THE FADE OUT #10 Preview Online and In Stores Today!

Confirming what we reported last week, yesterday Comic Book Resources posted a five-page preview of the tenth issue for The Fade Out, and Ed Brubaker relays that the issue is out today "in the best comics shops in the world."

This chapter of the sprawling noir mystery is titled "Where Angels Fear to Tread," which matches the title of a 1905 E.M. Forster novel but may be more directly an allusion to the original line by Alexander Pope, "For fools rush in where angels fear to tread."

The phrase hints at both the recklessness of the story's central characters and the danger they face as a result.  I think it's very unlikely they'll navigate the treacherous waters and find a happy ending on the other side.

And for Charlie, at least, the story's setting of debauchery and political intrigue is receding in importance, as his quest is driven by much more personal stakes.

It's probably too soon to look past The Fade Out, but it is worth noting that Image Comics released its January solicitations yesterday, and there were no listings for Brubaker or Phillips.  The convention season for Image Comics recently ended with the conclusion of the New York Comic Con on October 11th, and that was probably the last obvious venue for announcing the next Brubaker-Phillips collaboration.

Here's hoping that the announcement comes sooner rather than later, and we'll be sure to pass along any news as we see it; in the meantime, we'll be taking a closer look at The Fade Out as it cuts to black, and we'll also relay when Brubaker's other series Velvet returns to the stands.

Bullets: THE FADE OUT Finale, Sean Phillips in Kendal, and More!

Been a couple weeks, so let's get right to it!

• The Fade Out Finale, Scheduled for December.  When we noted the latest releases of The Fade Out -- the ninth monthly issue and the second trade paperback collection -- we missed the other big news for the noir series:  Image's December solicitations have been released, and they include the series finale, The Fade Out #12.

THE FADE OUT #12 (OF 12)
STORY: ED BRUBAKER
ART / COVER: SEAN PHILLIPS & ELIZABETH BREITWEISER   

DECEMBER 16 / 40 PAGES / FC / M / $3.99 

SERIES CONCLUSION
It all ends here! The dramatic wrap-up to the mystery and to Brubaker and Phillips’ bestselling and most ambitious project yet!

We previously speculated that the series would run 12 issues, but we believe that this is the first time the series has been presented as a 12-issue mini-series:  this solicitation is the first to list a release as issue X "(of 12),"and it does so with the 12th and final issue.

The finale is scheduled to be released on December 16th, and projections at ComicList do point to the series' home stretch arriving on time.  The site doesn't offer permalinks for its lists of weekly arrivals, but as of right now, the site's list for next week includes The Fade Out #10 -- copies of which Sean Phillips just received, confirming next week's arrival -- and its more persistent link for a recent extended forecast for Image Comics has all of the remaining issues coming out on their original solicitation dates.

10/21/15 The Fade Out #10
11/18/15 The Fade Out #11
12/16/15 The Fade Out #12

We've thoroughly enjoyed the series, with its sprawling cast being contained to a quite specific setting and the story being driven by the first issue's murder and cover-up.  We're considering doing what we did with the conclusion of Fatale:  after the release of the series' penultimate issue, we may look back with thirty days of short blog posts.

And we'll be sure to keep an eye out for what's coming next from Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips.

• Sean Phillips at the Lakes International Comic Art Festival.  We've noted Phillips' prior appearances at the prominant festival hosted annually in Kendal, England:  he appeared with Ed Brubaker in 2013, and then he created artwork with Rian Hughes in a burlesque-inspired event in 2014.  We've also already noted that, this year, Phillips is curating the PHONO+GRAPHIC exhibition of record covers created by comic artists.

The arts festival is this weekend, and Sean Phillips has announced that his only signing session will be this Saturday, from 11 am to 1 pm local time.  He also posted some striking images of the exhibit, which now features 61 record covers; the exhibit opened earlier this month and runs for another week, closing on October 20th.

Sean Phillips also recently blogged that some of his original art is being included in an auction organized by the Lakes International Comic Art Festival, to be held on November 24th at Orbital Comics in London.

The auction includes a "one-off digital print" titled "Bring Me Sunshine," part a series of postcards commissioned by the festival.  Created by "seven leading illustrators," the series is titled "Wish You Were Here – Postcards from the Edge of Reality."

...and fans of Fatale should note that Phillips' other contribution to the auction is the original cover art for the third trade paperback collection, West of Hell.

The auction also includes work by Frank Quitely, Jeff Smith, Dave Gibbons, Charlie Adlard, and Ed Brubaker's Deadenders collaborator Warren Pleece -- and Sean Phillips reminds fans that, if you can't attend in person, you can bid online.

• ...and Darwyn Cooke at Lakes International.  Sean Phillips isn't the only famous colleague of Ed Brubaker's who's making an appearance in Kendal.  Darwyn Cooke will be there, in what is evidently his first UK appearance and hot on the heels of this week's debut of The Twilight Children, his four-part Vertigo mini-series written by Gilbert Hernandez.  He'll introduce the New Frontier animated film adaptation and be the featured guest at an event focusing on his artwork, and Sean Phillips tweeted that Cooke has produced an "exclusive gorgeous, giclee" of Sean Connery's James Bond.

The limited-edition artwork is available from the festival's online store, along with two prints by Sean Phillips, the cover art to The Fade Out #8 and a monochrome "Hollywoodland" giclee featuring three of the main characters from The Fade Out.

• Other Work by Sean Phillips for the BBC.  Last year, we reported that Sean Phillips had produced artwork advertising BBC Radio 4's adaptation of Good Omens, a humorous 1990 novel by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, and Phillips has recently announced that a tee-shirt featuring his art of Neil Gaiman is still available online, benefiting the Alzheimer’s Association.  The shirt is available at TeeFury, in multiple sizes and colors.

More recently, Phillips created artwork for BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour, featuring portraits of the five women who were guest editors during the program's Takeover Week in September.  He's posted the final digital images and a few of the original hand-drawn pieces.

• Recommended Reading.  Finally, there are a few pieces we've stumbled across online that our readers might find interesting.  First, Michael Mann recently spoke at the Toronto International Film Festival on the 20th(!) anniversary of what is one of our all-time favorite films, Heat. Uproxx has posted a nice, meaty retrospective on the epic crime story, reporting on Mann's appearance and elaborating on the enduring appeal of "A movie that was made by thinking hard about who the characters were and what they should do, shot in as straightforward a manner as possible."

And, The Weekly Standard has an essay on Dashiell Hammett, the mystery writer who has a (fictionalized) cameo in The Fade Out #6.  In reviewing the new book The Lost Detective, by Nathan Ward, the essay recounts the writer's life and politics, concluding that Hammett was a complicated man and most prominently a "genius writer who created an entirely new way of talking about urban America."

I wonder what writers like Hammett would say if they knew that the torch of noir and crime fiction is being carried with aplomb by comic-book creators like Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips, and Darwyn Cooke.

THE FADE OUT Issue #9 and Volume 2 In Stores Today!

Ed Brubaker confirms what Sean Phillips suspected when he got his comp copies last week, that the latest issue and trade paperback of The Fade Out are both in stores this week, beginning today.

The Fade Out Act 2 collects issues #5-8 and, like the first collection, it retails for a little less than the total price of the monthly issues, albeit without the excellent back matter.  Comicosity includes the book in this week's "Trade Waiting" feature, which highlights five new collections each week, and a tweet from Pulp Fiction Comics shows that the book has a striking blue spine that complements the red spine from Act 1.

Fade Out #9! Read the 2nd TP, jump on here & catch the great floppy-only backups! @brubaker @seanpphillips @devincf pic.twitter.com/8MzDY6xwvi

— Pulp Fiction Comics (@PFBooksComics) September 15, 2015

The Fade Out #9 begins Act 3, and Comic Book Resources just posted a four-page preview.  The text description appears to be for Mark Kidwell's zombie comic '68, but the preview images are correct.

New readers can quickly catch up with the series, as the danger continues to heat up.

A Criminal Collage, Deluxe Fatale Volume 2, and Phillips' Return to the Criterion Collection!

We've been making a few changes to the blog's appearance for both conventional web browsers and mobile browsers: for the former, we have a new banner image, and for the latter, we've updated the background collage.

The most recent banner image has used the first panel from the two-page preview of the 2011 story, "The Last of the Innocent."  The new banner uses the striking standard cover to this year's Special Edition one-shot.

The mobile site's original collage -- which we mistakenly described as a montage -- featured the thirty bordered images for Fatale, namely the 25 covers to the 24 monthly issues and the covers for the five trade paperback collections.  We're now using the six final covers for Image's Criminal reprints, which we've finally assembled into a nearly 1000x1000 JPEG image that readers can see below and save to their own folders.

On the subject of Fatale, last month we reported on Ed Brubaker's hint that the second and final deluxe edition was soon to be solicited, and the volume has since been included in Image Comics' November solicitations.

FATALE: DELUXE EDITION, VOL. 2 HC

STORY: ED BRUBAKER 

ART / COVER: SEAN PHILLIPS & ELIZABETH BREITWEISER 

NOVEMBER 11 / 432 PAGES / FC / M / $49.99 

This Deluxe Edition presents the conclusion of Brubaker and Phillips's bestselling horror-noir series FATALE in a gorgeous hardcover edition filled with insightful extras and behind-the-scenes artwork. This is the book for serious Brubaker and Phillips collectors! 

Collects FATALE #11-24 

ComicConverse recently posted a review of the entire series, for those who haven't yet dived into the horror-noir mashup.

With this upcoming release, all of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' previous major collaborations will have been collected in deluxe, oversized editions:  Sleeper from DC's Vertigo imprint, Criminal and Fatale from Marvel's Icon imprint, and now Fatale and even Scene of the Crime from Image Comics.

(Add Dynamite's The Art of Sean Phillips, an even larger hardcover collection, and you have quite a substantial library of Brubaker and Phillips.)

The plans for Image to reprint Incognito sometime this year have evidently changed, but we still expect new editions to be printed eventually, possibly in time for the film adaptation that is evidently still on track.

The duo's current collaboration is scheduled to continue in November, with The Fade Out #11 being included in that month's solicitations.  With issue #8 being released in August, a monthly schedule would be needed to ensure this issue's timely release -- on August 17th, Phillips tweeted that he just finished an extra-long issue, probably issue #9 -- but either way, the description implies that the the end is near:

"All the threads of the mystery come together, as Charlie and Gil barrel headfirst toward trouble!"

Since Fatale literally doubled from its initial plans of a 12-issue run, Brubaker and Phillips haven't announced any planned issue count for this new series, and it's doubtful they'll announce such plans for any future work:  each series will tell stories with a definite ending, but the ending will arrive in its own time.

With all that said, we believe we can now offer our educated guess that The Fade Out will run 12 issues, divided into three 4-issue acts, with a trade collection for each act.  The traditional three-act structure may eventually be collected into a single deluxe edition, but history suggests that we shouldn't expect that any earlier than the end of 2016.

Finally, Sean Phillips has already produced artwork for four Criterion Collection home video releases, black-and-white films from the 50's and 60's, all arguably tied to the broad genre of noir. In June, Phillips announced on his blog that he's been commissioned for artwork for another two Criterion Collection films and three productions for Arrow Films.  The two Criterion projects are being released this month, two color films on colonialism by Bruce Beresford, titled Breaker Morant (1980) and Mister Johnson (1990).

Both films will be available in both DVD and Blu-Ray, and both are scheduled to be released on September 22.

Just today, Sean Phillips posted additional artwork for these new Criterion releases.

Banner Images

For our own record keeping and hyperlink purposes, we're using this blog entry to post the current and new banner images for this site.

It's never been explicitly stated, but our readers are welcome to save a copy of any image we post here.

Velvet #11 and The Fade Out #8, In ALL Comic Stores Today.

For those of us who were hit by last week's shipping delays -- we've finally updated the blog post -- we can confirm that The Fade Out #8 is in all stores today -- and it's a double dose for Ed Brubaker fans, as Brubker's throwback espionage with Steve Epting also returns today, with issue #11.

This is the first issue of the third arc, "The Man Who Stole the World," possibly an allusion to "The Man Who Sold the World," the 1970 David Bowie song famously covered by Nirvana for their Unplugged show in New York City.

Comic Book Resources has just posted a three-page preview of the issue.

UPDATE, SEPT 4:  Just noticed that the blog post's title had the wrong issue number for The Fade Out; it has now been corrected.

THE FADE OUT #8 in *SOME* Stores Today -- and More!

I'm in the process of writing a lengthy post, but we want to get the first item out there immediately.  I'll be updating this post, probably tonight, but until then...

• The Fade Out #8 in SOME stores today, in all markets next week.  The big news is that the latest issue of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' The Fade Out is beginning to reach stores today:  issue #8 is the conclusion to "Act Two," and a three-page preview can be found at Comic Book Resources.

The issue was listed as "not verified by Diamond" in this week's new arrivals at ComicList.com, it wasn't listed in Brian Hibbs' list of arrivals for his shop in San Francisco, and my local shop in Georgia confirmed last night that they didn't get the issue either.

What gives?  Ed Brubaker tweeted that there were "shipping delays," and he relayed to us the details: a truck for Diamond Comic Distributors broke down, delaying the issue's arrival for one week, for both the South and the West Coast.

We appreciate the info from Ed, and we suppose we can make it one more week:  if our readers have any doubt about whether the issue is waiting at their local shops, we recommend calling ahead to confirm.

More "bullets" to come...

--

UPDATE, 8/12:  Well, that took longer than I expected.  This is the first and probably last time we'll deliberately split a post like this.


Director Leaked for Incognito Adaptation.  The big news last week was an exclusive report from The Tracking Board about the film adaptation for Brubaker and Phillips' pulp noir comic, Incognito.  According to the story, "sources confirm" that the film will be directed by Fede Alvarez, whose directorial debut was for the remake of Evil Dead, a job for which he was hand-picked by Sam Raimi.  He has since co-written a draft on the Incognito screenplay, and the insider website reports that an additional writer is being sought.

I believe the last time we reported on this adaptation was just over three years ago, and while it appears no further comic stories are currently planned in the Incognito universe, we reported in March that the two existing stories are scheduled to be reprinted later this year.


Fatale Deluxe on the NY Times Reading List, and Volume 2 Likely To Come Soon.  Toward the end of July, the New York Times posted a "kick-back summer reading list," and the feature concluded with the first deluxe collection for Brubaker and Phillips' popular horror-noir mashup.  Dana Jennings writes that the series should be the next graphic novel adapted on "quality cable."

"It’s a full-bodied blend of noir and Lovecraftian horror... Perfect reading at dusk, as the bats dip and dart in the eaves."

And what about the second and concluding deluxe edition?  Ed Brubaker has recently tweeted, "Keep watching the solicits."

We haven't seen anything yet, be we expect the November solicitations to be released in the next few days.


Nerdist Podcast Interview with Ed Brubaker.  Finally, on July 28th, Nerdist posted a Comics Panel podcast with Ed Brubaker, recorded at WonderCon on April 4th.  We're still going through the audio, and we'll post any highlights of info that would be new to regular readers of this blog.