Fatale #22 – Review

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

The Story: Even being evil can get pretty drab after a while.

The Review: As a relative latecomer to Fatale, I feel like I’ve dealt with my lack of background knowledge pretty well. The one character I still struggle with understanding is Sommerset, Jo’s scaly, blinded archnemisis. To date, I still have no idea what his deal is. Besides the basic questions of where he comes from and what he’s after, there are more specific curiosities. Why is he scaly? How was he blinded? What’s his exact problem with Jo? With Wikipedia pretty much useless when it comes to recent Image series, I was afraid I might just be left in the dark until the end.

Fortunately, it seems that I’ve only been operating in the same darkness as everyone else, as this issue provides a fairly complete summary of Sommerset’s life from his first resurrection to his present schemes. Just to make it clear what kind of man Jo’s dealing with here, Brubaker takes us to San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake, depicting it as the product of a hellish ritual to make Sommerset into the new bishop of hell on earth, with the ensuing casualties as his empowering sacrifices. Whatever forces he’s worshipping, they are very real and very powerful.