Page 45 Review by Stephen
Warning: do not read this if you're already coming undone!
This will unravel you further. You will be thrown into the headlights about to blind Jacob and wonder what on earth bloody hit you.
Each and every CRIMINAL graphic novel noir is a twisted masterpiece of multi-layered malfeasance but this one is so fucked up it's not true. As are its protagonists - all of them. Remember I wrote that when you approach the dénouement, start seeing things from other points of view, then realise that what you've been reading is a lie. Or at least not the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
So help you, God.
From the creators of Page 45's current Comicbook Of The Month, THE FADE OUT comes a fourth instalment of CRIMINAL whose first volume was itself a Page 45 CBOTM and whose penultimate chapter comes with a twist of genius I did not see coming. Unfortunately for Jacob, its lust-struck protagonist, document forger and detective newspaper comic strip creator, neither did he. Let us begin.
Do you wish you'd gotten involved when you saw that couple fight?
Most of the time you instinctively fear for the woman. Not always - I've known some men get a right battering too - but usually you fear for the woman.
Jacob didn't get involved that night in the diner; he backed right away. He'd already experienced enough grief in his life when his wife drove off a road in a storm, the car landing in an old culvert pipe where it - and she - lay undiscovered for years while the police questioned him with dogged determination and malice, even leaking his supposed guilt to the press.
But while driving home in the rain Jacob saw the woman once more, flagging a lift, and he pulled in. She was drunk - real booze-breath drunk. Then, a few minutes later, she was passed-out drunk in his passenger seat.
She hadn't had time to tell him where she lived so he took her to his house, heaved her into his home and onto the couch. Being a gentleman, that's where Jacob left her, but later that night she was grateful, so very grateful and she showed him her gratitude exactly as you're imagining.
But it wasn't too long before he wished that she hadn't, and that he hadn't got involved at all. Now the couple are in his home and he can't get them out. Can you imagine why from what I have written?
Now the couple have leverage. Now the couple have a plan.
No. No, I have not given the game away. I have but alluded and which elements are important I won't even tell you.
This is much, much more tortuous than you can imagine.
This is petrifying.
