Fatale #11

Written by Ed Brubaker
Art by Sean Phillips

I love the fact that Ed Brubaker has decided to make Fatale an on-going series instead of limiting it to the sixteen or so issues he'd originally intended, mostly because it gives him the space to tell stories like the one in this issue.

This is kind of a 'Times Past' one-off, checking in with Josephine back in 1936, at a time when she still hadn't figured out everything about herself and her abilities.  When the book opens, she's convinced a police officer in Texas to take her across the state, ruining his own life in the process.

Jo goes to visit Alfred Ravenscroft, a writer of mystical pulp stories, who Jo thinks may know something about her and her situation.  Ravenscroft's story is a strange one, encompassing his own brush with the otherworldly as a boy in Mexico in the 1890s, which has had a lasting effect on him and his mother.

This is a strange issue, and while it doesn't reveal a whole lot more about Jo, it does suggest that there is a lot more to Fatale than its central character.  We start to get a sense of the larger forces at work in this series, and this story provides Brubaker the chance to include the pulps that this series is a love letter to.