A pretty good week of releases this week, with one book topping my stack for pick of the week. While we’ll get to that in a moment, a quick nod to the first issue of Higher Earth #1 from BOOM! this week, with an interesting premise and a nice price (just a dollar), and Mind the Gap #1 from Image from last week, with it’s gorgeous art and nice mystery, was pretty great too. On to what got my pick this week.
Fatale #5 is my pick for this week. The conclusion to the first arc to this maxi-series, this issue brings a nice first act to a close. Brubaker and Phillips’ partnership is one that all but guarantees a quality product, and seeing how successful this series is becoming is almost enough to regain a bit of your faith in readers. The stories of Hank, Walter, and Jo all coalesce nicely here, and we finally see the mysterious Mr. Bishop. The horror elements are at their most obvious here, an appropriate time with the slow burn build up of the last four issues. The mystery of what’s in the box is played well here as well. Brubaker and Phillips are really delivering something unlike any other books on the market with this story, with such a delicious mix of pulp noir and H.P. Lovecraft-style horror. I find that horror is something difficult to achieve in most mediums, and in graphic storytelling in particular. The reader easily can spoil a shocking moment just in a cursory glance, so achieving actual moments of surprise and horror can be rare. By utilizing an H.P. Lovecraft approach to the horror elements here, with mood and atmosphere leading the reader to make the horror more cerebral, Fatale actually achieves where countless other comic stories fail. As I stated above, this issue is technically the end of the first story arc, so readers wanting to jump on and get the whole story might be better advised to check out the upcoming first trade paperback due out in June.
There you have it folks, your pick for the week. I’ll see you back here next week, same time, same channel.