The Fade Out: Volume 1
By Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, Image Comics, 120 pages, $11.50
Hollywood, 1948: The folks who make the movies are haunted by war and hounded by the House Un-American Activities Committee, as the studio system teeters and shades of noir blot out the sunshine. A rising young starlet is found dead in her home and dismissed as a suicide – though screenwriter Charlie Parish could swear he saw her murdered, during one of his booze-sodden blackouts. Muddling his way through backlot intrigue and studio subterfuge, Charlie takes his first drunken steps toward finding her killer in this first volume of the new series from haute-pulp specialists Brubaker and Phillips. The set-up may seem overly familiar, as might the cast of archetypical players – the mogul, the siren, the fey matinee idol and cigar-chomping security chief. But writer Brubaker manages to avoid cliché by grounding it all in a vivid sense of time and place, a vanished L.A. made tangible thanks to Phillips's craggily stylized art, rumpled but glamorous.
Hurricane Isle and Other Adventures: The Best of Captain Easy and Wash Tubbs
By Roy Crane, Fantagraphics, 320 pages, $49.95
For a short while in the 1920s, a bespectacled half-pint named George Washington Tubbs II was the unlikely star of the first action-adventure strip in the funny pages, saving damsels and thwarting pirates. But once Captain Easy swaggered out of a Mitteleuropean dungeon, Roy Crane's Wash Tubbs had a new main attraction: a blue-blooded brawler, squint-eyed and strapping, Easy was the prototype for countless silver-screen he-men yet to come. This selection of Wash and Easy's "best" provides ample opportunity for Crane to spin out picaresque yarns of shipwrecks, rum-running, jailbreaks and other feats of derring-do, all while indulgently drawing exotic locales and dastardly villains (which, in that era, could mean unfortunate detours into Orientalism and racial caricature). Despite this edition's emphasis on stories from early in Crane's run, the strip gets leaner and more propulsive as it goes along, culminating with a celebrated sequence aboard an old-fashioned whaler. As the crew harpoons their prey, or mutinies in desperation, Crane's cartooning achieves a brute and curious grace.
Here Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera
By Richard Kraft with Danielle Dutton, Siglio Press, 64 pages, $40
Not just kitty, but a whole bestiary of odd creatures comes out to prance around in Richard Kraft's collaged "comic opera." Using the panels from an old Polish anti-Nazi spy comic as a base from which to work, Kraft improvises a new and arcane storyline entirely his own, clipping out and pasting all manner of monkeys, gymnasts, gods and hot dogs over top of the espionage drama playing out beneath these manic assemblages. This genre of patchwork picture-stories stretches back to Max Ernst's surrealist collage-novels – a pedigree that privileges unconscious associations more than linear narrative. Kraft's book is duly dreamlike and mystical, excerpting text and imagery from biblical stories, Hindu iconography, found photos and children's primers, and collapsing them all into palimpsestic visions and portmanteau people. The raucous paper opera is regularly "interrupted" with prose poem entr'actes by Danielle Dutton, before returning to its elaborate system of motifs and patterns, pitting sense against nonsense in a way that's both cosmic and buoyantly childlike.