Fatale #16 – Review

By: Ed Brubaker (story), Sean Phillips (art), Elizabeth Breitweiser (colors)

The Story: Jo proves that being a groupie and a muse are not mutually exclusive roles.

The Review: “Magical realism” was a term we threw around a lot back in my creative writing days.  It seemed a fancy concept back then, but now I think it was just people’s way of getting shoehorned into certain genres: fantasy, sci-fi, horror, occult, etc.  At any rate, the phrase is a useful way of describing the most convincing supernatural elements, the kind that feel as though they can exist, barely perceptible, in the real world.

The most impressive quality of Brubaker’s craft is the how, even though he’s made it clear that a very real mysticism is at work in this series, he grounds it so well in the ordinary world that you don’t always know when you’re seeing magic or simply the spectacle of human behavior and psychology gone wrong.  This is the wellspring of one of Fatale’s most compelling questions: whether Jo’s allure comes from her unusual nature, or whether it’s simply the byproduct of being a charming, sensitive, utterly beautiful woman.