The Fade Out, Act One
Written by Ed Brubaker
Illustrated by Sean Phillips
Colored by Elizabeth Breitweiser
Image Comics
Release Date: February 25, 2015
Cover Price: $9.99

If you like your crime noir with an extra dose of darkness, Ed Brubaker has you covered in The Fade Out, Act One from Image Comics.

The setting is Hollywood, 1948, and the cast of characters runs the gamut from sleazy studio security to Clark Gable himself. The story opens as our protagonist Charlie, a screenwriter secretly struggling with PTSD from WWII, discovers the dead body of the leading lady in his current work-in-progress.

What follows is a spiral of drunken blackouts, suspicious memories, and foggy familiarity. Charlie finds himself on the fringes of a studio-constructed murder coverup and doesn’t even know if he might be the killer.

Talk about a bad night.

Oink: Heaven’s Butcher
Written and Illustrated by John Mueller
Edited by Daniel Chabon
Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: March 10, 2015
Cover Price: $17.99

I should admit straight away that I wasn’t quite prepared for what I’d find when I cracked open Oink: Heaven’s Butcher by John Mueller from Dark Horse Comics. On the surface it looked like a horror comic with fantastic artwork that featured a race of pig-people, but once I got a few pages deeper I discovered that Oink was loaded with some pretty dark and disturbing themes instead of just your typical blood and gore.

Descender #1
Written by Jeff Lemire
Illustrated by Dustin Nguyen
Lettered by Steve Wands
Cover by Dustin Nguyen
Image Comics
Release Date: March 4, 2015
Cover Price: $2.99

I took a break from my usual horror reads this week to dip into a bit of sci-fi with Descender #1 by Jeff Lemire from Image Comics. I have absolutely no regrets for that decision.

First of all, take a good, close look at that cover. See that? Yep, that’s watercolor and pencil, and it isn’t just on the cover — it makes up every single page of this book.

Real watercolor and pencil.

You may know that Ron Perlman was a beast long before he donned the horns and red skin of Hellboy, and that Linda Hamilton was certainly a beauty before she became the iconic Sarah Connor in the Terminator films, but did you know that one of the people at the reins of their rise to fame in the Beauty and the Beast TV series on CBS was George R.R. Martin?

That’s right — before penning the slaughter of entire families in his A Song of Ice and Fire books, which were adapted into HBO’s Game of Thrones, Martin was juggling a delicate love story during an era where violence on television was limited to fake bullet wounds and energetic shoving matches.

ElfQuest: The Final Quest #2
Script by Wendy Pini & Richard Pini
Art by Wendy Pini
Colors by Sonny Strait
Letters by Nate Piekos of Blambot
Cover by Wendy Pini
Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: March 26, 2014
Cover Price: $3.50

The legendary fantasy series ElfQuest rekindled the spark for many fans with its recent comeback, and the story in ElfQuest: The Final Quest #2 by Richard Pini and Wendy Pini from Dark Horse turns those sparks into flames.

With more than three decades of storytelling under their belts, it’s no wonder the Pini team has amassed such a voracious following of their feisty Wolf Rider tribe. ElfQuest: The Final Quest #2 continues the battle from the previous issue, but punctuates the action with pauses of tender emotion and sensual moments that fans have come to expect. (Don’t let the Wendy Pini’s fresh-faced elves fool you into thinking this is a fantasy for kids””ElfQuest is definitely a series for more mature readers.)