In San Francisco, luxury is just another trap. Fatal-Ray is a noir crime comic about a hitman stuck behind the wheel of power, money, and a very sharp sword of Damocles.

Fatal-Ray is a hard-boiled crime thriller graphic novel set in San Francisco, packed with brutal action, mafia problems, and a hitman who never gets a clean exit.

Author’s Words

When I started drawing Fatal-Ray on January 2, 2025, I didn’t decide I was going to make noir. It just became that.

A friend of mine actually said it doesn’t need color. One thing just led to another and I ended up making a crime noir comic. There’s another funny thing too. I started making Fatal-Ray with the attitude that it would be like movies such as Casino, Good Fellas, or Scarface in comic form. But what happened was that Fatal-Ray found its own voice thanks to those earlier influences. Readers can decide that, because as the creator I’m obviously biased to say it myself. But I do know this: when I write dialogue, I hear Ray in my head, not Robert De Niro. Besides Ray there are other characters too, but more important than any human character might be the city of San Francisco, which provides the stage for everything. I chose San Francisco because its history is full of events I can use in the story. And anything that serves the story and its characters is a reason for me to make those decisions.

Why I ended up making a gangster story:

Over the years, there have been studies about how many people work in a place they don’t want to be in. Fatal-Ray began when I started thinking about what kind of workplace would be an extreme example of that. Because I couldn’t think of a worse job than being a hired killer for a criminal organization, everything grew from there.

Ray Lombardo works in a place he doesn’t want to be, and he can’t just walk away. He has to do things he doesn’t want to do, but he has no choice. It eats away at him, and he struggles with it. Even though the comic has action and satire, one of its most important qualities is getting inside Ray’s head, where a lot of painful thoughts keep circling. Fatal-Ray is a psychologically charged crime noir comic, and the deeper the story goes, the more readers can begin to understand why this guy does what he does, and above all how he ended up here.

It’s time. Drawing takes time, and even though I’m a fairly fast illustrator, it still feels like the days disappear at record speed. In 2025 I drew over 200 pages of a crime noir comic, and it still didn’t feel like enough.

The other challenge is coming up with different ways to kill someone so it looks like an accident. In Fatal-Ray, the core idea is removing people without the system catching on to the criminals. Ray is a master manipulator who sets people up in the right places so an “accident” can happen, but as the writer, my job is to first come up with something that surprises both the victim and the reader.

What do I find the most challenging in this whole project?