30 Days of Fatale: The Metastasizing Monster.

Fatale #17
released September 25, 2013
following a five-page preview


With Fatale #17, we see the return of the story's monstrous antagonist, the Bishop.  His real name appears to be Sommerset, and I believe this is the first use of that name, which is mentioned again in issue #22; Hans, the name used in the 70's, may have just been an alias.

The Bishop's position as a Nazi officer was lost at the end of the war -- and after Booker rescued Jo from the first failed ritual -- but the Bishop's earthly power then grew as he became more physically disfigured from his encounters with Josephine.

He ran an obscure cult in the 1950's; running the Method Church in the 70's, he attracted a following in Hollywood and apparently had a run-in with Charles Manson; by the time we see him again in the mid-90's, he's flying a corporate jet with an interest in quite a few businesses, especially in entertainment.  At the same time, he had become "blind, partly crippled, and covered in burns."

Hunting Josephine across the decades, even sensing her presence when she wasn't in hiding, the Bishop had grown both more powerful and more grotesque, even as his quarry had herself become more knowledgeable of his occult secrets.

30 Days of Fatale: Crosswords and Sudoku.

Fatale #16
released August 7, 2013
following a five-page preview

Fatale #16 was the second of two issues to feature cover art different from what was solicited.  The original cover featured Nicolas Lash, but he was replaced with Lance since Nicolas' present-day story wasn't continued in this issue.  Sean Phillips originally planned to reuse the art in another issue, and the advance cover at Amazon suggests that it may have been considered for the last trade paperback, but it will probably be printed nowhere except perhaps as part of the bonus features of a deluxe hardcover.

The issue continues the arc "Pray For Rain," and the issue reminds me of the different approaches to works of literature -- books, comic books, plays, and movies.  Some works are like crossword puzzles, where you need to bring a lot of information with you to make sense of what you have, and some works are like sudoku puzzles where all the information you need is presented to you.

I can understand needing annotations to understand Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales -- or an extensive dictionary to understand Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey novels, set in during the Napoleonic Wars and written to match the era -- but generally I prefer sudoku-like works, where at least the basic narrative and the character's motivations are explicit in the work itself, even if one must closely read (and re-read) the work to catch all the nuances.

It was fun to examine "The Last of the Innocent" to find analogues to the characters in Archie comics and other works, and it was good seeing Teeg Lawless again, but it wasn't necessary to have read Archie or indeed any of the other self-contained Criminal stories to follow the plot.  It sounds like Jess Nevins' annotations to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen heightens the enjoyment but isn't strictly necessary to read Alan Moore's books, and my biggest problem with Grant Morrison's Final Crisis was the apparent Ph.D in DC history one needed to get even the vaguest notion of what was going on.

Overall, Fatale appears to be quite self-contained:  the mysteries that can be answered, can be answered from clues in the story itself.

That doesn't mean there aren't allusions to other works and figures in history, and Fatale #16 has more than most other issues.

Set in Seattle, 1995, the issue alludes to the 1994 death of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain; the movies of Ray Harryhausen, who used stop-motion effects to bring classic myths to life; the writer Carlos Castaneda, who focused on shamanism and sorcery; and the music of The Walker Brothers, from the 60's and 70's -- their song "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore" can be heard here -- and Scott Walker, especially his acclaimed 1984 solo album Climate of Hunter.

The issue also lets us get to know the members of the rock band Amsterdam, without clunky exposition:  Lance, who has resorted to robbery to finance their next music video; Jon, the undersized and fearless guitarist; Tom, the withdrawn songwriter who dances the line between genius and madness; Darcy, his girlfriend; and Skip, the medical student.

Every one of them is deeply affected by Josephine -- "Jane Doe," as she calls herself in her state of amnesia -- and each is affected differently; only Darcy is immune, but she is resentful of the effect she has on the guys.  Each of these five-issue arcs shows Jo's influence on more than one man, and in this arc her power is overwhelming an entire house of bandmates as well as the serial killer Wulf and her friend Gavin.

About Gavin... on the next to last page of this issue, we discover that Jo and Gavin came to Seattle to find some rare occult books, sent by a mysterious "librarian" whom we won't meet for another five issues.

All the pieces of the puzzle are here; it's just not always easy to put them together.

30 Days of Fatale: Crime Scenes.

Fatale #15
released June 26, 2013
following a six-page preview

We return to Nicolas' tragic story with Fatale #15, the first chapter in "Pray for Rain," released on the same day as the trade paperback for Book Three:  "West of Hell."  It appears to be Image's very shrewd standard practice to release the previous arc's trade on the same day as the first issue of the new arc, making it easy for new readers to jump on.

This issue was the first to have multiple covers since the "Beauty" and the "Beast" covers for issue #1 and the additional printings for the first three issues.  I believe we missed this at the time, but that year's Image Expo featured an exclusive variant that had Sean Phillips' untouched black-and-white artwork for the cover; the original piece is still available at Splash Page Art, at least at the time of this writing.

The issue was also available as an elusive "ghost variant" with cover artwork by Brubaker's Catwoman collaborator, Darwyn Cooke.

What's most notable about all three covers might be their subject:  for the first time, we see Nicolas Lash on the cover.  He'll appear again on the cover to issue #21 and on the cover for the final trade collection, "Curse the Demon," but I'm surprised how infrequently he appears here, as he narrates the very first page of the series and appears in more than half of the title's 24 issues.

Inside, we find Nicolas trading one form of captivity for another, and the issue features a couple of crimes that are almost prosaic compared to the bizarre rituals in most of the book:  a jailbreak and a bank robbery, the kind of stuff that would be right at home in the world of Criminal.

We come to find out that the two crimes aren't entirely unrelated, and we should have figured that out sooner in light of Ed Brubaker's occasional use of clever scene transitions.  He doesn't draw attention to those juxtapositions by having the dialogue in the first scene finish as a caption in the next scene, and the transitions usually occur with a page break as well, so only careful readers will find them.

Perhaps my favorite such transition in Fatale is between pages 17 and 18 of issue #8.  In one scene we see the Bishop's bizarre ritual to find Jo, in the other we see Jo talking to Miles on the beach as they're on the way to planning to steal the Bishop's cult scripture.

Page 17, last panel, narrator:  And soon [the Bishop would] have her... and he'd know that touch again.

Page 18, first panel, Josephine:  This feels amazing... you should come in... just get your feet wet.

In issue #15, we transition from Nicolas' trek as an unwilling fugitive in the present day to the aftermath of the bank robbery in Seattle in 1995.  The visual similarities are striking, with both sides of the transition showing figures hurrying in the rain, moving from left to right.

In hindsight, the connection between the two scenes should have been obvious.

30 Days of Fatale: 30 Striking Covers.

Sean Phillips' cover art has always been outstanding, but the design has never been as uniform as it has for Fatale:  a single mostly monochromatic image, bordered by white on all sides and the title placed at the top.  This artistic design has held true for everything except Darwyn Cooke's "ghost variant" for issue #15 and -- somewhat surprisingly -- the first deluxe hardcover collection.

There will have been 24 standard covers for the monthly issues, a variant cover for the debut issue, and five trade paperback collections: a total of 30 covers that are at least as beautiful together as they are individually.

For our readers, we're happy to present an extra-large, 3600 x 4500 a 1280 x 1600 montage of these 30 covers of Fatale, suitable for use as desktop wallpaper or for printing and framing.

UPDATE [7/18]: The extra-large 3600 x 4500 montage didn't upload, but we'll provide this larger image as soon as we can.

UPDATE 2 [7/18]:  I've confirmed that Blogger automatically resized the extra-large image to 1280 x 1600.  If any readers would really like this larger image, let me know in the comments.  If there's any real demand for the larger image, either in 5.5-MB JPEG format or the original 20-MB PNG format, I'll look into finding another way to get the file to you.

UPDATE 3 [7/20]:  We're happy to announce that we've made the 5.5-MB JPEG available on Google Drive, visible to the public.  Feel free to download here.

30 Days of Fatale: The Convergence of 1943.

Fatale #14 features the story "Just a Glance Away," and it was released on May 15th, 2013, with a five-page preview. It completes the series of four stand-alone stories that comprise the third trade paperback, "West of Hell," stories that fill out some of the history of the curse and the cult that are the focus of this Lovecraftian horror-noir.

Just a month prior, the series was nominated for a stunning six Eisner awards, including Best New Series, Best Continuing Series, and individual awards for Brubaker, Phillips, and colorist Dave Stewart.  In July, the series was all but shut out, as Stewart won an Eisner while the other categories were dominated by Hawkeye and Saga.  Still, it's easy to see why the series received so many nominations, and this latest issue provides the fullest treatment of one of the key events in the story.

Set largely in Romania in 1943 -- the year of the Normandy invasion and a year before the two atomic bombs were dropped in Japan -- "Just a Glance Away" connects the dots from Jo's earliest story in issue #11 to "Death Chases Me," set in San Francisco in the 1950's.  We see Jo's first direct encounter with the Bishop, her realization that he has been hunting her for about a decade, and her meeting Walt Booker as he rescues her from the Bishop's ceremony.

(We'll revisit these events once more in issue #22, as we learn a few important details about the story from the Bishop's point of view.)

We see how Booker got the ancient stone knife and the fragment of parchment seen in the first arc, and how Jo met a gypsy woman named Mirela, who taught her the occult secrets that would serve to keep her safe for most of the next sixty years -- "symbols that would keep her hidden... words that would help her see the gears of the universe."

In the sixth panel on page 8, we also see an example of the other people who shared Jo's ability to see into the dark world beneath the surface, people like Booker and Mirela.  Reading some arcane book in front of a crammed bookshelf, wearing some familiar horn-rimmed glasses, the man may well be Otto the Librarian in his youth, introduced more fully in issue #21.

Perhaps the most important thing is confirmation that the Bishop's ceremony would result in a fate much worse than the Consort's merely physical death.   He told Josephine that death isn't exactly the right word for what happened to her predecessor, who we know is "Black" Bonnie from the previous issue.

"Devoured is more accurate."

The stakes couldn't be higher for Jo in the upcoming final issue, and since another "convergence" is approaching like the one that occurred on the night of the failed ceremony in Romania, we should not be surprised if issue #24 echoes issue #14 -- if each issue informs the other and reveals more about the ritual and the reason for which Josephine has been hunted for decades.

30 Days of Fatale: The Pattern Set.

Fatale #13 was released on March 27th, 2013, along with a five-page preview, and it features "Down the Darkest Trail," the single-issue spaghetti western.

The story focuses on "Black" Bonnie, Josephine's immediate predecessor, and along with the Bishop's bald, inhuman servants (sans glasses and bowlers), we see a land-locked lighthouse that serves as the cult's church tower and beacon, and we see a grotesque, improvised compass:  one of the servant's eyes floating in a glass jar.

Beyond these elements of the bizarre, we see in the brief story covering Bonnie's life a pattern that echoes Jo's life as it has been documented throughout the series.

The woman's cursed life begins with her first death and the slow discovery of her new powers over men. She meets others who see and understand the shadow realm more than most people -- and she discovers that she is being hunted by monsters.  With help, she thinks she defeats the cult, and she acquires their unholy scripture.

Bonnie's third and final death was a fate worse than death, a sacrifice that led to the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 -- and to one young man's transformation into the most recent Bishop.

When Bonnie went to the grave, "the earth broke open and an entire city burned, and she finally understood the words written in that book."

We'll find out soon enough whether Josephine is able to break this pattern and write a different ending for herself.

30 Days of Fatale: The Owl and The Ribbon Around the World.

Fatale #12 was released on February 13th, 2013, on the heels of a five-page preview, and it's the furthest back our story evidently takes us.  Set in France in AD 1286, "A Lovely Sort of Death" tells the story of Mathilda, one of Jo's predecessors.

Even Mathilda apparently wasn't the first "Consort," and the story shows the same cult from the 20th century, in a different guise:  "the order," noted for the yellow cross sewn into their tunics and led by another Bishop, a predecessor of the monster chasing Josephine.   Ganix was a "watchman" who fell for Mathilda and protected her instead of betraying her to the order.

Mathilda had been burned at the stake -- an understandable response from a town tormented by her curse -- but her powers caused her executioners to kill each other and kept her from dying.  In the "beatific afterglow" of the pain of death, she saw the world's secret paths "and the things that walked upon them," some of the most uncanny things Sean Phillips has ever drawn.

One of those demons or spirits bears a striking resemblance to an owl, and the owl is a recurring figure in this story.

One of the fairy tales that Ganix would tell Mathilda at night is about an owl "with the thread of the world in its claw."

In the interlude that opens issue #3, Nicolas has been reading Hank's unpublished manuscript, "The Losing Side of Eternity."

...there had to be a reason the old man never let anyone see it.

But the only part that makes me think of Jo at all is a scene where an old woman tells a drunken Graves a bizarre fairy tale.

About a silk ribbon that's wound around the world every night, held in the beak of an owl.

At least I think it's an owl, from the description.

In the interlude for issue #8, Nicolas dreams about that owl, shown with a strangely human face, and he sees that same owl toward the very end of issue #23, before the cliffhanger ending.

Is this weird spectre that Mathilda sees in the woods that same owl-like creature?  Is there a deeper meaning to this owl with the thread of the world, or is it just a striking image that Brubaker evokes for this story?  And if there is a deeper meaning, will we discover it in the Fatale finale, or will Ed Brubaker keep it to himself?

The possibility of answers is another reason I'm anticipating issue #24.