Zeb Larson reviews The Fade Out #7…
Charlie is falling for the replacement blonde…but is he working her for information, or is she playing him for her own ends?
This issue is a first for Fade Out: it didn’t really grab me. This has always been a slow burn kind of series and it has usually eschewed action in favor of narration. This time, however, the narration didn’t do its job, and without any notable action or big reveals that would advance the plot the result was a surprisingly lifeless issue. Oh well, every series has to have a slow month, right? I will be discussing spoilers in my review of this issue, so consider yourself forewarned.
While Dottie and Tyler are talking about the next step for his career (which involves a generous amount of cajoling on Dottie’s part), Charlie and Valeria head to an isolated hotel north of Los Angeles to drink and make love. They manage to do a considerable amount of both until Valeria tells him about her screen test for Thursby. Unsurprisingly, sex was involved, and this makes Charlie suspicious. While Valeria goes to an event with Tyler, Charlie drinks at a bar and ends up in a fistfight with another writer and has to clean himself up in the restroom. In the restroom, he meets Drake Miller, and Charlie remembers where he’s seen him before: the night of Maya’s death.
It’s telling of how little happens in this issue that the above synopsis captures 95% of the comic. I have no objection to there being sex in a comic, and I have no issue with making it as explicit as the author desires. However, the scenes of Valeria and Charlie either being cute or having sex take up a surprising amount of the book this month, and the narration that accompanies them is surprisingly sparse. The sex and cute flirting becomes dull after a while. Considering that one of the strengths of The Fade Out is the neo-noir language that Brubaker is so good at, going light with it for an issue doesn’t make the book more interesting.
The plot advancement is also very minimal in this issue. I was hoping that we would start to learn a bit more about Valeria, perhaps to tease out her role as the book’s femme fatale. The scene where she talks about presenting herself to Thursby hints that Valeria knew exactly what she was doing, and that might be what made Charlie so nervous. However, that could also just be Valeria’s determination to get ahead and succeed, which we saw back in the third issue. She doesn’t get a lot of insightful dialogue apart from the Thursby scene, and there’s no narration for her either. In short, for an issue in which she’s a major presence, we don’t learn much about her. Drake Miller’s presence will be important, but as we know nothing about the night Maya was killed his significance is still unknown and murky.
So, this was an issue on the way to something else more interesting. Hopefully subsequent issues will flesh out Valeria further, and we can at least reasonable assume that Drake Miller will be important for the future.
Rating: 7.2/10
Zeb Larson
https://youtu.be/yIuEu1m0p2M?list=PL18yMRIfoszEaHYNDTy5C-cH9Oa2gN5ng
Originally published June 25, 2015. Updated April 14, 2018.
