Only Eduardo Risso, Jordi Bernet and Frank Miller can do Comics Noir like Phillips.

The noir atmosphere perfected in the outstanding 'Criminal' books seems even darker here, as Phillips drops his spot-blacks even thicker in his brilliant chiaroscuro style.

Fatale, however, manages to forge these two disparate elements into a hitherto unknown alloy. Lovecraft, on the other hand, was a self-educated shut-in likely suffering from an unknown psychiatric disorder, writing his strange tales of cosmic horror for the pulps and receiving virtually no attention for his bizarre themes and awkward, overwrought prose until after his premature death. Hammett was a brilliant writer, an excellent prose stylist who had led a fascinating life of adventure and came late to the writing game, receiving a great deal of critical acclaim and celebrity almost immediately. Both Hammett and Lovecraft were contemporaries who wrote genre fiction, but there the similarities end. Lovecrafts' alien word-spores, and you end up with Fatale. I wish I felt clever enough this morning to avoid saying it, but it nevertheless sums up Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips latest creation, Fatale, quite nicely: imagine the cool, flawless writing of Dashiell Hammett cross-pollinated by H.P. This excellent series is scheduled to end soon with Issue #24 so I expect that one more hardcover is forthcoming. Though the series is now up to Issue #21, I enjoyed returning to these first two story arcs and noticed how much I had missed or forgotten since the first reading. I’m a great fan of the Brubaker/Phillips partnership and bought every issue of this series as it was released. It also features some additional Sean Phillips artwork and two essays from Jess Nevins. As with their Criminal and Incognito hardcovers, this book also features larger page margins than the comics and TPBs, a welcome feature that ensures that none of the artwork is swallowed by the spine’s binding. Her hypnotic power over men usually leads them to misfortune. The complex story follows the seemingly ageless Josephine through the 1950s and 1970s. The narrator meets the titular femme fatale Josephine at his eccentric uncle’s funeral and is soon fleeing with her from a sinister Lovecraftian cult.

This material was previously collected in the Fatale Volume 1 “Death Chases Me” and Volume 2 “The Devil’s Business” TPBs. This hardcover collects the first ten issues of the Ed Brubaker/Sean Phillips supernatural noir comic book series originally published by Image Comics in 2012.

Fatale, Vol. 1 by Ed Brubaker