The Fade Out #8

Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips's Hollywood noir series reaches its eighth chapter with a cover that pulls no punches — a hard-edged man in a fedora and trenchcoat levels a revolver directly at the viewer, a smear of vivid red bleeding behind him like a wound in the composition. Sean Phillips's painterly cover work gives the image a tense, pulpy immediacy that feels right at home in the shadowy world of 1940s Tinseltown. "A Dead Giveaway" promises the series is still deep in dangerous territory.