Fatale #18 – Review

By: Ed Brubaker (story), Sean Phillips (art), Elizabeth Breitweiser (colors)

The Story: They don’t have skeletons in the closet, but do they have bodies in the basement.

The Review: I may be speaking from a position of ignorance here, but up to this point, I still don’t know if I find Jo particularly compelling as a protagonist or not.  Of course, this may just be bad timing on my part, having jumped aboard the title just when most of Jo’s personality was wiped by amnesia, but my ambivalence remains.  Not that it matters all that much.  The things that happen around her are thoroughly interesting, even if she herself remains an enigma.

For example, I still don’t know if I genuinely empathize with her or not.  All the time that she’s shedding tears, sending rivulets of mascara down her face like she had her makeup done by Alice Cooper, my instinct is to shrug.  She’s a tragic character, obviously, but looking at what happens to the people around her, I say she has very little complain about.  Of them all, she alone retains the ability to control her actions, and with that free will, she chooses to relinquish control and hide from the responsibility that entails.

Compare that to the members of the band she’s Yoko-ing.  Even after she admits to what she did to poor, rape-happy Skip, the others remain firmly under her spell, focusing on his transgressions (“That sick son of a bitch.”) instead of the fact that he’s the one lying bloated, cold, and lifeless on their bathroom tile.  Even more chilling is how prosaically they behave in cleaning up (read: hiding) his body afterward.  The way they snipe at each other for improperly handling the body (“C’mon…get his ankles…”), you’d think they were carrying a drunk friend to pass out on the couch instead of, you know, the cadaver of a man their newest roommate just murdered.

The only one who doesn’t seem to be in Jo’s thrall is Darcy, leaving her to experience the full horror of what’s happening around her with no commiseration or support.  As she watches Jon and Lance handle Skip’s corpse in plastic sheeting, “[i]t was like they weren’t even human anymore.  She just couldn’t take it.”  Her hysterical reaction, instead of waking up her friends to the depravity of their actions, merely drives them further into the deep end: “There.  I just mutilated the body…you wanna call the cops now and explain how we aren’t all accessories?”

But just as it’s impossible for Jo to ward off her memories and all the trauma they come with forever, the band’s attempts to lose themselves in potentially the greatest song of their career is a Band-Aid on a wound that’s already turning gangrenous.  Though they justify their already fragile lies as a cover-up for Lance and Jon’s bank-robbing exploits, Jo’s influence is clearly all over them.  The deception isn’t to protect themselves, but to afford Jo a little extra denial.

It all has to fall apart in the end, of course, but the thrill of seeing the characters proceed inexorably to that point is worth the inevitability.  Just as Darcy’s breaking-point anxiety provides some of the issue’s most powerful drama, Jon seeing the horrors taking place in front of him, the horrors he himself is partially generating, yet incapable of stopping, gets your heart pumping practically in time to the issue’s inaudible soundtrack.  When the music stops, setting off the chain reaction towards the band’s doom, you can’t help hitching your breath at Jon’s hopeless expression and the fact that Jo has left them high and dry in their worst hour.

Phillips is a very fine drawer of figures, but it’s the psychological tension that comes through the characters that makes Fatale a standout book.  His post-impressionist style is perfect for evoking the eerie events taking place, with some panels haunting you long after the initial viewing.  One of the best panels in the issue is a close-up of Lance, eyes closed, singing his heart out like there’s nothing in the world except beautiful music, and Jon in the foreground, staring straight at you with jaw-clenching, wide-eyed expression of utter terror.  Breitwiser uses color to provide tonal unity to the issue; when Jo begins to dance, her power appears as a warm, shimmering glow, not only in the studio where the band’s filming their music video, but streaking across Wulf’s face as he begins to beat a hooker to death or against the naked, bloody body of Sommerset as he reaches out blindly for the woman he can sense but not see.

Conclusion: There are some titles out there that are wonderfully engaging for your imagination or intellect, but none come nearly as close as Fatale in appealing to the dark side of your conscious mind.

Grade: A-

– Minhquan Nguyen

Some Musings: – I kind of have to wonder what the concept for this music video is to begin with, that they need male extras dressed like Mormons and female extras looking like nurses from the fifties, down to the pillbox hats.