The Fade Out #2

The Fade Out #2

 

The Cover:

Features a man smoking, motion of inhaling demonstrated by that famous universal symbol of the red burning tip of the cigarette. The man’s face is wrapped in bandages, similar to the invisible man. The red water colour ink blot that looks similar to blood as it runs down the cover is repeated from the inside cover of the first issue. Again the blood lines bleed off the cover page. Inside issue two of The Fade Out the reader discovers that the man in bandages is supposed to be Earl Rath’s character for the film he and Valeria Sommers were shooting before she was murdered. As the reader discovers, Earl did not like having his face wrapped in bandages. The scenes shot with the man in bandages is Earl’s double, Morty. What makes the cover interesting is that you cannot tell if the man on the cover is Morty or Earl, adding to the mystery of the invisible man.

 

Some comparison and tid bits on the actual movie The Invisible Man from 1933:

Here’s a movie advertisement from Universal Pictures for The Invisible Man from 1933.

The character on the cover of The Fade Out #2 does not look much like the invisible man from the movie, but the general similarity in the bandages is there. That’s a great thing about comic art, the images are representation of what the artist sees and wants to convey to the reader. In the 1933 movie The Invisible Man was played by actor Claude Rains. Claude plays the character of Dr. Jack Griffin and after his scientific misfortune becomes the invisible man. Claude looks nothing like the comic book lead actor Earl Rath.

Claude’s co-star was William Harrigan who played the character of Dr. Arthur Kemp, Claude’s laboratory assistant. Ironically, William Harrigan looks a lot like Earl Rath, in this picture from the movie The Invisible Man.

Cast of Characters:

On the cast of characters page new characters have been added: Jack “FlapJack” Jones (who knew Valeria as a kid), Melba Mason (Mel’s wife), Mr. Thursby (Founder of Victory Street Pictures), and Frank Schmitt (the director). An interesting point to note is that some of the character descriptions have been updated since the first issue, for example, Gil Mason is now listed as Charlie Parish’s best friend (because Charlie shared details of Valeria’s murder with Gil). What is great about more characters being added is that it builds the story, the reader does not get the whole list of characters from the start, as the characters enter and others die off as the series continues, it builds anticipation for what and who comes next. Brilliant!

 

What I liked and what I found interesting about The Fade Out #2:

To start with I really liked how much caption narration took place in this issue. Of the 144 panels, 49 of the panels are narration. Why I like the caption narration so much is because it increases the intertextuality between image and text. The narration does not necessarily have to speak about what is only depicted in the picture, because the picture is analyzed by the reader and based on the reader’s experience and knowledge. The reader’s involvement is what develops the image to say more about the story then the caption box can. The first page opens up to a panoramic blacked out panel with the title The Death of Me in white letters. The title is metaphoric because as the reader discovers, there are several characters who are having difficulty with the passing of Valeria Sommers. Charlie and Gil, who know that Valeria’s death was not a suicide, suffer greater difficulties as they know the truth behind the Hollywoodland studio cover-up. Perhaps this is a foreboding to the death of Gil who cannot handle the truth of knowing the secret behind the cover-up, or the death of Charlie who cannot live with himself for not going to the police and telling the truth

 

The caption narration begins with a panoramic panel depicting a cemetery with the Hollywood hills in the background. There are people dressed in funeral attire attending the burial of Valeria Sommers. The caption narration says in this panel “The funeral is a small affair, but it still feels fake to Charlie.” This line reminds the reader of the narration caption from the first issue that read “Something in the air made it easier to believe lies.” Charlie knows the truth and because he knows the truth he can’t tell who’s being truly sincere in the loss of Valeria and who’s just acting sympathetic; it would be difficult to tell in a world of actors and false reality. And this is what happens with hermeneutic text, the reader reads the caption box, looks over the image and between text and image, the reader creates meaning. This is what I liked so much about this second issue; as the reader you are constantly making associations between what is not said and what was said in the previous issue and by doing so developing an underlying story.

 

 

Now even though the reader knows that Gil knows about Charlie’s secret, Charlie also holds a secret of Gil’s. The reader knows from the first issue that Gil was a blacklisted writer in Hollywoodland. In the second issue the reader discovers that Gil was blacklisted as a communist. Charlie had shadowed under Gil as a writer before the war, and after the war Charlie could not bring himself to write, as if he had lost his craft. Gil was blacklisted so the two teamed up to write together. Gil dictated to Charlie what to write and Charlie took the credit for the writing as his own.  So even though Gil and Charlie are so opposed to fake realities and lies, they themselves are living lies and fake realities.

 

The fight scene between Charlie and Gil makes it worth discussing because it is rich with comic theory. The first thing to note is the background is now just a red colour with faded red slashes. The reader knows that the fight is taking place in the cemetery but the artist does not have to depict the cemetery background because the reader’s knowledge of the previous panels showing Charlie and Gil in the cemetery. Removing the background allows the eye to focus on the characters. The red background signifies Gil’s anger. According to the Urban Dictionary, seeing red refers to enraged anger that takes control of the individual. The sound effects are anomatopheia, which means that they are invented words that mimic sound. “Kraak” is a non-linguistic sound which can only take place in the sensory diegetic world of the story. The large capitalized letters of the sound effect display the volume and force of Gil’s fist making contact with Charlie’s face. Even though the reader does not get to see the fist make contact with Charlie’s face, the sound effect acts as the timer and point in which the contact between fist and face were made. As the reader reads the word Kraak each of those letters represent the fist and face in contact. As the reader reads the word and makes sense of the meaning, the visual movie player in the brain shows the fist making contact with the face. So even though the actual image of fist making contact with the face is not actually shown, it was seen by the reader in their own mind. When the reader has finished reading the word, making sense of the word in their head and looks to the speech balloon the fist has left the face as shown in the picture. Gil’s shouting is shown in a octagonal speech balloon, almost as if to say he can’t stop himself as he inflicts pain and curses on his only friend Charlie. The blood shown flying from Charlie’s lip is to depict that contact was made by Gil’s fist. Even if someone had never witnessed a fist fight before they could piece together the image to understand that Gil’s fist hit Charlie’s face. The blood from Charlie’s lip is an example of synecdoche because the blood represents more reality then is actually shown in the image. For example Charlie’s pain on contact of being hit by Gil’s fist cannot be illustrated, or the skin and blood vessels breaking as the fist makes contact. These ideas have to come from the readers own knowledge and experience. Personally I have never been in a fist fight before, but I can imagine what the pain would feel like from injuries I have incurred on my own.