In an unusual coincidence, I have been reading two things titled
Fatale. The first is the comic
Fatale by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips and in a word, it is awesome. A Lovecraftian-noir comic is a good description of it. And I think it is a really great example of how good comics can be - this story would be too hard to do effectively as a movie and would lack its visual punch if done as a novel. As a comic, it is brilliant. It is an incredibly fun and exciting thing to read. (Also, it reminds me of the RPG Call of Cthulhu I played as a kid - and one about espionage called, I think, Top Secret - which we used to add Cthulhu stuff to.) And another thing - in addition to the great art in this series, the coloring is fantastic. It is done by Dave Stewart, whose work I know from Hellboy and B.P.R.D. I don't know much about coloring and lack the technical ability to describe the work but it just looks perfect.
The other
Fatale I've been reading is the novel by Jean-Patrick Manchette, recently translated and attractively published by the New York Review of Books. A slim novel, it concerns a woman who is on a killing spree in France. I'm not done reading it yet but I am enjoying it immensely. I wish more were available in English by Manchette. I have another novel of his,
The Prone Gunman. And there is another I will soon buy. I know he has done some work with Jacques Tardi (or maybe Tardi has adapted Manchette's work into graphic novels) and I will be looking into those soon.
