The Dame Wore Tentacles: Fatale #1 Review

I am probably not the best person in the world to review Ed Brubaker’s and Sean Phillips’s Fatale, because I’ve spent the past several months, on my wretched morning commute, plowing through old crime and detective novels. Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Richard Stark; basically anything with a meaty crime in the middle of it that isn’t a comic book, if only so I dont have to attract a conversation with a comic book fan on a city bus. Have you seen us? We can be… awkward. But I digress.

The point is that someone like me would be the prime audience for Fatale, which if distilled down to its elevator pitch would be: “Philip Marlowe vs. the Cult of Cthulhu and Brigid O’Shaughnessy, provided Brigid’s powers of seduction were somehow supernatural in nature as opposed to the half-decent set of jugs that women need to seduce dudes in real life, by which I mean it’s okay if she only has one.”

So in short, I generally liked this book a lot… but someone like me is supposed to.

The nuts and bolts of the story are a little hard to nail down, because it jumps backwards and forwards in time. The prologue introduces one protagonist, Nicolas Lash, at the funeral of his godfather, Hank Raines, where he meets Josephine, the “fatale” in question, who claims that her grandmother was in love with selfsame godfather. Shortly after, Nicolas finds an old manuscript of his godfather’s, armed men show up to attack him, Josephine arrives just in time to help him and, being that this book is named “Fatale” and not “Manic Pixie Dream Girl,” Nicolas’s shit gets all fucked up.

We then flash back to 1956 and protagonist #2: Hank Raines, who meets (Dun dun DUNNNN!) Josephine, who looks exactly the same as she did in 2012. And here’s where we get to the real hard-boiled crime stuff that Brubaker does so well. We’ve got an intrepid journalist / detective, investigating a crooked cop who might have killed a witness, and trying to protect a femme fatale (Get it?). It sounds like Brubaker’s Criminal, except the dame doesn’t seem to age and can get men to become obsessed with her by eye contact or just by thinking real hard about it, and for some flavor there’s cultists and some kind of history with Nazi occultists.

This might sound like a mishmash, and on one level, it kind of is. The biggest gripe I have with the book is that certain things in the story feel like they came from checklists labeled “noir crime story” and “pulp horror comic.” We have a light aircraft chasing a car, because airplane equals North by Northwest, while helicopter equals Magnum P.I. We have Nazi occultists because, well, anything supernatural in a story set after 1945 is because the Nazis were occultists… completely forgetting that if they were really as good at summoning occult power as stories like Hellboy and Brubaker’s own Captain America claim, we’d all be speaking German and living in a Hentai nightmare right now. Part of me saw robed Nazis in the book and said, “Jesus, again? You know, the Reagans were into astrology; can’t we get a story where Nancy accidentally summons Yog Sothoth?”

But on the other hand, Brubaker knows his pulp crime stories. The dialogue is hard boiled like you read about: “Hank was in deep already… and he knew it. He wished he’d never met Josephine… just thinking her name was like a punch in the guts.” That’s good shit right there. And there’s enough elements of a classic crime tale here to hook me in to see what’s coming.

Sean Phillips art, as with all his crime and pulp work with Brubaker, fits perfectly. Now part of that is that, after Sleeper and Criminal and Incognito, this kind of art feels like it should match this kind of story just by habit. But the other part is that it’s the right style for pulp: thick-lined, with realistic body types, strong facial expressions in closeup and more abstract and shadowed at a distance, with heavily-inked shadows. Throw in Dave Stewart’s coloring, with a dark and limited palatte, and the look of the book oozes a pulp feel. The only problem I had with it was a storytelling blip during the plane chase – I couldn’t tell by looking if Nicolas was jumping from the car, being thrown from the car, or perhaps dry-humping the car – but if two panels out of 24 pages are the worst we see, it’s still damn solid.

I won’t deny that there are parts of this book that seem formulaic. But for good or ill, I like the formula. And considering that this is a hard-boiled noir that is about Lovecraftian Elder Gods, I’d say there plenty of time for Brubaker to break from the checklist. If you like crime stories, you owe it to yourself to at least check this out.