30 Days of The Fade Out: Alienation and Memory.

I intended this increasingly misnamed series -- "30 Days of The Fade Out" -- to follow the pattern I set with Fatale in July, 2014, having a month-long look back at the latest series by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, concluding with the release of the series' grand finale.  Instead, a shockingly busy personal life caused this series to run just more than four months.

On the one hand, I have written more than thirty posts in this series -- by my count, this is #33 -- but, on the other hand, there are quite a few topics that I haven't really covered.

• The wonderfully complete experience in the magazine-sized variant for the debut issue.
• The possible meaning behind each chapter's title, as most titles were evidently allusions to song lyrics from the ear.
• The fascinating bonus essays written by Devin Faraci, Jess Nevins, Megan Abbott, and Ben Godar -- and, accompanying the essay in issue #10, the striking artwork of The Wizard of Oz by Sean Phillips' son Jacob.
• And, the letters pages, and the conversations they facilitated between Brubaker and his readers.

About that last subject, in issue #3, Brubaker asked readers about their favorite actor or actress from the 1940's.  I didn't write in, and I don't think anyone mentioned who I would have picked:  Mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs and Daffy and the rest of the classic Looney Tunes characters.

--

Wrapping up, I'd just like to highlight what seems to be two main themes of the story, namely alienation and memory.  Charlie Parish in particular feels alienated from his fellow man and perhaps even himself, as he runs from his own memories and even obliterates what he can in a bottle of booze.

Many of the story's characters remain opaque to the reader, sometimes frustratingly so:  Drake Miller's presence is frequently felt, but his only real dialogue is in one of Charlie's memories of the night Val died.  We learn about Earl, Melba, Tyler, and Valeria Sommers herself only through their actions and through others' descriptions.

For other characters, we're afforded a more intimate glimpse of their interior life.

• Victor Thursby feels like he lost part of himself in the hills with that hedonistic cult, and after Val's death he wonders what his life's work was for.
• Maya Silver finds herself excited at the thought of her ex-husband being beaten, and she hates herself for it, but she soon "sleeps like a baby."
• Gil Mason decides to turn against the power of the studio system because of how Brodsky intimidated and humiliated him, acting as if Gil was "just a fool pretending not to be a coward."
• And Dottie Quinn had learned in her own life about the power of secrets, how to keep them, and how the world would always rather have a good story than the honest truth.

(We even get a glimpse of Phil Brodsky, who knows he's being played by "some fucking joker" on "Hallo-fucking-ween.")

But, ultimately, The Fade Out is Charlie's story.  It begins and ends with him musing on the phantom planes during the war, and we follow the character from his discovery of Val's body to his discovery of what "maybe" happened that night.  Along the way, we see memories and movie scenes play behind him, and we see the impressionistic images of the fragments of memory from the night of Val's death. He tries to forget her death, then unearth what really happened, and finally find a way to survive the consequences of that (almost explicitly) quixotic mission.  Charlie piles one lie on top of another, and his life lurches from misery to despair as he learns the extent of his complicity in Val's death and the corrupt studio system.

Having read the series a few times and having learned the twisted and sordid context of his life -- as much as the creators tell us, explicitly and between the lines -- I find it interesting to focus on Charlie's inner life, to read through the narration text for all of Charlie's scenes.

"Charlie didn't care one way or the other about funerals.  They were just another of life's rituals that he felt removed from." 

"But after a week, Charlie began fantasizing about sneaking into the costume trailer... and becoming an invisible man himself.  He imagined it would be a relief, to have a mask everyone could see... but that made them all look away at the same time."

"Of course, it hadn't slipped Charlie's mind... he'd purposely locked away those years.  And now they were trying to break free again, like they always did..."

"But that Charlie, that young hotshot... he feels like a distant cousin now... like someone he only ever vaguely knew, at best."

"Charlie never felt more removed from humanity than he did at events like this.  The mob of screaming voices... crushing each other for an autograph..."

"Why can't he be more like her, actually appreciating the moment... instead of always being caught up in the past?"

"Not just that there's someone who truly sees you... truly understands you... to your soul... but that you event want them to.  That's the sweetest lie, the one you tell yourself."

"Charlie could only think as far as the next drink anymore... could only exist on the edge of oblivion."

We discover that Charlie's father was a junkie and that he'd seen plenty of violence from "trouble boys" in his youth, but how much could be explained by his upbringing?  We learn that he saw -- and apparently did -- terrible things during the war, and yet he always seemed to say and do the wrong thing with his ex-wife Rebecca, who left him shortly after Pearl Harbor.

How much was Charlie's life a trap of his own making?

Whatever the answer, we see his alienation with others and even himself, his running from both his past and his future, and his attraction toward vulnerable women and his simultaneous disbelief that he could be truly vulnerable with anyone else.

His is a tragic state of affairs, which too many of us probably find all too familiar, and it is this shared misery -- and the shared capacity for anguish and despair -- that connects us with Charlie Parish even as most of us will (thankfully) never find ourselves entangled in quite so terrible a crime.

Charlie's story evokes our sympathy even as it crushes our hope for him -- and perhaps it is this shared empathy, even with fictional characters as irredeemable as him, that gives us hope for ourselves.  Though I believe that the greatest hope comes from God, I also believe that, if we can turn from the comic's page to the person beside us, perhaps we can become a friend to our neighbor and find a measure of peace with ourselves.

30 Days of The Fade Out: Glimpses of the Shadow.

We noticed a pair of two-part interviews with Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, published at the conclusion of The Fade Out, and in the second part of Newsarama's interview, Brubaker commented about Shadow of the Valley, the noir movie that Victory Street Pictures was producing throughout the story.

Zack Smith asked if that film was fully plotted out, and Brubaker responded, "That one I had a loose idea of what it was, but suffice it to say, it wasn't a masterpiece."

That opinion was shared by its audience, at least going by the clipping of the movie review on the back cover of issue #12.  The review has much higher praise for its stars -- Earl Rath and his "riveting dark side;" Maya Silver and her "gravity and depth" as the character Gracie -- than for the dialogue they were given.

We're not told much about the movie itself by its (fictional) reviewer Eileen Theo, except that it was based on a short story written a "legendary" (and fictional) writer who was rediscovered in death, Jacob Thacker -- or perhaps Jacob Thakeray? -- and published by the real-world pulp magazine Black Mask.  Founded in 1920 and peaking in the early 1930's before ceasing its original publication run in 1951, the famous magazine published works by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner, and other writers of hardboiled fiction.

We don't see much of the film that Charlie was writing, either in the original cut that was being produced with Valeria Sommers or the new cut with her replacement, Maya Silver.

Here's what we know, from the first five issues.

1. The director Franz Schmitt mentions scene 74-B, apparently set in a dining car.
2. We see part of a rough cut that studio head Victor Thursby reviews:  the two main characters argue and then embrace inside a boarded-up building, as they're "too far gone" and "may die tonight;" Earl's character has his face covered in the bandages we see on the issue's cover; after that scene we see Val's version of Gracie standing, arms folded, in an empty field.
3. Maya and Earl dance during an apparent screen test; Earl isn't wearing the mask of bandages.
4. We see Gil dictating dialogue to Charlie -- "Then she says, 'You don't really think you can hide like that?'" (possibly alluding to the bandages) -- and filming takes place on a studio set that resembles a rustic log cabin (again, no bandages).
5. Location shooting takes place in Ojai, on a small-town Main Street set and in a "mountain cabin hideout;" on Main Street, an old scene is reshot with new, substandard dialogue, but the same action takes place:  Earl's character (no bandages) and Gracie enter a bank to commit armed robbery.

After issue #5, very little new information can be gleaned about the film.  In issue #9, we see fragments of a later scene in that same boarded-up building -- "Looks like they're here" -- and we learn that Earl Rath's character, now bandaged, is named Bill.  On the back cover, we see a promo photo for the film, with Gracie embracing Bill, possibly wearing a robe with his face covered in the familiar mask of bandages.

Then, in issue #12, we learn that Victor Thursby has had a personal cut of the film made, with Val's performance kept intact:  we see a single frame of the movie, Val in the foreground with bandaged Bill -- probably played by Earl's double Morty -- standing in the background, framed by the light of an open doorway.

What was this movie about?

My guess is this:

• Bill and Gracie fall in love and into a life of crime, like the real-life love-struck bank robbers Bonnie and Clyde, who were gunned down in 1934.
• After dancing in a fancy nightclub and robbing one or more banks, they escape to the country; at one point maybe they travel by train (complete with dining car), and they end up in a rustic mountain cabin.
• UPDATE: Schmitt wanted to work around Val's scenes by filming the dining car scene:  maybe Gracie wasn't on that train after all.
• Eventually, trouble catches up with the pair, and Bill's face becomes horrifically scarred, forcing him to wear a mask of bandages, which Gracie knows won't hide his identity.
• The pair are cornered in some boarded-up building; Gracie perhaps has had several opportunities to run from her life with Bill -- in the urban alley seen in issue #12 and then in the field outside the condemned building, seen in issue #2 -- but she's with him even as their pursuers arrive.

(I do wonder how much our surmises match Brubaker's working concepts.)

Like any good noir, the movie almost certainly avoids a happy ending for all involved, but is it a good movie?  That question depends less on what is being told as how the story is told, and we could never glean that from the fragments we saw in the comic.

Even before Val's death and the reshoots that it necessitated, the script was being ghostwritten by Gil Mason, and in his most honest moments even he would admit that Charlie was the better writer, at least before the war and his writer's block.  With a new actress, the new scenes were being written by a distraught and distracted Gil, who was more self-destructive than usual; if the one scene in Ojai was any indication, the new material was worse than the original script.

It makes me wonder about that private cut of Victor Thursby's.  There were still at least eleven days of shooting left in the original production schedule but was a more-or-less complete story told in the edit of the incomplete footage shot with Val Sommers, along with any non-Maya scenes filmed after her death?  With the original script and her apparently transcendent performance, perhaps this cut ended up even better than what was released to theaters.

If that cut ever escaped Thursby's private possession, perhaps it might have become a cult hit in Hollywood screening rooms and then become a critical success when it was released decades later:  it could be like the 1998 edit of Orson Welles' 1958 noir Touch of Evil, which received wide acclaim for approximating the writer and director's wishes as expressed in an early memo to the studio.

It certainly wouldn't atone for Val Staples' murder, and presumably the cover-up is never disturbed, but the existence of Thursby's film points to the possibility of a very thin silver lining for a very dark cloud.

30 Days of The Fade Out: One Possible Glitch in Continuity.

After our fourth or fifth read-through of the comic, we've stumbled across what may be a continuity error in The Fade Out -- a minor glitch in the backstory, fortunately nothing central to the main story's murder and cover-up.

It's hardly worth mentioning, but in our wrap-up of our lengthy look at the series, we do want to take a moment to document what we've discovered.

In Charlie's encounter with Drake Miller -- both the apparently imagined talk in the Formosa bathroom in issue #7 and their actual conversation in Val's kitchen, recalled in issue #11 -- the produce and FBI plant tells Charlie that At the End remains one of his favorite pictures, and that it would have had a best-writing Oscar "in the bag" if he hadn't gone up against Citizen Kane.

The chronology that's established in issue #9 doesn't quite add up: in an extended flashback explaining their "shared spiral down the booze-hole," we find out that Charlie and Gil got in trouble with the mob on the night of Charlie's Oscar nomination.

"They barely spoke the rest of that year... until Pearl Harbor.

"Holding a grudge felt petty in the face of war..."

Orson Welles' Citizen Kane was released in 1941, and it was awarded Best Writing (Original Screenplay) at the 1941 Academy Awards.

The problem is, the 1941 Academy Award nominations were announced on February 9, 1942 (see footnotes), with the awards given out on February 26, 1942 -- both more than two months AFTER the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941.

Somewhat famously, Stephen King's first Hard Case Crime book, The Colorado Kid, had a seeming continuity error that was surprising for a carefully plotted and confounding murder mystery:  Starbucks Coffee was mentioned as present in Denver in 1980, which was historically inaccurate.  Responding to a review in USA Today, King wrote that Dark Tower readers might find that the detail was a clue rather than an error, and the comment seems to point to parallel universes.

Perhaps this dilemma could be explained the same way, that we're reading a story set in a universe that's not quite our own.  Beyond the existence of Victory Street Pictures, the people who worked with the studio, and the films they produced, the universe of The Fade Out differs in that the 1941 Oscar nominations were announced prior to Pearl Harbor.

...or, perhaps more simply, Charlie Parish was nominated for two consecutive Best Writing Oscars, first for an unnamed film released in 1940, then for At the End, released in 1941.

The problem could be addressed in subsequent printings of the book -- maybe the big news could be changed to some important reviewer's declaration that Charlie's film was the movie of the year, published upon the film's release and prior to Pearl Harbor -- but it wouldn't bother us if this hiccup remained.

After all, plenty of great works have their tiny flaws, including Citizen Kane.

30 Days of The Fade Out: Setting the Scene.

In The Fade Out, fictional characters are producing a fictional movie for a fictional studio, but their story is set in the very real world of Hollywood's Golden Age, specifically the fall of 1948 with its backdrop of the blacklist and big band music, movie-story magazines and stars coming home from the war.



Hollywood Memorial Cemetery

Familiar locales end up appearing quite often in the story.  We recognized the Brown Derby in the debut issue, and we surmised that many of the other settings were historical. 

Rereading the first eleven issues just before the finale was released, we found that the series seemed to evoke every major historical site except the Griffith Observatory and the Chinese Theater -- and the latter ended up in the last issue, for the movie's big premiere.

A map or travel guide to The Fade Out would be a fascinating thing, but it's more than we can provide in this humble blog.  Instead, we hope it's enough to point our readers in the right direction, with a list of locations that includes Wikipedia links and -- in brackets -- the issue numbers in which each location makes its first appearance or a significant subsequent appearance, either being shown or referenced.

Hollywood Brown Derby

We found that the Los Angeles Times has an excellent interactive map of modern-day Los Angeles county, which divides its 272 neighborhoods and 4,000 square miles -- a huge area, half the size of Wales -- into sixteen regions.  We'll use those regions to organize the locations found within the world of The Fade Out; we'll list those regions by proximity to central Los Angeles, and we'll alphabetize each neighborhood within a region.

• Los Angeles County, California (neighborhood map)
• Central LA
• Downtown (Wikipedia)
• Angel Flights incline or funicular railway in the Bunker Hill district - evidently next to Charlie's apartment; in operation in its original location from 1901 to 1969; compare Phillips' artwork with this image on a webpage about the railway [1]
• The Bunker Hill district - location of Stevie Turner's house, from which he ran a photography lab; since his house was on "the other side of Bunker Hill,' it was presumably north of Clifton's Brookdale and Charlie's apartment near Angel Flights [4]
• Clifton's Brookdale - cafeteria in Downtown LA, where Charlie sobered up over coffee before finding that Stevie Turner had died, supposedly in a house fire; this second location of a chain of eight restaurants opened in 1935, was renamed from "Clifton's Cafeteria" in 1939, and is the only location still in operation [4]
• Elysian Park (Wikipedia) - a neighborhood north of Downtown LA that encompasses Chavez Ravine, which held three poor but socially cohesive Mexican communities in the 1940s, named La Loma, Palo Verde, and Bishop; Maya told her ex-husband Armando to go find a fight "somewhere in Chavez," and she later hid Charlie at her mother's house in Chavez Ravine, "the Mexican part of town;" Dodger Stadium opened in there in 1962 and is sometimes called Chavez Ravine [3,12] 
• Hollywood (Wikipedia) - northwest of Downtown LA
• The Broadway-Hollywood building - among other possibly famous signs, Charlie walks past the building's famous neon sign in the comic's last panel; built in 1927 at the intersection of Hollywood and Vine, the building housed The Broadway department store from 1931 through the 1970s, and the building now houses loft condominiums [12]
• Grauman's Chinese Theatre - location of the star-studded premiere of Shadow of the Valley, attended by Charlie, Maya, Earl, Tyler, and Brodsky; opening in 1922 and now called TCL Chinese Theatre after the Chinese electronics corporation, the iconic theatre also features celebrity footprints [12]
• Hollywood Brown Derby - evident location of Gil's encounter with Bob Hope; built in 1929 and closed after a fire in 1987; compare Sean Phillips' artwork of the restaurant with this Wikipedia image [1]
• Hollywood Memorial Cemetery - evident location of Val Staples' burial; the only cemetery in Hollywood, it was founded in 1899 and renamed the "Hollywood Forever Cemetery" around 1998; The New York Times has an interesting article on the cemetery, published in '98, and the image in a website about hauntings may have been the reference image Phillips used at the beginning of the burial scene [2]
• The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel - Brodsky staked out the hotel lobby on Halloween night, waiting in vain to catch Thursby's blackmailer; located across from the Chinese Theatre, this fixture of Hollywood lore opened in 1927 and remains in operation today [8]
• La Brea Avenue - a prominent thoroughfare that runs through Hollywood, Gil tailed Thursby to "a side street off La Brea," arriving at the original Victory Street offices; Charlie Chaplin Studios is in Hollywood on La Brea, just south of Sunset Boulevard, and it is now the home of The Jim Henson Company [9]
• Musso & Frank Grill - Site of an informal meeting organized by Dashiell Hammett, to raise money for victims of the Hollywood blacklist; Gil would find Sam Hammett there, to ask him for "hypothetical" advice about investigating Val's murder; founded in 1919 as "Francois," the restaurant adopted its more famous name in 1923, and it remains in operation today, maintaining its traditional décor and steakhouse menu [6]
• Hollywood Hills (Wikipedia) - evident location of Earl Rath's estate [1] 
• Hollywood Sign - visible from Earl's place; built in 1923 and facing south, it still displayed "Hollywoodland" until 1949; note the brief mention of Peg Entwhistle in the Wikipedia article
• Koreatown (Wikipedia) - between Downtown LA and Hollywood, known as part of Mid-Wilshire (Wikipedia) before attracting South Korean immigrants in the 1960s
• Ambassador Hotel - home of the Cocoanut Grove nightclub, where Tyler Graves and Maya Silver had their first public dinner date before heading to Ciro's; in operation from 1921 to 1989, and the site of the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy; compare Phillips' artwork of the nightclub's entrance to the door and sign visible in this photograph, from a webpage about the hotel [4]
• West Hollywood (Wikipedia) - home of the Sunset Strip
• Ciro's - scene of Dottie's PR stunt, with Tyler Graves punching a hired drunk while on a date with Maya Silver; a well-known nightclub in operation from 1940 to 1957, described as "one of 'the' places to be seen and guaranteed being written about in the gossip columns of Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons and Florabel Muir" [4]
• Formosa Café - restaurant and bar where Charlie waited for Maya, got in a fight, and seemingly encountered Drake Miller -- in reality, he met Tina, who left him a note about how they needed to talk; the café was founded in 1925 and is still in operation; Sinatra was reputed to be a frequent patron in the 1950s while he pined over Ava Gardner [7]
• The San Fernando Valley (Wikipedia) - Franz Schmitt held a pro forma casting call to replace Valeria Sommers, evidently asking for every attractive young actress "in the valley" [3]
• Studio City (Wikipedia) - location of Val Sommers' bungalow, which was within walking distance of Earl Rath's house and "only a mile" to the studio lot of Victory Street Pictures [1]
• The Westside 
• Santa Monica (Wikipedia) - probable beach where Brodsky's men burned evidence from the original Victory Street offices, likely due to its proximity; the famous Santa Monica Pier is less than ten miles from the Charlie Chaplin Studios on La Brea [9]
• The Verdugos - named for the Verdugo Mountains, a small, rugged mountain rang
• Pasadena (Wikipedia) - Val Sommers' hometown; Maya Silver evidently won Junior Miss Pasadena; incorporated in 1886, only the second city incorporated in the county, after Los Angeles in 1850 [2,3]
• Santa Monica Mountains (Wikipedia)
  • Malibu (Wikipedia) - city near the southwest corner of the county, close to Val Staples' beachfront hideaway; the house is described as "up the road from Malibu" and "north of Malibu," but here the coast runs east-west, so the house is probably west of the city, on the unincorporated coast or even in Ventura County [7,11]
• Northwest County
• Unincorporated Santa Susana Mountains - part of the Santa Susana Mountains, which span Los Angeles County and Ventura County; in these mountains was Harmony Hamlet, a camp for the Divine Order of the Great Eleven, where Victor Thursby stayed for a few weeks in the fall of 1928 [3]

• Ventura County, California (maps, Adobe Flash map, the entire county is visible in the LA Times map)
• Ojai (Wikipedia) - site of Al Kamp's ranch; the production moved "north to Ojai," but the idyllic city is more accurately about 75 miles northwest of Hollywood, nestled against the Los Padres National Forest which dominates the northern half of Ventura County [5]

Cocoanut Grove, the Ambassador Hotel

Locations outside of southern California are also mentioned in the story, most notably Pearl Harbor, England, France, and Germany because of World War II.  In issue #8, Tina tells Charlie that she's leaving for a gig in Atlantic City, and we learn about Charlie's familiarity with heroin abuse growing up in Kansas City.  At the story's conclusion, we learn that Drake Miller has been recalled to back east, ostensibly to find "Commies on Broadway."

Not all local scenes are so easily identified as what we list above.  I don't believe we're ever given any strong indication of where Gil lived or where Charlie and Maya saw the Desi Arnaz Orchestra perform.  We see Charlie pass a Ralphs supermarket, but I couldn't pin down the specific location, and we see the nightclub where Charlie and Gil ran afoul of gangster Bugsy Seigel, but that club's identity isn't made clear.

Angel Flights, Bunker Hill District

Even without a comprehensive list, we can see the grand sweep of the story in its real-world locations.  Less than ten miles separate the mansions of the Hollywood Hills and the shacks of Chavez Ravine, but they're worlds apart in terms of wealth, if not in their capacity for depravity and corruption.

30 Days of The Fade Out: Tomorrow, When the World is Free.

Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' sweeping tale of murder and deception in postwar Hollywood concluded with The Fade Out #12, released on January 6th after a three-page review.  The issue was received to wide acclaim and the best reviews for the series, with ten critics awarding an average score of 9.6 on a 10-point scale.  The issue ends by calling back to the story's very first scene, and in the meantime the most prominent loose ends are tied up.

The Movie.  Readers had left behind the film's production with its wrap party in issue #10, and in the following issue, Victory Street co-founder Al Kamp was found dead in his compound. "Six Weeks Later," and the film is being released just in time for the Christmas holidays.  Costars Earl Rath and Maya Silver attended the premiere, the latter being escorted by her studio colleague and new fiance, Tyler Graves.  Going by the clipping of the review on the issue's back cover, their performances were more warmly received than the writing for Shadow of the Valley.

The Murder.  That mixed review was understandable, as the film's ostensible writer and its real writer were more than distracted by the murder of Val Staples and the subsequent cover-up.  Following the disastrous trip to Kamp's compound, Charlie called Maya and hid at her mother's house, leaving Gil's body in the car parked outside.  Seeking some kind of catharsis -- revenge instead of justice -- Charlie decides to kill Drake Miller, only to find that he's been recalled by the Feds.  Broken and close to suicide, Charlie returns to the house in the slums, only to find that Maya has called Brodsky.  He helps "clean up" Charlie's mess, and after the premiere, he relents and tells Charlie what "maybe" happened on the night of Val's death:  Drake Miller pressed her for any kind of dirt on anyone she knew, and he murdered her in the rage triggered by her refusal to cooperate.  We end the story with Charlie's crushing realization that Val died trying to protect his secret partnership with his blacklisted ghostwriter:  her integrity and his dishonesty both contributed to her death.

Brubaker and Phillips keeps giving us tragic endings that are suitable for their noir tales but surprising in their resolution:  Charlie Parish lives, finding a way to resume writing and ending up with a woman he loves -- as much as he can love anyone else -- but his ending is anything but happy.

Val Sommers, Stevie Turner, Al Kamp, and Gil Mason are dead, and their deaths have proven to be meaningless:  the show must go on, and the corrupt industry -- a cesspool of abuse, intimidation, deception, and outright murder -- has paid no price for the lives it destroyed.  Trying to hide his own deceit, the story's protagonist has become an accessory to the murder and cover-up, seemingly unable (and unwilling) to escape the evil for which he has now become a deliberate participant.

Questions still remain.

What happened to Charlie during the war?  In the previous issue, we learned that what happened in Germany was one of his "pathetic secrets," and here Brodsky says that he read Charlie's file and concluded that the writer is a "realist" who recognizes that justice is a fairy tale.  It sounds like Charlie wasn't just generally traumatized by what he saw, he was compromised by what he did, perhaps an act of cowardice or some kind of self-serving betrayal.

Why was Val's underwear on the floor when she died?  Here, too, we can piece together what we know and hazard a guess.  Perhaps Drake Miller tried to force himself on her, or perhaps she tried to offer herself instead of betraying any of her friends, but -- assuming Brodsky's hypothetical recounting was accurate if not complete -- whatever happened wasn't enough to quell Miller's rage and save her life.

Beyond answers to these open questions, what isn't shown is as intriguing as what we do see.

After Charlie's confrontation during the wrap party, we never see Earl Rath again.  He's mentioned as being present at the premiere, asking for Charlie, but Charlie doesn't see him, and neither do we.  And the back-cover review mentions his revelatory performance, but the picture is of Maya, not Earl.  Maybe he was trying to mend fences after Charlie's mistaken insinuation that he was involved with Val's murder -- he seemed genuinely hurt -- but perhaps Charlie is never again in the orbit of the star and playboy.

And we don't ever see Charlie fully realize his flaws.  Maya wonders if he ever really sees her, after she made herself vulnerable revealing her family background, and we learn that "part of him" does, but Charlie still thinks his problem is that "he'd lost the ability to imagine what happened next."

That is part of it, but only part of it and -- I believe -- not even the biggest part of the problem.  It's not just that he couldn't foresee consequences, it's that he couldn't relate to others.  In avoiding painful memories, he lost both the ability to predict and the ability to empathize; losing one made him foolish, losing the other made him self-centered.

Looking beyond Charlie's arc, we do find that this closing chapter doesn't just give us holes to ponder:  the story isn't just his story, it's the story of Valeria Sommers, and we're shown much more than a (possible?) flashback of her murder.

We see Charlie imagine Val on the red carpet for her film's premiere. We see Victor Thursby watching a personal cut of Shadow of the Valley, with its original actress.

We see the effect her death had on the people who knew her -- and we see glimpses of what might have been.

30 Days of The Fade Out: Anyone Else But Me.

The penultimate issue of Brubaker and Phillips' Hollywood noir was released on November 25, 2015, following a three-page preview.  Being a Glenn Miller fan, I immediately recognized this chapter's title from that quintessential wartime song, "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree (with Anyone Else but Me)."  In the letters page to issue #12, Brubaker subsequently relayed that "most of our chapter titles" were taken from the lyrics of songs from the 1940's:  we haven't yet attempted a complete list of song references.

As with issue #9, this chapter follows hot on the heels of the previous chapter, this time as the story careens toward its tragic finale.

The Movie.  There are no further developments with Shadow of the Valley, whose development recedes to the background as we focus on more murder and mayhem.

The Murder. Charlie and Gil drive to Ojai in the middle of the night, formulating a half-baked plan to get to the bottom of the murder and cover-up by abducting and interrogating studio co-founder Al Kamp. When they arrive, they find his screening room cleaned of almost everything, and they find Kamp himself dead in the bathtub, evidently murdered.  A mysterious armed man finds the pair, who escape the compound, but not before Gil is fatally wounded.

Who was the mysterious man at Kamp's mansion?  Was he with the Feds or with Brodsky?   We never get an explicit confirmation, much less a name, but the man appears to be one of the henchmen who meets with Brodsky in issue #9, who he sends to destroy incriminating documents from the original Victory Street offices.  In the course of the series, we find that Brodsky and his team are responsible for the entire cover-up operation, after Val's murder and Gil's provocations.

En route to the Kamp compound, Charlie and Gil talk things over in a rural diner, in a scene that reminds us of a scene (or two) in the first Criminal arc, "Coward."  Charlie mentions a fateful conversation he had with Val, about a week before her murder, and he's only now recalling everything after talking with Dottie about Drake Miller at the end of the previous issue.  It doesn't speak highly of our protagonist that he is so self-absorbed and his memory is so (deliberately) murky that he doesn't think of this conversation sooner.

It's also not to Charlie's credit that the house in that flashback is so familiar:  Val's hiding spot in Malibu was where he took Maya for their tryst in issue #7.

Leaving the diner, Gil mentions that Charlie has "three theories, and they're all full of maybes."  It appears that these are his suppositions:

1. Drake Miller was leaning on Val, which explains why she was so distraught in Malibu. 
2. Miller was also leaning on the studio, which explains why an FBI front man was able to pose as a producer on the studio lot. 
3. Gil is right, that Miller, Kamp, and Val's murder are "all tied together, somehow."

In the final issue, we discover that Charlie came close to the truth, but he missed a key detail that proves to be devastating.

Finally, in the halls of Kamp's mansion, Charlie has another flashback, suddenly recalling another blackout moment, seemingly from the kitchen in Val's bungalow on the night of her murder.  In both the dialogue and in how the panels are framed, his conversation with Drake Miller is an obviously deliberate reiteration of Charlie's conversation with Miller at the end of issue #7 -- and that casts very serious doubt on Charlie, on the reliability of his memory and even his experiences.

At this point, readers might still be tempted to consider Charlie to be the prime suspect in Val's murder.  We discover soon enough that he's innocent of her death but guilty of other, soul-wrenching moral compromises.

30 Days of The Fade Out: Where Angels Fear to Tread.

(...and, we're back.)

Released on October 21, 2015, following a five-page preview, The Fade Out #10 marks a long-expected turning point in the story, in which Charlie and Gil finally work together to get to the bottom of the murder and cover-up.

The Movie. Filming has completed for Shadow of the Valley, and as the film moves to post-production, the cast and crew celebrate with a wrap party, evidently at a studio facsimile of the "mountain cabin hideout" at Al Kamp's old ranch.  The production had left Ojai early because of Tyler Graves' car accident: not part of this film's production, Graves is still a Victory Street contract player, so the studio ordered them to wrap the location shoot early.  That last day at Ojai, the director Franz Schmitt had gotten in an argument with the writer Charlie Parish -- Charlie had stonewalled to cover for his missing ghostwriter Gil -- and the old man got payback at the wrap party, starting and winning a one-sided fist fight with Charlie.

The Murder. Determined to learn more about Val's murder before confronting the studio bosses about the subsequent cover-up, Charlie convinces Gil to call Phil Brodsky and clear out his office with the continued threat of blackmail.  As the fight with Schmitt gave him a solid excuse to leave the wrap party, Charlie has an unexpected opportunity to confront Earl Rath -- an apparent mistake -- and he then searches Brodsky's office.  He stumbles across the security chief's thin file on Drake Miller and is then caught by Dottie Quinn.  He explains himself to Dottie, who tries and fails to convince him to drop the whole issue:  he picks up Gil, and the pair head off to Ojai and Al Kamp.

We learn an awful lot in this issue.

• In Brodsky's file on Drake Miller, we find a photo of the group that left Earl's party for Val's bungalo -- presumably taken by Stevie Turner, since murdered as part of the cover-up -- and an innocuous head shot of Val Sommers, when she was young Jenny Summers, a child actor in the Krazy Kids films.
• Dottie Quinn confirms that Drake Miller is working for the Feds, blackmailing people while hunting Communists.
• Dottie also confirms that she was lying when she said, in issue #6, that she didn't recognize the description of Drake Miller.
• And, we find out that Charlie cannot apparently remember what happened with Maya Silver on Halloween night just a few short days before:  shockingly, he doesn't remember helping her find her strung-out ex-husband. 

And, I believe this is the last time we see Earl Rath in this story.

One of the recurring complaints of modern comic books is decompression, telling too little story in each issue.  For too many publishers, the cover price keeps going up, the page count keeps going down, and the number of incidents in an issue continues to shrink.

That's certainly not the case with the comics by Brubaker and Phillips:  each issue is quite dense, and the benefits (and often the necessity) of rereading the book means that it's one of the best values at the local comic shop.  But, for The Fade Out in particular, the story takes its time as we explore the large cast of psychologically complex characters and vignettes that capture the corruption of Hollywood's own Gilded Age.

In the series' debut issue, Val Sommers is murdered and the crime is covered up as a suicide, and Charlie Parish tells his writing partner Gil Mason.  It takes until issue #6 for Gil to talk with Dashiell Hammett and begin provoking the studio's co-founder Victor Thursby.  Now, in issue #10, Gil and Charlie have finally teamed up -- and this is about the closest they get to classic detective work.

30 Days of The Fade Out: Living in a Memory.

The Fade Out #9 was released September 16, 2015, following a four-page preview, and it marks a turning point in the series' pacing.  The main plot in each issue tends to cover a quite compact span of time, but there tends to be a larger passage of time between each issue -- from the film's halted production in issue #1, to the review of the current cut of the film in issue #2, to the more-or-less pro forma auditions in issue #3, etc.

But here, the plot picks up immediately from the cliffhanger revelation at the end of the previous issue:  just enough time has passed for Charlie to leave his apartment to drive to his ex-wife's house, later that same Halloween night when he went trick-or-treating with Gil's family and attended the Victory Street party on the studio lot.

It's a common approach to time in storytelling: as the tension ratchets up, time becomes compressed.

(This is probably why so many in the audience were thrown off by the pacing in The Dark Knight Rises.  The scope of Nolan's film expanded to a kind of modern-day riff on the French Revolution and its Reign of Terror, so days and weeks were passing when the viewer was probably expecting only the passage of hours.  The sequential chronology from scene to scene in the movie's conclusion actually does add up, but it doesn't feel that way.)

But for those readers of The Fade Out who wait for the trades, this change in pacing will probably be felt even more strongly, as the beginning of Act Three follows very hot on the heels of the end of Act Two.

The Movie.  The Victory Street Halloween party probably continued well into the night, but presumably no real progress was made on the film's production, as the main narrative takes place over a single night.

The Murder.  Understandably terrified by the realization that Gil is evidently blackmailing Thursby, and that Brodsky's men may soon come down hard on the both of them, Charlie retrieves his military-issued pistol and waits in his apartment, where he and Gil do their work writing.  When Gil shows up, Charlie confronts him and starts a long-overdue fist fight, and he learns what Gil has really been up to.  "Rattling the cages," Gil follows Thursby to the studio's original offices, and that Halloween night, he had just followed Brodsky's men and snatched one of the envelopes of sordid photos that they retrieved from the offices and were destroying at the beach.  Knowing that it's a terrible idea, Charlie still decides to help Gil solve the murder "even if it gets us both killed."

Gil's explanation fills in the gaps of what he's been doing since just after the end of issue #6, when he sent the first blackmail note to Victor Thursby. Assuming that each scene in the "main narrative" is really sequential, he presumably went trick-or-treating in issue #7 after stealing the incriminating photos from Brodsky's men.  He and Charlie were together with Gil's family, so he had a chance to tell him about the photos, but he had already determined to act alone in his almost explicitly quixotic pursuit of justice.

Gil had typed the blackmail notes in Charlie's apartment, so maybe he returned there late that night to review his progress, plot his next move, and compose his next note.  Maybe he told Melba he was going to work with Charlie, but he clearly didn't expect him in on the night of the studio's big party.  But Charlie had found his draft blackmail letters and was waiting to confront his friend and partner.

On the technical side of things, this issue gives a kind of master class on how to provide flashbacks without losing the reader; we still want to dig up our back issues of Duncan Rouleau's 2007 Metal Men mini-series to try to make heads or tails of its time-bending and mind-bending presentation.

There seem to be at least three rules that Brubaker follows:

1. You can have multiple flashbacks in series, even in a single issue as we see here, but you should avoid the nesting-dolls structure of flashbacks within flashbacks.
2. Within each flashback, each event should occur chronologically, not out-of-sequence, even if -- as is the case here -- the series of flashbacks cover events that must be shuffled together.
3. Within each flashback, present all the scenes from a single character's point of view, relaying his thoughts and perspective even if the story uses an omniscient third-person narration.

Here's the issue's structure, page by page:

• 1-3, Charlie retrieves his service pistol from his old house, still occupied by his ex-wife Rebecca and evidently her husband Fred Franklin
• 3, flashback to Rebecca visiting Charlie recovering from the war
• 4-8, Charlie returns to his apartment -- the reader is shown parts a scene from the film Shadow of the Valley -- and he picks a fight with Gil
• 8-12, flashback to Gil's time in Hollywood, from his arrival and his meeting Charlie to their being coerced into an exclusive seven-year contract with Victory Street
• 12-13, two panels of Charlie and Gil fighting, with Gil fighting back
• 13-17, flashback to more of Charlie's experiences during the war: his reconciliation with Gil after Pearl Harbor, his living with Gil and Melba after being discharged from the army hospital, and his watching Gil unravel, culminating with his self-destructive testimony before a House committee
• 18-19, gathering themselves at the end of the fistfight, Gil shows Charlie the photos he was carrying and begins to explain himself
• 19-21, Gil narrates a flashback of his trailing Thursby following his first note
• 21, Charlie asks whether Gil broke into the studio's original offices, now used primarily for storage
• 22-23, Gil narrates a flashback of his trailing Brodsky's men following his second note, resulting in his stealing some photographs before they were incinerated
• 24-26, Charlie explains that he hasn't given up, and he decides to help Charlie get to the bottom of the murder and cover-up

(That House committee was presumably the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was a permanent committee from 1945 to 1975.  Nine days of hearings in 1947 led to the blacklisting of the Hollywood Ten and other artists.  We see part of presumably the same hearing in flashback in issue #2, where we learned, "Gil had been one of the first to be blacklisted after the Hollywood Ten.")

The issue presents series of five flashbacks across 21 pages, almost all in chronological order -- the first brief flashback takes place between the second and third -- and covering the writers' time before The Fade Out and Gil's actions after issue #6.  None of the chronology is unclear, and we find every revelation to be riveting, even if we don't ever quite learn Charlie's experiences during the war, exactly what he saw and what injuries he sustained.

Along the way, we discover more and more about Charlie and Gil.

Charlie suffers from an explicit survivor's guilt, and it emphasizes the point Ed Brubaker made in one of the recent interviews, that the character is "trapped by his tragedies," keeping on because he has to.

"Would he even be able to pull the trigger if they came for him?

"Was he that much of a survivor...?"

Just a couple pages later, we learn that, early in his Hollywood career, Gil was tasked with rewriting an evidently fictional screenplay An American at Cambridge, already revised by F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1937: neither would get credit for their work upon its release.

Here we learn that Fitzgerald was Gil's favorite author, and way back in issue #5, we find Gil thinking that the famous author was right when he said, "The rich were different than us."  It appears he slightly misquoted one of Fitzgerald's most famous paragraphs from the short story "The Rich Boy,"  originally published in 1926.

"Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves."

Gil then thinks to himself, "But they end just like the rest of us, sitting in their own piss, wondering where all their time went."

Fitzgerald really was a Hollywood screenwriter, working exclusively for MGM between 1937 and 1939, where he received no screen credit for work on Madame Curie and an unfilmed draft for Gone with the Wind.

It couldn't have helped Gil's grudge against Hollywood's powers-that-be, that he and his favorite writer suffered the same indignities.  Fitzgerald died in 1940, mocking himself as a Hollywood hack, and Gil was on his way to his own fate.

30 Days of The Fade Out: A Dead Giveaway.

Thanks to shipping delays, issue #8 of The Fade Out reached some stores on August 5th and was available in all stores by August 12th, all preceded by a three-page preview.

"Act Two" of the story concludes with a closer look at Brodsky's investigation into the threat of blackmail -- and Charlie's discovery of how Gil has been spending his time.

The Movie.  A month after the death of its star Val Sommers, Victory Street Pictures throws its annual Halloween party on the studio lot.  We find out that Schmitt should hit the wrap date on Shadow of the Valley, because being late isn't an option.

The Murder. Gil has sent another anonymous note, this time demanding an implausibly small amount of only $1000, and Thursby sends Brodsky on the wild goose chase to discover the blackmailer.  At the studio's Halloween party, Charlie is found by the woman who left the mysterious note at the end of the last issue: Tina the dancer ("Or was she a singer?").  On her way out of town, she tells Charlie that Brodsky had leaned on her about her leaving Earl's party with Val on the night of her death -- he wanted to know who she was with, and it's clear to readers that he also wanted to see if she was the blackmailer.  Charlie wonders why Brodsky is asking questions so long after Val's death, and he discovers the answer when he finds the mistyped drafts of Gil's blackmail note.

In the first issue, we see a group of five people who left Earl's party for the long walk to Val's Studio City bungalow -- two women, three men, none identifiable.  We know right away that Charlie and Val are in the group, and in the last issue Charlie learns that his mystery man is the producer Drake Miller.

Here, Tina provides the first comprehensive list of the people leaving the party, albeit a frustratingly vague list.

"Brodsky was asking about Val?"

"Yeah, he knew that I left the party with her that night..."

--

"Listen, Tina,... I'm actually a bit foggy on that night... Who else **did** we leave with?"

"It was your movie star friend, and some producer... and some other guy I didn't know."

That gives us six people, not five.

1. Val Sommers
2. Tina the dancer/singer
3. Charlie Parish
4. Charlie's movie star friend: he asks if she means Earl, and Tina moves on to the subject of Charlie's drunkenness, but we learn in issue #10 that his friend was Tyler Graves, not Earl Rath.
5. A producer, who we now know is Drake Miller
6. "Some other guy" that Tina didn't recognize

When we see the photograph of the group in issue #10, we're back to that group of five people --- two women, three men -- so presumably the "other guy" was the man behind the camera, who we surmise to be the recently deceased photographer Stevie Turner.

--

One other thing worth mentioning is a plot point not directly affecting either the production of Charlie's movie or the mystery of Val's murder:  Charlie and Maya's rescuing her ex-husband Armando Lopez from a "shooting gallery" heroin den.

This is the second straight issue where considerable time is spent bringing some conclusion to the story of a character who is (presumably) incidental to the central narrative.  In the last issue, we see that Tyler Graves had survived his accident and resigned himself to the studio's control, and here we see the cataclysmic effects of Armando being beaten by Brodsky and his goons.  His mouth evidently so broken that he could no longer play the trumpet, he became lost in drug addiction.

Maya's ex-husband and the man pretending to be her boyfriend:  their stories may not be essential to the main plot, but I think they're important to the overall work.  I'm reminded of Michael Mann's Heat, where time is spent to flesh out secondary characters.

In both that movie and this comic book series, the vignettes add to the story being told, echoing or commenting on the main themes.  With Tyler and now Armando, we see the very high personal costs of those living in the shadow of Hollywood's corrupt power structures.

30 Days of The Fade Out: The Sound of Waves.

The Fade Out #7 was released on June 24th, 2015, following a five-page preview.  The issue focuses on Charlie Parish spending time away from the studios of Victory Street Pictures -- and continuing to run from the murder and cover-up of Val Sommers.

The Movie. Production continues back on the studio lot, where Charlie and Maya exchange meaningful glances and plan for a weekend tryst.  Their getaway ends when Maya returns for a PR appearance alongside Tyler Graves, recovering from his car wreck and the subsequent plastic surgery.

The Murder. Taking Maya to Val's old hiding spot in Malibu, Charlie imagines a conversation with her ghost, apologizing for running from his complicity in the cover-up, and back in the city, he gets in a bar fight and has a strange encounter with Drake Miller:  getting picked up by Maya, he expects to find Miller's business card in his pocket, and instead he finds a cryptic, handwritten note signed "Tina."

...and, interestingly, Dottie tells the recovering Tyler that Brodsky has been "off on some secret job for the boss man [Thursby] all week," presumably looking into the anonymous note that Gil left him at the end of the last issue.

It's clear that a major theme for the story is man's primal need for relationships -- for visibility, for transparency, and for a genuine connection with at least one other person.  Charlie is at war with himself, with the desire to disappear made tangible in his daydream about wearing the bandaged disguise of his "own" film's protagonist, but the need to connect drawing him to one woman after another -- to Melba, to Val, presumably to Dottie during one of his drunken blackouts, and now to Maya.

"Charlie had always been a sucker for this part... the first days.

"The days when you let yourself believe the lies...

"Not just that there's someone who truly sees you...

"Truly understands you... to your soul...

"...but that you even want them to.

"That's the sweetest lie.  The one you tell yourself."

Charlie wants to be truly visible, but he wants to hide as well, and it seems he doubts that either option is really viable.

30 Days of The Fade Out: To Set the World on Fire.

Issue #6 of the Hollywoodland noir comic was released on May 20th, 2015, preceded by a five-page preview and received to positive reviews. The plot thickens as Charlie falls for Maya Silver and Gil begins to "rattle the cages," as the hero would put it in *Batman Begins*.

The Movie.  Following the nearby auto accident of one of Victory Street's contract actors, the location shoot for Shadow of the Valley is cut short, and the cast and crew return from their brief stay in Ojai.  Maya Silver continues her publicity appearances by attending the premiere of a movie in which she has a small part, and she's escorted by Charlie Parish instead of the injured Tyler Graves.

The Murder. Remembering the mystery man from the night of Val's murder and the strange confrontation between Val and Al Kamp in Ojai, Charlie begins to ask questions:  Dottie tells him, probably dishonestly (as we learn later), that the description of the probable producer doesn't ring any bells, but Flapjack Jones hints at sordid parties in Ojai that a young Val Sommers had to attend as a child star.  Meanwhile, Gil asks questions of his own, picking the brain of mystery writer Dashiell Hammett about what a detective would do -- hypothetically -- in Gil's situation; ignoring Hammett's clear warnings about playing such a dangerous game in real life, Gil sends Victor Thursby an anonymous letter saying he knows what really happened to Val and intimating blackmail.

[UPDATE, 1/24:  In our review of issue #10, we see that Dottie did explicitly confirm that she lied about not recognizing Drake Miller by his description.]

Intensified by the stress of knowing about Val's murder and subsequent cover-up, Charlie and Gil's fatal flaws drive the two to isolation.  Worried to the point of paranoia, Charlie doesn't tell Gil about his recalled memory of the man we know to be Drake Miller, and Gil then misinterprets Charlie's silence as a surrender.  He thinks Charlie's given up, so he's taking matters in his own hands.

The narration mentions an interesting, ongoing argument between Charlie and Gil, both chronic drunks, about the effects of alcohol.  Does it remove a person's judgment, his memories, or his inhibitions?  Does it make him a fool, an amnesiac, or a man of action?

It's commendable that the series doesn't just include booze as window dressing.  It shows that, for many pathologies, alcohol adds fuel to the fire.

30 Days of The Fade Out: The Broken Ones.

The Fade Out #5 was released on April 15th, 2015, after a brief hiatus for the Criminal Special Edition one-shot released toward the beginning of the year.  Following a three-page preview, the issue was well received with critics awarding an average score of (another) 9.1 on a ten-point scale.

The Movie.  Production has left the studio lot to film re-shoots on location, specifically on the standing sets for the "small town Main Street" and the "mountain cabin hideout," both located on the ranch co-founder Al Kamp owns in Ojai.  Charlie Parish (and his secret ghostwriter Gil Mason) accompanied the crew to work on rewrites at night, as the director Franz Schmitt has rejected some of the new dialogue as inferior to the original script.

The Murder.  Charlie recalls his last trip to Ojai, for the original location shoot with Val Sommers, while Gil rejects his better judgment to leave the motel room to play poker.  Both encounter the senile and lecherous Al Kamp, Charlie in his memories and Gil at the bar.  Brodsky arrives to take care of Kamp, and he threatens Gil into forgetting the old man was ever there:  balking at the bullying and condescension, Gil quietly decides that he's going to bring down the studio's corrupt leadership.

It is perhaps appropriate that the issue was released on Tax Day, as the bills started to come due for more than one character.   Neither Charlie nor Gil could run, not just from the truth of Val's murder, but from their own fatal flaws.  Charlie tries to "run from his troubles" and the paranoia prompted by that mysterious man in the horn-rimmed glasses, but he can't run from the "ghosts" of the memories that he'd rather forget.  Meanwhile -- and not for the last time -- Gil indulges his worst habit of putting himself in all the wrong places.

It's been observed that, in drama, tragedy often results from the fatal pairing of a person's flaws and those special circumstances that exploit those flaws:  switch their places, and the hot-headed Othello and the hesitant Hamlet would have avoided their downfalls, as the murdered king would have been quickly avenged while the falsely accused wife would have been examined and found blameless.

Here, we have two men in the same circumstances, and the same awful truth prompts opposite responses that both lead to trouble.

The narrator notes that "Charlie has always been drawn to the broken ones," whether it's Val or Maya, who's hiding something behind her smile.

But they're not the only ones who are broken.

30 Days of The Fade Out: The Word on the Street.

The Fade Out #4 was released nearly one year ago today, on January 7th, 2015.  Evidently released without any previews, the issue was well received by critics, with another average score of 9.1 on a ten-point-scale.

The Movie. Production continues for Shadow of the Valley with filming each day on the Victory Street studio lot and with rewrites each night ostensibly by Charlie Parish.  The PR department organizes a stunt to introduce Maya Silver to the public while simultaneously strengthening the reputation of the studio's contract player Tyler Graves.

The Murder. Charlie and Gil continue to agonize over their knowledge of the murder and cover-up, with one being tormented by his fragmented memories of that night --images keep bubbling up, but they're more haunting than illuminating -- and the other becoming a more sullen drunk barely steadied by his ghostwriting work.  Charlie sees a photo of a guy who might have been on Charlie's blackout walk, but he doesn't get a chance to question the photographer about him:  Stevie Turner dies before Charlie returns, supposedly in an accidental house fire, and Charlie sees that mystery man taking his own photos of onlookers and then driving off.

This issue concludes "Act One" of the 12-issue series, and this act is book-ended by two apparent murders.

"And for the second time since he found Valeria Sommers lying dead on her living room floor...

"...Charlie feels the ground drop out from under his feet.

"What the hell has he stumbled into?"

We have had our own theories, but it did take quite a while for us to figure how the photographer fit into the picture, as the mystery man's photo with Ronald Reagan didn't seem dangerous enough to kill over.

Why would someone want to kill Stevie Turner?

The answer doesn't begin to form until issue #10, when Charlie searches Brodsky's office and discovers a thin file labeled with the name of that mystery man -- by now, we know his name is Drake Miller.  Inside the file are just two photographs, one of which is a photo from Earl Rath's fateful party.

In issue #1, we see one of Charlie's brief flashes of memory of that night, three men and two women leaving the party, none identifiable -- "a long walk... him and a few others..."

The picture in Drake's file provides the clarity that had long eluded Charlie, but as with the existence of any photo in a murder mystery, it raises an obvious question.

Who took that photograph?

Stevie Turner was a "photographer to the stars" who took illicit pictures for Earl Rath.  If he photographed one particular woman while Earl was "off with her sister," could he not have taken these photos at Rath's infamous, debaucherous parties?

Suppose Turner snapped a picture of of five people leaving the party, one of whom turned up dead.  If the murderer was part of that group, both the photograph AND the photographer's memory of that night would constitute incriminating evidence.

Covering up one murder can often lead to another murder.

30 Days of The Fade Out: Movie Story Magazine.

Before we turn our eyes to The Fade Out #4, we'd like to bring our readers' attention to one tiny detail in issue #3:  Movie Story Magazine, a real publication that makes a brief cameo appearance.  In a flashback, we see Maya holding a copy while she waited on her final audition and introduced herself to her Val, and another copy (or two) lies on the coffee table.

I couldn't find the full article freely available online, but a 2003 essay from the University of Texas Press' Cinema Journal reviews the "seldom studied but long-lived and robust ancillary product of classical Hollywood cinema, the monthly movie story magazines devoted to article-length fictionalizations of feature films.  These magazines flourished in a variety of forms from the late 1920s through the 1970s."

The genre reminds us of Reader's Digest Condensed Books, which would abridge popular books and collect several works in a single hardcover; they aren't in great demand at our local used bookstores, and they are now valued more as decor than as literature.  Short fictionalizations have vanished along with magazines that focused on short stories, but we do still see the occasional novelization -- and we've read that the novelization for the new Star Wars movie answers questions that were raised by a plot that emphasized action over clarity.

The movie-story magazine may strike some of us as odd, but it makes a lot more sense in a world without television and home video, to say nothing of the Internet and streaming movies:  if a movie wasn't in the theater, it wasn't available.

At the Galactic Central website dedicated to magazine indexes and bibliographies, we see that Movie Story Magazine published 206 issues between 1933 and 1951, with the first three years released under the title Romantic Movie Stories.

The website's comprehensive checklist has cover art for almost every issue -- perhaps this is where Sean Phillips got the images? -- and we're guessing that the particular covers chosen for The Fade Out were more for aesthetics than strict accuracy for what was likely to be found in a studio waiting room around 1948.

The issue that Maya holds, seen above, is #143 from March 1946, featuring a cover story on The Postman Always Rings Twice. The issue on the coffee table appears to be #59 from March 1939,with a cover of Clark Gable, who has a cameo in the subsequent issue of The Fade Out.

We wondered if the magazine was devoted more to celebrity gossip than the movies themselves, and we find the concept fascinating, of magazines that feature short novelizations of recent films.  Between the film crew and the PR department, Hollywood has made a tremendous fortune telling stories, both stories that are clearly fictional and those that are presented, however misleadingly, as biographical.

30 Days of The Fade Out: The Replacement Blonde.

The Fade Out Number Two Three: "The Replacement Blonde"

• Released November 12th, 2014, following a six-page preview
• Praised in 19 critic reviews, receiving an average score of 9.1 on a 10-point scale

As we noted before, this third chapter of The Fade Out is the only one to omit Charlie Parish from the "Cast of Characters" page at the beginning of the issue.  Only eight characters were listed, leaving the last position available, but Charlie's hardly in this issue at all.

Instead, the issue tells us more about Victor Thursby and introduces us to the woman replacing Val Sommers in Shadow of the Valley: Maya Silver, an actress "waiting for her big break."

The Movie.  To replace his deceased lead actress in Shadow of the Valley, director Franz Schmitt picks Maya Silver, whom Val beat in the final round of auditions, but Schmitt still has a casting call which Maya's agent inaccurately describes as a formality.  Being fortunate enough to have the same dress size as Val, Maya enjoys her first day of shooting interspersed with photos being taken for publicity, and her day ends with Brodsky getting rid of her possessive and disruptive ex-husband.

The Murder.  Nothing changes regarding the mystery surrounding Val's murder and cover-up:  we'll learn in the next issue that Charlie and Gil continue to agonize over what they already know and are trying to forget.

Set outside of the context of the rest of the story, this issue shows us what "business as usual" looks like in the corrupt studio system: hopeful artists compromise their integrity trying to break into the business, and their willingness to do anything makes them prey for the powerful.  Maya quickly comes to terms with the costs of her emerging life of stardom, Brodsky and Tom Greavey try to take advantage of women using the lies they want to hear, and the infrastructure and even the architecture of Victor Thursby's studio facilitates his vices.

(The scandalous abuses of powerful men in the entertainment industry still make front-page news.)

Thursby's behavior is particularly interesting.  Earlier we wrote that we surmise that he was the man who rescued Val from her old life of abuse as a child star, but his life clearly isn't one of chastity, probity, and chivalry.  We learn in issue #7 what Val did to make herself unattractive to Thursby, and clearly he distinguishes between child abuse and taking advantage of adult women.

He thinks to himself that Maya isn't Val, and that makes us wonder about the friendship between Victor Thursby and Val Sommers, and just how platonic their relationship was -- or, at least, how platonic Thursby wanted it to be.

We also wonder whether Thursby ever tries that routine again:  we don't see him do so in the comic itself.

"What-- what is it you want... sir?"

"But he doesn't answer...

"...because he realizes right then, he doesn't even know anymore."

It's possible that nothing will ever be the same for him, no matter how much he tries to forget the girl he saved and the woman he lost.

30 Days of The Fade Out: The Death of Me.

The Fade Out Number Two: "The Death of Me"

• Released September 31st, 2014, following a widely-distributed three-page preview
• Subsequently given a second printing following an immediate sellout at the distributor level; this was the last issue of the series to receive multiple printings, with a black-and-white version of the cover art displayed beneath the familiar red-ink logo
• Received with a good number of positive reviews, with 23 critic reviews awarding an average score of 9.2 on a ten-point scale

The sophomore issue of Brubaker and Phillips' period piece begins with the funeral of Val Sommers and then reveals the secret ghost-writing arrangement between the psychologically paralyzed Charlie Parish and the blacklisted Gil Mason.

The Movie.  After paying for the funeral for the film's leading actress, studio co-founder Victor Thursby reviews the in-progress footage for Shadow of the Valley with its director and writer.  He would have preferred scrapping the film altogether, but the studio system is about to collapse in the wake of the Supreme Court's recent anti-trust ruling, and they have nothing else to release.  He gives Franz Schmitt and Charlie Parish a scant two extra weeks for re-shoots with a replacement actress, to wrap shooting in 25 days.  The director then pushes Charlie into accepting his idea of using the added time as an opportunity to rewrite the entire film.

The Murder. Evidently resigned to the cover-up, Charlie is agonizing over his betrayals -- his unintended complicity in destroying the evidence of Val's murder, and now his collaboration in erasing her from her last film -- and he realizes that even his telling Gil was a kind of betrayal, so he could be the strong one in their shared distress.  Gil is falling apart even more than Charlie, drunkenly spying on Val's funeral and visiting the new grave again that night.

In this chapter, we see an expression of Charlie's issues with alienation and invisibility:  his daydream of disguising himself in the bandages of the film's main character.  We also see how that daydream transitions seamlessly to the rough cut that he watches with Thursby and Schmitt.

"He imagined it would be a relief, to have a mask everyone could see...

"...but that made them all look away at the same time."

It reminds me of the opening lines to David Gray's moody 2002 song "Freedom."

Take your eyes off meThere’s nothing here to seeTrying to keep my head together...

We also see that, in contrast with the actors' cynicism toward the man, Thursby is torn up by Val's death:

"Thirty-five years... a life's work, he thinks, and for what?

"For what?"

Val's friend and fellow child actor from the Krazy Kids, Flapjack Jones grouses at her grave's headstone, engraved with her stage name Valeria Sommers rather than her birth name Jenny Summers:  "She wasn't any... aristocrat... just a girl from Pasadena."

In issue #11, we learn that there was a "kind man" who saved Val from her old life as a child actress.  In a line that has added importance in hindsight, she says of him, "He helped me stop being Jenny."

We've mentioned having a theory about this man's identity.  To be clear, we surmise that he was Victor Thursby himself,.  If he knew that Val Sommers associated her birth name with her old life of trauma and abuse, he very well may have put her stage name on the headstone as an act of kindness that may always be seen by others as an act of callousness.

In a story where numerous acts of betrayal are seen as business as usual, we have this shining act of love, mistaken for indifference.

30 Days of The Fade Out: The Wild Party.

The Fade Out Number One: "The Wild Party"

• Series introduced with a three-page trailer and retailer promotional poster, re-posted below
• Released August 20th, 2014, following a five-page preview at The A.V. Club and an eight-page preview at USA Today
• Released with a standard cover, an over-sized "movie magazine" variant, retailer-exclusive variants by Jamie McKelvie and Chip Zdarsky, and a second printing
• Received with wide acclaim, with 41 critics awarding an average score of 9.2 on a 10-point scale

The debut issue of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' The Fade Out sets in motion parallel projects that the series will follow evidently to its conclusion with issue #12, namely, the production of a noir film at Victory Street Pictures and the mystery surrounding the covered-up murder of the film's lead actress Valeria Sommers.

The Movie.  After Val's body was discovered, production was temporarily shut down for Shadow of the Valley; with the production already delayed by numerous rewrites, the director Franz Schmitt tried to work around her absence but was stopped after being physically accosted by lead actor Earl Rath.

The Murder. Writer Charlie Parish had woken up in Val's bungalow in Studio City, and upon discovering her body, he tried to erase any evidence of his being there, consequently scrubbing the crime scene of evidence of the murderer as well.  Grilled by the studio's security chief Phil Brodsky, Charlie discovered that her murder was covered up to look like a suicide.  Torn up by his unintended complicity in the cover-up, he spills his guts to his blacklisted friend and ghostwriter, Gil Mason.

This driving motivation for so much of Charlie's subsequent actions is captured in the key quote from the issue.

"Studios had been covering up murder and rape and everything in between since at least the Roaring Twenties.

"That's what men like Brodsky were there for... to prevent scandals.

"And he'd helped them this time.

"He helped them."

Will the film be completed and released, and what will Charlie do in the face of a conspiracy?  The next eleven issues slowly reveal the answers to both questions.

UPDATE, 12/31.  ...and, we'll slowly fill in the gaps of Charlie's sketchy memory of the night of Val's death, the "wild party" and who was with him when he left.