collected in deluxe, oversized editions:  Sleeper from DC's Vertigo imprint, Criminal and Fatale from Marvel's Icon imprint, and now Fatale and even Scene of the Crime from Image Comics.

(Add Dynamite's The Art of Sean Phillips, an even larger hardcover collection, and you have quite a substantial library of Brubaker and Phillips.)

The plans for Image to reprint Incognito sometime this year have evidently changed, but we still expect new editions to be printed eventually, possibly in time for the film adaptation that is evidently still on track.

The duo's current collaboration is scheduled to continue in November, with The Fade Out #11 being included in that month's solicitations.  With issue #8 being released in August, a monthly schedule would be needed to ensure this issue's timely release -- on August 17th, Phillips tweeted that he just finished an extra-long issue, probably issue #9 -- but either way, the description implies that the the end is near:


"All the threads of the mystery come together, as Charlie and Gil barrel headfirst toward trouble!"
Since Fatale literally doubled from its initial plans of a 12-issue run, Brubaker and Phillips haven't announced any planned issue count for this new series, and it's doubtful they'll announce such plans for any future work:  each series will tell stories with a definite ending, but the ending will arrive in its own time.

With all that said, we believe we can now offer our educated guess that The Fade Out will run 12 issues, divided into three 4-issue acts, with a trade collection for each act.  The traditional three-act structure may eventually be collected into a single deluxe edition, but history suggests that we shouldn't expect that any earlier than the end of 2016.

Finally, Sean Phillips has already produced artwork for four Criterion Collection home video releases, black-and-white films from the 50's and 60's, all arguably tied to the broad genre of noir. In June, Phillips announced on his blog that he's been commissioned for artwork for another two Criterion Collection films and three productions for Arrow Films.  The two Criterion projects are being released this month, two color films on colonialism by Bruce Beresford, titled Breaker Morant (1980) and Mister Johnson (1990).

Both films will be available in both DVD and Blu-Ray, and both are scheduled to be released on September 22.



Just today, Sean Phillips posted additional artwork for these new Criterion releases.

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Banner Images

For our own record keeping and hyperlink purposes, we're using this blog entry to post the current and new banner images for this site.

It's never been explicitly stated, but our readers are welcome to save a copy of any image we post here.



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