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.