So I Read Velvet: The Secret Lives Of Dead Men

A 250 word (or less) review of Velvet Vol. 2
by Ed Brubaker, Steve Epting, Bettie Breitweiser, and Chris Eliopoulos; Image Comics

This is a review of an ongoing comic. To read about the first chapter go here.

Velvet is a comic about Velvet Templeton, the unassuming secretary to the head of a clandestine espionage agency who is secretly a deadly spy. In the first chapter Velvet reactivates herself to uncover a traitor responsible for the deaths of agency spies and finds herself framed as a potential mole. In The Secret Lives of Dead Men, Velvet begins to execute her own plan to find the identity of the traitor and to outsmart the men hunting her. Velvet Vol. 2 is a properly good espionage story. In some ways I felt that the first chapter of Velvet, while a gorgeous and well written comic, was more interesting as a concept exploration, what if the cliched Bond secretary were the real secret agent, than as a thrilling spy story. Velvet Vol. 2 manages to build on that fantastic premise and create an engaging plot filled with twists, betrayals, lies, tension, and all of the action that the espionage genre demands. Velvet: The Secret Lives of Dead Men, completely aside from the fun premise, manages to be a fantastic and stylish spy story that will have you frantically turning pages. It's a great comic.

Word count: 193

Previously:
Velvet Vol. 1

So I Read The Fade Out: Act One

A 250 word (or less) review of The Fade Out Vol. 1
by Ed Brubaker, Sean Philips, and Elizabeth Breitweiser; Image Comics

The Fade Out is a murder mystery set in the Golden Age of Hollywood. In the comic Charlie Parish, the screenwriter of a troubled Noir picture, wakes up after a long night drinking and finds himself face to face with the dead body of Valeria Sommers, the starlet of the picture. Charlie, hazy on the details and knowing how it looks, flees the scene and runs right into a Noir tale worthy of the Silver Screen. The Fade Out is a difficult comic to review; so much of the pleasure of reading it is the unfolding of the mystery and the gradual construction of the story world. To tell you anymore about the premise would be a disservice. What I will say is that this is a very good comic: The Fade Out is a comic built out of Old Hollywood style. It has all of the class and glamour of classic film and all of the war trauma, sex, abuse, eccentricity, injustice, and straight up crime that existed unseen around the studios of the Golden Age. The Fade Out is a comic that at once revels in nostalgia while also complicating the past. It's also cool as hell. Basically, if you want to read an engrossing murder mystery filled with intriguing characters in superlative setting, than The Fade Out Act One is just about the perfect comic.

Word count: 228

Post by Michael Bround

So I Read Fatale: Curse The Demon

Or a 250 word (or less) review of Fatale Vol. 5
by Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips, Bettie Breitweiser; Image Comics

To read a *SPOILER* free review of Fatale, go here.

Fatale is a comic about Josephine, an enigmatic woman cursed to be a literal femme fatale. In previous chapters we have seen how an eternally young and beautiful Jo has run afoul of men through history, manipulating them with her magic, and destroying them with her curse. In Curse The Demon we see the conclusion of the story where the various plot threads somehow all unite and we see Josephine take ownership of her power and execute a plan to finally gain her freedom. It is a story as visceral, bloody, psychedelic and horrific as the series demands and really delivers the conclusion this great story deserves. It is also a comic that exemplifies maybe the largest common genre trope of the Horror and Noir that Fatale is built of: inevitable doom. Both Cosmic Horror and Crime Noir are built on the promise that for the protagonist there is only an unhappy ending, and whether by consequence or the unfeeling gaze of terrifying alien gods, the protagonists are ultimately gloriously fucked. And Fatale delivers on this promise with excruciating perfection. I cannot recommend this comic enough.

Word count: 186

Post by Michael Bround

Previously:

Fatale: Death Chases Me

Fatale: The Devil's Business

Fatale: West of Hell

Fatale: Prey for Rain

Deep Sequencing: Velvety Colours

Or the use of cinematic lighting in Velvet
by Ed Brubaker, Steve Epting, Bettie Breitwesier, Chris Eliopoulus; Image Comics

Velvet is a comic built out of cinematic espionage cool. In the comic, Velvet Templeton is the confidential secretary for the director of super-secret espionage group ARC-7. When a field agent is killed Velvet is implicated and forced to flee from her erstwhile colleagues. Which reveals a secret: Velvet, the middle-aged secretary, might be the finest secret agent alive. It's a thrilling comic that plays with familiar espionage tropes, subverts sexist expectations, and examines the neglected women of the espionage genre. It's pretty great.

It's also a comic done in a really interesting cinematic style that combines photo-realistic drawings with the colour lighting of vintage film.

While I love the total look of Velvet, I find the aspect I most want to explore is the colouring. Velvet has a very painted style that makes heavy use of light and shadow which I think helps sell the cinematic feel of the comic and create this wonderful sense of reality on every page. It looks really good and works beautifully with the pencils and inks to create a really effective comic.

Which is somewhat weird for me: I usually prefer simplified flat colours to the elaborate painting of Velvet-style colours. Flat colours, particularly when married to simplified colour palettes reduce the amount of stuff the reader has to process and often makes the reader focus more on the nuances of the line art and inking. Which can really help make a page feel more kinetic and animated. Add in the emotion that can be generated by carefully curating the simplified colour palette and flat colours can really work in the background to enhance the final comic. The case that Velvet makes is that rendered, highly detailed colours can look just as good as the best flat colours and can be involved in some pretty nifty storytelling.

In this post I want to explore some of the cool, cinematic effects that arise form this style of colouring.

There will of course be *SPOILERS* For Velvet Vol. 1.

One of the greatest advantages of this kind of painted style is how it deals with darkness. In the real world we are very seldom in true, total darkness. Instead we are usually close to some faint, residual light source that partially illuminates the murk providing highlights, brighter areas, and soft, deep shadows. This is particularly true in film where the very nature of the medium requires a certain amount of light to make the cameras work. The painted style of Velvet depicts this perfectly: painted highlights replicate the glow of the light source and then transition smoothly into the judicious black of the inks. It's a look that creates an organic sense of depth to the darkness that feels at once very authentic and very cinematic. Which works splendidly to create the atmosphere of standing in a darkened, shaded room or prowling naked through a lovers belongings while they sleep. It's great comics that can't be accomplished as well in a flatter colouring style.

Velvet's painted style shines through even more when depicting rainy London nights. If urban darkness is defined by light sources, then a rainy night is defined by reflective surfaces. When it rains every wet surface becomes a mirror for surrounding light sources and rain droplets themselves can act as refractive points of light. So making an exciting looking rainy night is all about depicting light in accurate and dynamic ways. Velvet's masterful use of light highlights and wonderfully painted reflections absolutely nails the look and drama of a rainy evening. Which, when viewed in contrast with more conventionally coloured comics, helps set Velvet apart as a cinematic experience. This is also something that painted-style comics can do that flat comics can't; it's pretty amazing stuff.

Another scene that I thought Velvet did especially well was a flash back at a beach resort. The way the colouring captures the suffused glow of tropical sunlight is pretty great. In my limited experience, visiting equatorial places comes with a certain light quality that is quite different than the sunlight of my native Canada, and Velvet absolutely captures this. Velvet also does a really good job depicting the way light interacts with water, and the spray of waves: I am absolutely transported to the beach. This scene is another really great example of just how masterfully light can be used in comics.

Velvet is a great comic for many reasons, from the genre and gender convention challenging story to the evocative pencils, to the vintage cool. It is completely worth checking out just as a comic. But, if you are a comic wonk like me, this is also a comic worth reading to see how the inks and colours work together to tame light and how effective this can be in storytelling. While I might usually prefer flat colours, Velvet really makes a case for how special painted-style comics can be when they are done really well. Because the results are gorgeous. 

Post by Michael Bround

Previously:

So I Read Velvet Vol. 1

So I Read Velvet: Before The Living End

Or a 250 word (or less) review of Velvet Volume 1
by Ed Brubaker, Steve Epting, and Betty Breitweiser, Chris Eliopoulos; Image Comics

Everyone loves a good spy story. A story about a debonair secret agent man off fighting, killing, and seducing for the safety of his government. It's a classic male power fantasy. But what if the story wasn't about the dashing secret agent man, but was instead about his boss' middle-aged secretary? And what if she was secretly the greatest agent of all? Velvet tells the story of Velvet Templeton, the confidential secretary for the director of ARC-7, a pan-NATO super secret agency. When agent X-14 is killed on a mission gone wrong, ARC-7 is thrown into disarray in an internal manhunt. A manhunt that soon turns to Velvet, unleashing her secret past as an agent, and sending her on a mission to discover who is the true traitor. Velvet is a comic of pure class: a retro dream of classic spy action rendered in beautiful, cinematic shadow and colour. It's like a classic espionage movie poster sprung to life with all of the class, sex, and danger inherent in its promise. Velvet is also emblematic of the mercenary value of exploring women in fiction: this is a really engaging comic that explores the stories of women in a genre that tends to treat them like props and finds some incredible stuff there. If you are a dude looking for the whats-in-it-for-me of depicting women in fiction, stories like this are one of the reasons why you should care about diversity in media. But mostly Velvet is just a great comic.

Word count: 250

So I Read Fatale: Pray For Rain

A 250 word (or less) review of Fatale: Volume 4
by Ed Brubaker, Sean Philips, and Elizabeth Breitweiser; Image Comics

Fatale: Pray for Rain continues the story of Jo, an immortal woman cursed to be the literal femme fatale with the power to control and captivate the men around her at the cost of driving them to madness and ruin. The current chapter primarily focuses on her life in the 1990s when an accident leaves her without her memory and sends her crashing into the wreckage of a Seattle Grunge band in the aftermath of Cobain's suicide. What's cool about Pray for Rain is just how alive it feels: as great as the other chapters of Fatale have been, they've felt like well-crafted stories, while this chapter feels like an anecdote of personal history. It’s easily my favourite chapter in the series so far. Pray for Rain also makes apparent that Fatale, as much as it plays with the idea of the femme fatale as a character archtype in a variety of settings, is also playing with the different genre/types of horror in period appropriate ways. Previous chapters have seen Jo tossed into a 1930s monster horror, 1950s lovecraftian horror, and a 1970s cult/Helter-Skelter horror, while Jo-like characters also appear in a medieval fearsome fairytale and a scary American western yarn. This chapter sees Jo right in the middle of a 90s slasher film in the very 90s milieu of urban Seattle. Fatale: Pray for Rain really cements for me what a smart, engaging comic the series is and why everyone really should be reading it.

Word count: 246

Previously:

Fatale: Death Chases Me

Fatale: The Devil's Business

Fatale: West of Hell

So I Read Fatale: West of Hell

A 250 word (or less) review of the third Fatale collection

By Ed Brubaker, Sean Philips, Elizabeth Breitweiser, and Dave Stewart

Fatale is Ed Brubaker and Sean Philips excellent Lovecraftain Horror, Noir Crime comic about Josephine, a woman cursed to be a literal femme fatale. Jo has been gifted with seemingly eternal youth and the ability to influence the men around her, but with the price that she eventually drives the majority of them insane and inevitably brings them to ruin. The core story of the series is a sort of crime comic about Jo's relationship to Nick Lash, a young man with a family history tied to Jo and knotted with her curse. West of Hell shifts the focus away from this main story and instead shows us some of Jo's backstory as well as tales of other women afflicted with her curse. Basically, it is really gripping background for the series that reveals some of the mysterious forces in play. But beyond that, West of Hell dose some really neat things with its core concepts. Fatale is, as much as anything, a meditation and exploration of the archetypical character of the femme fatale. By setting its chapters in different settings: a traditional Lovecraftian horror story, a medieval witch/fairy tale, a western, and a war story; West of Hell displays how the femme fatale and heroines in general function within genre fiction. And beyond that, the comic shows how character tropes can transfer between subgenres and function in different milieus. Fatale: West of Hell is pretty damn clever and a great collection of comics.

Word count: 244

Previously:

Fatale: Death Chases Me

Fatale: The Devil's Business