The Fade Out

Hollywood in the late 1940s. The golden age of the noir genre, in print and on the silver screen. Charlie Parish is a screenwriter struggling with his inner ghosts; he is suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome after his return from the battlefields of World War II. After a party, Charlie wakes up in a room and finds the lifeless body of Valeria Sommers, a great film diva and his friend. He had been drunk the night before and cannot remember what happened. The affair haunts him and he decides to investigate, digging deeper and deeper into a world that hides a myriad of murky secrets behind the glossy image of a 'dream factory’. Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips return to revisit the noir genre (after the beautiful Criminal and Sleeper), taking inspiration from literary masters such as Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy and films such as Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard. Phillips' digital drawings masterfully render the dark atmosphere of the story, with excellent use of black that seems to envelop the characters. The comic book is also full of quotations and references to the world of cinema, which begin as early as the title (Fade Out in English), with which each story in the miniseries opens.  

Dissolvenza a nero (The Fade Out)
Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips
Panini comics, 2018