30 Days of The Fade Out: Fake Movies with Occasionally Real Actors.

Say you're publishing a monthly comic:  what do you with the back cover?

You can use the space to create a wraparound cover, as we saw with Criminal and Incognito, you can preview the next issue's cover art, as we see with the comic Chew; you can have the comic's logo on a plain page, as with the comic Black Science; you can run an ad, as we see on the back of Ed Brubaker's Velvet.

You can have blurbs praising your work, as with the Criminal Special Edition, or you can set the mood by featuring a single striking image of interior artwork, as with Fatale.  Or, you can create new artwork to flesh out the fictionalized world of your story, and that's precisely what Sean Phillips did with The Fade Out.

What we see are black-and-white promotional stills for movies from the 40's and earlier, featuring the comic's main characters as the cast and produced by the comic's fictional studios.  Production years are also added as the series progresses.

Sean Phillips featured a couple of the images in his blog, The Neon Nightmare and Way Out West.  While I haven't been able to find real-world photos that match the exact style of these cards, they do look authentic to the era, and they cover a wide range of movies produced in Hollywood's Golden Age, from adventure movies and westerns, to comedies including kids' shorts that resemble Our Gang, to horror and noir.

Bonus material from a comic's fictional universe is nothing new, going at least as far back as the excerpts and editorials in the back pages of each issue of Watchmen.  The most dramatic example may be Brubaker and Phillips' own magazine-sized variant to the Criminal Special Edition, where the entire package -- and quite a few pages in the story itself -- was a pastiche of the sword-and-sorcery comics of the 1970s.

The most subtle example might also be found in the works of Brubaker and Phillips.  In the bonus essays for the pulp-noir mashup Incognito, Jess Nevins provided an overview of some classic pulp characters.  The essay in the last issue for the first story arc focused on the "zeppelin pulps" -- the essay's expanded version that we mentioned in 2009 is still available online -- and Brubaker eventually admitted that the essay wasn't entirely historical.  Rather than flesh out the characters of Incognito in their own universe, the essay pretended to expand on their presence in our universe, giving readers the impression that the comic's characters were created during pulp's heyday and were simply being repurposed by Ed and Sean.

In one instance, The Fade Out's back-cover movie card included a real actor and a real studio, deepening the reader's impression that the story takes place in our world with its sordid film history.

Here we think it's worthwhile to list the cards' descriptions, with the two real-world references in bold.

1. VICTORY STREET PICTURES presents: THE NEON NIGHTMARE starring Earl Rath
2. VICTORY STREET PICTURES presents: VALERIA SOMMERS in THE DARKEST HOURS OF THE NIGHT
3. VICTORY STREET PICTURES presents TYLER GRAVES in WAY OUT WEST
4. VALERIA SOMMERS as "LANA" in: "HONEYMOON IN BLUE" VICTORY STREET PICTURES © 1945
5. KAMP PRODUCTIONS presents SKINNY CARMICHAEL in SKINNY DIPPIN' © 1919
6. FLAPJACK and TEENSIE in "THE KRAZY KIDS GO FOR A RIDE!" © 1926 Kamp Productions
7. RAY MILLAND and JESSICA TOWNE in "AT THE END" © 1941 RKO
8. Earl Rath in "THE DEADLY SANDS" © 1943 Victory Street Pictures
9. COMING SOON from VICTORY STREET PICTURES - Earl Rath in "Shadow of the Valley"
10. BARBARA MOONEY in THE BIG PARADE © 1948 Victory Street Pictures
11. FLAPJACK in "THE KRAZY KIDS CHRISTMAS CAROL" © 1928 Kamp Productions

As issue #7 details, Charlie Parish wrote the screenplay for At The End, which might have won an Oscar if it didn't go up against Citizen Kane.  The latter was snubbed for the Best Picture award in 1942, in the ceremony honoring movies released the previous year: infamously losing to How Green Was My Valley, Kane did win the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.

UPDATE, 12/9:  The obvious was pointed out to me, that the movie card for issue #11 includes a young Valeria Sommers (aka Jenny Summers) in the background:  the blonde girl didn't completely resemble the starlet from the 1940's, but she's clearly the same girl as the one in the phot of Jenny Summers in issue #10.

I'm overdue for another careful reading of the entire series, but I believe that the movie card for issue #9 is the first -- and perhaps the only -- mention of the title of the movie being made at the time of Valeria's murder, the ominous and appropriately titled Shadow of the Valley.

UPDATE, 12/9:  It is: at least through the first eleven issues, the title of the movie everyone is working on isn't mentioned, except on this one back cover.

UPDATE, 2/17:  Corrected the spelling for Valeria Sommers, for the card on issue #4.