Brubaker & Phillips are rocking Hollywood Noir with ‘THE FADE OUT.’

Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips are a comic book power couple. Even if I’m not obsessive over all their collaborations, their names alone are enough for me to get intrigued. Maybe even marginally jacked + pumped. Right off the bat. Their latest effort to be revealed is some straight-up Hollywood Noir shit. The Fade Out.

Writer Ed Brubaker and artist Sean Phillips have collaborated on a number of different spins of the noir variety over the years: hard-luck stories (Criminal), supervillain parables (Incognito), even mixing in Lovecraftian on occasion  (Fatale). Now, the creative team is taking on another aspect of noir: old Hollywood’s seedy underbelly.

The first project announced since the two inked their five-year carte blanche deal with Image Comics, The Fade Out will kick off August 20 with a 40-page first issue which will include exclusive back-matter articles not to be collected in later editions. Readers can also buy an oversized “movie magazine replica” edition of The Fade Out #1, with eight extra pages of art.

Image’s press release about the new series describes it thusly:

An intricate and groundbreaking crime story on a level Brubaker and Phillips have never tackled before, THE FADE OUT weaves a tangled web through the underbelly of a 1948 Hollywood… A noir film stuck in endless reshoots. A writer plagued with nightmares from the war and a dangerous secret. An up-and-coming starlet’s suspicious death. And a maniacal studio mogul and his security chief who will do anything to keep the cameras rolling before the Post-War boom days come crashing down. THE FADE OUT is the most ambitious series yet from the award-winning Noir Masters. [Comics Alliance]