Fatale and Fatale

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.