The Fade-Out by Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips, and Elizabeth Breitweiser

[spindizzy]

Brubaker and Phillips' newest hit series, The Fade Out, is an epic noir set in the world of noir itself, the backlots and bars of Hollywood at the end of its Golden Era. A movie stuck in endless reshoots, a writer damaged from the war and lost in the bottle, a dead movie star and the lookalike hired to replace her. Nothing is what it seems in the place where only lies are true.

I can't tell if The Fade Out is trying to subvert the "starlet dies in Hollywood sleaze" tropes or play them straight. A script writer with PTSD and writers' block - who specifically threw his ghost-writer under the McCarthyism bus - wakes up after a drunken party to find an actress dead next to him. He removes any evidence of his presence, only to find that the murder itself gets covered up, which means that someone else knows and he doesn't know who.

I'll be honest: it made me want to read Angel City again. The art here is fine, and the level of sleaze feels plausibly noir, but after the first chapter I was bored of white men having feelings about dead women. I appreciate that it's probably intended as commentary on how the film industry protects white men from consequences, but that didn't make it any less frustrating to read. It does introduce a female protagonist eventually (who a lot of men have feelings about!), but by that point I was already bored and not in the mood for more stories about gross men trying to take advantage.

Maybe it gets better later, but for me, it wasn't worth the effort.

[Caution warning: murder, abuse, PTSD, racism]

Originally posted at ladybusiness.