Fatale, Vol. 5: Curse the Demon

Very lame ending to a kinda boring series. I love Brubaker/Phillips, Noir and Horror so this seemed like the perfect series for me...what a letdown. I bought all volumes at once and read them over the course of 4 weeks. Still, I always ended up forgetting what happened in the previous volumes and confused arcs because they are always kinda the same Story but in different time periods. Disappointing, but still ok.

So this functions as a review of the series as a whole, not just the fifth volume. And as a series, Fatale kind of overstayed its welcome for me. The concept is great and full of potential, and with Brullips, I would have thought it was in the right hands. I generally love their work. However, instead of capitalizing on this chance to break out of their usual mold, they decided to dig in even deeper and repeat themselves on a meta level—the series' tone ended up very similar to that of their other work—as well as on an issue-by-issue basis. There simply is not much forward momentum, and each arc plays out in much the same way as the others, right up until volume five here, when they can't stretch the material any more and have to bring it home. To be fair, they manage that landing mostly very well, and this last volume is pretty much the strongest. But they literally had a cosmos of possibilities for putting a twist on their usual shtick and seem to have decided to ... just not do that, I guess?

This doesn't mean that Fatale overall is bad, of course. These are very talented craftspeople with decades of experience under their belts. Even at his most routine, Brubaker still has an intuitive understanding of pacing and tone, Phillips has a good feeling for when to add detail and when to leave that to the reader, and Breitweiser's colors will always be some of my favorites in all of comics. So on a moment-to-moment basis, this is great stuff. It's just that I think they should have either stuck to 12 issues with this one or gone way harder on the cosmic horror aspects. As it stands, it's surprisingly unremarkable.