If you aren’t reading Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’s crime-and-cults Fatale, this is as good a time as any to start.  With the second arc having been finished in the last issue, Fatale is doing a few one-shot stories of which this issue is the first.

The series tells the long story of Josephine, a woman on the run from dark forces who possesses a hypnotic, almost addictive magnetism that makes men do crazy things for her.  She’s also strangely ageless, allowing Fatale to jump across decades and styles to tell the stories of those who cross Josephine’s path.  This time the year is 1936, and Josephine has tracked down an author of pulp horror fiction, an H.P. Lovecraft analogue, in Texas.  To her, his stories ring with a certain truth, tell of things that must be seen to be conceived.  Things she’s seen.

As the first arc in the 1940s was hard-boiled noir and the second, in the 1970s, was rather grindhouse, so this story works in the style of pulp horror of the first half of the century, and Lovecraft’s in particular.  The whole series has a Lovecraftian overtone, and nowhere is it more prominent than in this issue.  This is a formula that Brubaker’s moody dialogue and Phillips’s shadowy art make work, issue after issue.

Fatale #11 is a great jumping-on point for new readers, introducing the all-important character of Josephine well on its own and offering up a one-and-done story that both satisfies and leaves the series’ loose ends still loose.  Regular readers will find that Fatale is in top form with this shift to one-shot stories, and might be pleased at the greater emphasis this one gives to the Lovecraftian elements that haven’t been quite as strong during the last arc.  This is definitely the time to check this title out.