The noir stylings of FATALE ought to please fans of hard-boiled crime fiction, and for those with affection for horror, well, there’s some of that too. But probably I hardly need to tell you that.

I haven’t read much of Brubaker’s work before – the odd Marvel comic here and there, I think – but clearly he knows what he’s doing with this genre. The narration, perhaps slightly heavy-handed, works well enough to move the story along, but leaves the art to tell it. And thank the gods for that.

Phillips’s pencils are superb and automospheric. Few comics have an art style that seems to so perfectly evoke the nature of the beast, but FATALE does: dark and shadowed, sometimes shifting a bit, the details starker than the big picture.

FATALE is good – and a lot goes in. You get your money’s worth. Probably, I would think – because I feel this way – it’s going to take a couple reads to get the full twists and turns of things (my memory of #1 is a little foggy), but I can hardly imagine that’s much of chore. Hell, I’ll probably enjoy it.