The Fade Out Act Three: In Stores Now!

The final trade paperback collection of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillip's latest series is in stores now. Listed as Crime/Mystery, "Act Three" of The Fade Out collects the last four issues for the retail price of $12.99, ten percent off the total price for the individual issues.

Even more strongly than the previous volumes, the book makes clear that the monthly issues' back-cover artwork is an important part of the team's approach to telling this story.  On the back of each collection, we see a detail from the movie card for issue #4, of Val Sommers in Honeymoon in Blue.  For this last collection, the story ends with the "Screen Views and News" clipping reviewing the movie that was being produced throughout the comic -- Shadow of the Valley starring Earl Rath and "Dazzling new starlet" Maya Silver.

In one of the post-mortem interviews for The Fade Out, Ed Brubaker tells Comics Alliance that this clipping points to the aftermath of the story.

...in the final issue, you have the review of the movie, so you get to see the end beats of Maya’s story and Valeria’s story, and you get a hint of where things ended up for people. Valeria’s not mentioned at all, as opposed to what could’ve happened, all these articles about this dead actress instead of talking about the movie.

That clipping is an appropriate epilogue to the series, sounding an appropriately ambivalent note for us readers who know so much more than the movie's general audience.