@ Newsarama: Fatale #1
Phillips' art takes a nearly imperceptible shift away from his usual Criminal work. He’s embracing his inner classic EC artist as he’s able to draw a comic not as grounded in our reality as Criminal has to be. Fatale #1 is more suggestive than anything we’ve seen him draw lately. The storytelling and pacing in Criminal and Incognito was all about building suspense in the moment of the panel. Playing with very familiar genres, Brubaker and Phillips don’t have to do a lot of world building in either of those series. Those worlds (superheroes and neo-noir) are practically pre-built in our imaginations nowadays. With Fatale #1, they almost have to take a step back and show the reader how to read it. The suspense in this issue is built not through our expectations of the story, but through the panel-to-panel pacing and the story elements that happen in the shadows.