Incognito: Bad Influences #4 – Review

By: Ed Brubaker (writer), Sean Phillips (art & letters) and Val Staples (colors)

The Story: Zack Overkill continues his dive into ethically troubling waters by playing a super-villain who went into witness protection and now is back undercover with the bad buys.

What’s Good: This comic just exudes pulp and noir goodness.  Even on a page where not a whole lot is happening, Brubaker’s narration boxes make you feel like you’re watching some old pulpy movie with gangsters around every corner.  It is a joy to read Zack’s deep dive back into the world of villainy and see how he is both enticed and disgusted by his old lifestyle.

This issue has lots of little goodies in it: the bar for super-villains (as distinct from a true “hideout”), well choreographed fight scenes, the always entertaining psychic interplay between the imprisoned alpha-villain Black Death and his attorney and even a seriously screwed up bloodfight between two children for the amusement of the villains.  Just read it and enjoy.

Phillips does a great job of telling the story with his panels.  I don’t think you ever look at a panel in Incognito and are confused about what is going on.  The fight scenes are all well done and the action makes sense.  His characters always have a lot of energy about them even if they are merely walking.  And, again, I love the colors by Staples in this issue.  He does such a good job of establishing the mood for a scene that it is easy to take for granted, but the real star from a coloring perspective is a psychedelic scene at the end where Staples gets to play with a lot of colors bright greens, pinks and yellows that wouldn’t ordinarily show up in Incognito.

Incognito: Bad Influences #3 – Review

By: Ed Brubaker (writer), Sean Phillips (art) and Val Staples (colors)

The Story: Zack is in the soup now.

What’s Good: This is a series that you need to be reading.  Ed Brubaker is writing an awesome gritty/noir type story and Sean Phillips and Val Staples are illustrating the hell out of it.

So far in this series, we’ve seen the heroes send reformed super-villain, Zack Overkill, back into the den of villains to catch a rogue undercover good-guy.  How insane is that?  That would be like a move called Goodfellas II where the FBI sent Henry Hill back into the mob.  Of course, the mob would just kill Henry the second he walked into their hideout.  Imagine the tension of that scene and you can appreciate what happens in this issue with Zack going right into the super-villains HQ and asking questions.

I’ve heard a few commentators say how much more they enjoy Criminal than Incognito, but this storyline illustrates something that you could never do in Criminal.  A bad guy can’t go into witness protection and then get sent back in the Criminal world.  He’d last about 5 seconds before he was killed.  But because the characters in Incognito are powered, they can do things like this just because Zack is a bigger badass than 99% of the villains.  They might want to kill him but they can’t. And Zack knows they want to kill him and it’s only a matter of time before they gang up on him or bring in someone even more powerful than him.  The clock is ticking….  And, there’s always the chance that Zack could go bad again.

Even though it might sound like this series has a lot of flips and flops with people changing sides, you’ll have no trouble keeping up.  I generally don’t like those types of stories because I find the betrayals and changing-of-sides to be way too predictable, but Brubaker is writing this at a very high level where the readers are constantly off balance.

I’m not sure how this comic would work with another artist and I wouldn’t want to find out.  This is the type of stuff that Sean Phillips was born to draw.  He’s a very versatile artist and can draw in a lot of different styles, but this dark/moody style is so perfect.  One thing that I love about this work is Phillips’ clear sense of where the light source is in a panel, and because he handles this with his inks, Staples doesn’t have to worry so much about adding glistening highlights to the hero’s deloids and pecs.  That frees him up to color the panel so that it projects the proper emotion to the reader and his coloring of a few scenes with fires is just awesome.

What’s Not So Good: This isn’t a huge critique, but this is a middle issue of a bigger story, so we ‘re done with the awesomeness of the basic idea of the story, but we’re not yet to the climax.  So, there’s a limit to how awesome such an issue can be.  That’s drama.

Also, I want Phillips to draw guns a little better (e.g. Slaughter’s rifle).  He’s such a talented artist who does such awesome still-life drawings and does all the “professional illustrator” stuff like drawing cars and lamps and street signs, that I just feel like we can get better firearms out of him than we do sometimes.  Just one of my little pet peeves in comics and one I rarely call out because a lot of artists need to worry about their characters first, but Phillips has got that stuff nailed.

Conclusion: A great transitional story in the middle of a great story.  Make sure to check out Incognito.  It’s the best thing that Brubaker is writing right now and Phillips and Staples are doing incredible things with the art.  .

Grade: B+

– Dean Stell

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Incognito: Bad Influences #1 – Review

By: Ed Brubaker (writer), Sean Phillips (art & letters) & Val Staples (colors)

The Story: What will Zack Overkill do now that he’s one of the good guys?

What’s Good: We use the term “creative team” a lot in comics: “Try this comic.  It has a new ‘creative team’ staring with issue #___.”  But, to use that term thusly is really a disservice to this creative TEAM.  The team of Brubaker, Phillips and Staples has brought us ~30 issues of Criminal and Incognito and they’ve gotten to the point where you can just tell that they don’t have to spend a lot of time giving instruction to one another.  They can just focus on their portion of the creative process because they pretty much know what the next guy will do with their work product.  Not to mention, they know the strengths of the others on the team and can lob meatballs that the other guy can just hit out of the park.

In case you cannot tell, the prior paragraph’s gushing means that Incognito: Bad Influences is a really good comic book.  It picks up some time after the events of the first volume of Incognito.  A year, perhaps??  The reader need not have read the first volume, but you’ll understand what is going on better if you do.  Not to mention that the first volume is an outstanding story of a super-villain in witness protection (think of a mob story, but with super powers).  At the end of the volume, the main character, Zack Overkill seems to have reformed and become one of the good guys.

It appears that this story is going to be more espionage flavored as Zack is sent on a secret mission that will tempt him to fall back into old habits.  An espionage comic is going to play right into the hands of the creative team.  It should be a lot of fun to watch this play out over the next few months.