The Fade Out #1

"The Wild Party"
Number One
written by Ed Brubaker
art by Sean Phillips

Brubaker and Phillips return to what they do best:  classic noir.  This time it's late-40s Hollywood.  Or Hollywoodland.  There's nothing horribly innovative about that.  Money, glamor, celebrity, corruption, and an indefinable mystique makes Los Angeles ready-made for its own dark underbelly and the stories it tells about itself.  After all, there was just "something in the air [that] made it easier to believe lies" (The Fade Out #1: 4).  It makes it just a little easier to dismiss the desperation.

A morning-after haze is timeless.  So is the embarrassingly inebriated friend.  Mirror lipstick is a little more mysterious.  A dead woman considerably less common.  Unless you're writing a Hollywood noir, in which case, she's all but required.

There's very little to recommend Charlie Parish, especially when it comes to women.  He wakes up in a dead woman's home, finds her strangled body, and removes evidence that he was ever there instead of calling the cops.  He barely remembers an anonymous blowjob from a (maybe?) dancer in a coat room.  He can't reconcile his patronizing estimation of publicity guru Dotty with the women who enjoyed Earl Rath's parties, a narrow reduction of women into crude categories men use to demean them when they find it convenient.  Girls you fuck and girls you protect.  Admittedly, he knows this last, though it does little to adjust his mindset.

Charlie's misogyny is nothing next to Chief of Security Phil Brodsky's racism.  A dust-up at Rath's party included a black actor named Flapjack, who apparently had sex with some MGM executive's wife (or two).  Brodsky's response:  "Yeah, lotta white women wanna fuck their hero from the goddamn 'Krazy Kids.'  Even Jew broads go for that little spook" (21).  His tolerance of so deemed "communist sympathizers" is, if possible, even less benign.

This is the cold-hearted world of The Fade Out, a world that can prioritize entertainment, conspire to eliminate scandal from the movies, and cover up a young woman's murder to do so.  That Charlie is made sick by it is actually quite winning.  Bravo!