Bullets: The Fade Out, Fatale, Criminal Reprints, and More!

It's been a whirlwind three weeks since the conclusion of Fatale, and so we're summarizing what we can, just before the debut of The Fade Out, in stores later today.

• The Fatale Finale Reviews and Interviews.  The aggregator site Comic Book Roundup has links to seven very positive reviews from critics for Fatale #24, and I've seen additional praise from The Outhousers, FangirlNation, and I'd Rather Be Reading Comics.  The only mixed review I've seen is from The Savage Critics; I think Abhay Khosla makes a stronger argument that the story's expanding scope may have slowed its momentum than he does that the story's conclusion is chauvinistic.

If those positive reviews aren't enough, Eat Geek Play provided a list of six reasons everyone should read Fatale, and Nothing But Comics has an essay on the title's search for redemption.

After the series finale, Ed Brubaker provided a few post-mortem interviews about the horror-noir series, at Comic Book Resources and Complex Pop Culture, with the former providing a few spoiler-heavy insights into the series that even careful readers probably missed.

(As an aside, we do hope that digital readers took advantage of the Comixology sale mentioned in the previous post, as Fatale is no longer being offered in a deeply discounted bundle.)

• The Fade Out Preview, Interviews, and Early Reviews.  It's worth reiterating from last time, that the debut issue of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' The Fade Out reaches stores today, including in an over-sized "movie magazine" variant that features an exclusive eight-page look behind the scenes.

USA Today has just published an article on the series, with a brief interview with the creators and an extended eight-page preview of the issue.  This is only the latest bit of publicity for Brubaker and the series, which has included an August 12th podcast interview with Inkstuds Radio and two August 18th interviews with Multiversity Comics and IGN.  The series' debut even made Entertainment Weekly's Must List.

We're combing all these interviews carefully to make sure we don't miss any big news, beyond the Criminal news we mention below.

In the meantime, Boing Boing provided an advance look at the magazine variant, with a few pictures of some of the exclusive content.  Broken Frontier lists The Fade Out #1 as their pick of the week, Comicosity includes it in their week's "hot five," and we've seen very positive advance reviews from Unleash The Fanboy, Comicbook.com, and Big Comic Page.

Paste Magazine also has an early review, giving the issue a grade of 9.0 out of ten and writing, "Hollywood has never looked so dark, so sinister and so seductive."

Darren Orf at Paste writes what we've known for years:  "The pair have generated so much provocative, successful work, that a Brubaker/Phillips byline might be one of the few insignias of a guaranteed good read in the comic industry."

• The Fade Out Retailer-Exclusive Variants.  Before moving on to other topics, we would like to highlight a bit of news that has flown mostly under the radar, that there are two variants to The Fade Out #1, both exclusive to the retailers that commissioned the cover artists to produce them.

(Sean Phillips tweeted that he received both variants along with his comp copies of the standard issue and the magazine variant.).

Jamie McKelvie produced the following glamorous variant cover for three retailers: Beachball Comics, Laughing Ogre, and Austin Books.

And Chip Zdarsky produced the more harrowing variant cover for DCBS.

• Heart of the Beast, On Sale Now.  In January, we reported that Dynamite Entertainment was releasing a prestige hardcover commemorating the twentieth anniversary of Heart of the Beast, written by Dean Motter and Judith Dupré, with painted watercolor artwork by Sean Phillips, who subsequently provided us with an exclusive first look at the final cover art.

We almost missed it entirely, but the hardcover went on sale last week.  CBR published a 12-page preview, and Amazon has an even more extensive preview.

• Sean Phillips' Artwork, On Exhibition in Kendal.  On Twitter, Sean Phillips has announced that his artwork is being featured in a small exhibition at the Baba Ganoush Cafe in Kendal, England, in the months leading up to the Lakes International Comics Art Festival, October 17-19.  Phillips has confirmed that the artwork will be for sale after the exhibition concludes.

• Velvet in the Times and on a T-Shirt.   In the wake of the off-beat success of Guardians of the Galaxy, The New York Times posted an article arguing that the comic book is usually better than the movie; along with three other titles, the writer recommends Brubaker's espionage comic Velvet for new readers.  The series is the focus of a Loikamania podcast interview with Brubaker published last week, and the series features heavily in Image Comics' November solicitations, released yesterday.  Along with The Fade Out #4 and Velvet #10, the month of November will see the release of a Velvet tee-shirt that "demands respect."

• Criminal Reprinted in January, Deluxe Fatale Volume 2 to be Published Later. Finally, one bit of news toward the end of yesterday's USA Today story caught my eye, and it cannot wait for a future blog post.

On the subject of Criminal, Brian Truitt reports, "Image will start re-releasing collections of the comic beginning in January."

We're about six months away from seeing Criminal back on the shelves, published by Image rather than Marvel's Icon imprint.  We'll do our best to investigate whether the new printings will differ from the Icon editions in any significant way. 

We're certainly further away from the second (and presumably final) deluxe hardcover collection of Fatale.  Although he generally doesn't comment on publishing plans until they are announced, Brubaker has tweeted to a reader that he can expect the second hardcover "At the earliest, a year or so after the final trade."  The fifth and final trade paperback collection, for "Curse the Demon," is currently scheduled for a September 24th release, so the second hardcover may be tentatively planned for the 2015 holiday season.

Regardless, next year should most and perhaps all of Brubaker and Phillips' creator-owned work in print and being published by Image Comics.

EXCLUSIVE: Final Cover Art for Heart of the Beast.

Yesterday we noted that Sean Phillips had posted a digital sketch for the cover for the 20th anniversary edition of Heart of the Beast.  A very early original graphic novel (OGN) for DC's Vertigo imprint, Heart of the Beast was a gothic romance / horror story released in 1994 and described as "set against the backdrop of New York City's decadent art world of the nineties."

The book was written by Dean Motter (Mister X, Terminal City) and Judith Dupré, the bestselling author of several books on art and architecture.  About the cover sketch, reposted below, Phillips relays that Motter is handling the book design, including the final logo.

This morning, Sean has provided us with an exclusive look at the absolutely gorgeous final cover art.

The book will be released through Dynamite Entertainment, and Sean believes the book will be out in May.

It looks like it's right up our alley, especially for fans of the horror-noir series Fatale, which Brubaker and Phillips are concluding around the same time of this book's re-release.  We'll be sure to cover Heart of the Beast in detail as the release date approaches and more information becomes available.

Bullets: Velvet in Stores, Fatale Cover Art, Criminal Movie Reference, and More.

A lot of updates, just in the span of a week.

• Velvet #3 in stores tomorrow. The latest issue of Ed Brubaker's Velvet arrives this week:  Brubaker already has his copies of Velvet #3, and a six-page preview has just been at Comicosity and Comic Book Resources.

We're honored to report that, in the letters column at the end of the last issue, Brubaker published my letter asking about whether a noir-tinged espionage story can still be optimistic in its outlook on the necessity of spying.  He noted that some spy stories are more police procedurals than noir, and while his work tends to noir, he thinks that some noir  -- like the Robert Mitchum film Out of the Past -- is optimistic about the consequences of a story that is usually very tragic for the main character.

I think that answers my question:  a spy story could affirm that the work is essential in protecting the interests of a relatively moral government while still being true to the personally destructive stories you find in noir.

I wonder if that's exactly the kind of contrast we'll see in the conclusion to Fatale: the cosmic evil's worst plans are thwarted or delayed, but only at a very steep personal cost.

Brubaker also encourages Velvet readers to check into this blog -- any newcomers here, welcome! -- as we've expanded our coverage from Criminal to quite a bit of work of Ed and Sean's.  We're not always able to cover every project as much as we should, particularly Sean's work that doesn't immediately reach the U.S. and Ed's projects for Marvel.  (I've always been more of a DC guy.)

That said, we're quite happy to cover as much work of theirs as we can, including partnerships with familiar faces like Lark, Rucka, and Cooke and especially all Brubaker-Phillips collaborations.

Whatever the work, there's a certain alchemy with the two of them that we find nowhere else.

• Heart of the Beast 20th Anniversary Edition. On the subject of other projects, last July, Dynamite Entertainment announced a 20th anniversary prestige edition of The Heart of the Beast written by Dean Motter and Judith Dupré, with painted watercolor artwork by Sean Phillips.  The gothic romance / horror story, released in 1994, was one of the earliest original graphic novels for Vertigo, about which Phillips said, "This was my first major project for an American publisher and it sank without trace twenty years ago."

We completely missed this announcement at the time, and I don't believe there have been many updates since, but, this past Saturday, Phillips posted a preliminary digital sketch of the new cover art.

He relays that this new edition will be "out in a few months."

• Fatale #24 Cover Art.  In other big news, just today Phillips posted cover art to Fatale #24, the grand finale of Brubaker and Phillips' horror-noir comic.

With The Fade Out scheduled to debut this summer, I'd expect this concluding issue to be released around June.

• Brubaker and Criminal Reference on the Big Screen. And, finally, a conversation on Twitter documented an emphatic shout-out to our favorite comic book writer and title:  in the 2012 independent comedy Stuck in Love, a character mentions Ed Brubaker as the writer of "an incredible, hard-boiled comic called Criminal," and another character is shown reading what appears to be Criminal #3, the midpoint of the debut story "Coward."

The film stars Greg Kinnear and Jennifer Connelly, it enjoyed a limited domestic release last July, and it's now available for watching at home.