Incognito: Bad Influences #5 – Review

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

The Story: The plots that Zack Overkill has involved himself in come to a climax as he finally comes face to face with Simon Slaughter.  Is he going to stay true to being a good agent, so slip back into his former criminal ways?

What’s Good: Even though Incognito is technically a superhero genre title, you could very easily transplant most of the tropes of this Bad Influences story arc right into a crime or espionage story.  The only thing that wouldn’t transfer very well is Zack’s ability to go back undercover with the bad guys.  As I think I’ve mentioned in earlier reviews of this story, that aspect is something that wouldn’t work in a crime story because the mafia types would NEVER accept one of their former gangster buddies who had turned state’s evidence back into their circles.  They’d just put a couple bullets into the dude to be safe.  But, it works in Bad Influences because Zack Overkill does have superpowers and his powers are a little higher level than most of the bad dudes…so they have to accept him (because they’re afraid of him).

Of course, that plot element has mostly played out by this fifth issues, but it is worth pointing out because it illustrates why Incognito isn’t just “Criminal or Sleeper with superpowers”.  The presence of superpowers allows Brubaker to write a different story than he could with mobsters and cops.

This issue brings everything to a climax that is pretty satisfying…  Zack finally confronts Simon Slaughter, the good guy agent who was sent undercover and went rogue.  The confrontation has a good bit of action, but the best part is Slaughter’s monologue about the nature of being a forgotten double agent: When your side forgets you’re there and leaves you “in” for too long, you start to lose track of what is right and wrong.  But, Slaughter also starts to tease at some secret plots going on at a much bigger level than anything we’ve seen in Incogito before.  Surely those things are going to be explored in a future story arc that will start with Zack in a pretty bad place.  I’m looking forward to it.

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.

The Best & Worst of ‘09

FORWARD

Welcome to WCBR’s year end comic book industry report card. In essence, this report card is a list of offerings we’ve enjoyed and disliked for the entire year 2009. There was definitely a lot of debate over each editor’s pick, and in the end we just decided to let everyone have their say. Let us know if we’re out of our minds, or if you concur.

BEST ON-GOING SERIES

Detective Comics – Detective has reached consistently dizzying heights throughout the year.  The sheer creativity and astounding quality this title has seen in 2009 is simply mind-blowing.  From March to April, we had Gaiman’s “Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader.”  Then, we quickly moved into Greg Rucka and JH Williams’ landmark work on Batwoman.  Gorgeous artwork met epic storytelling all year long.  We started out with a beautiful farewell to one great character, only to be introduced to another.  -Alex Evans

Captain America – Ed Brubaker’s smart, suspense and intrigue stories with a doubting, redemption-seeking hero really top the game in the ongoing category.  -DS

Detective Comics – Greg Rucka and JH Williams took this B-list character from the forgettable pages of 52, and made 2009 her year. Batwoman in Detective Comics makes a strong case for a series of her own. -Ray

BEST NEW SERIES

The Unwritten – The Unwritten is the smartest book on the racks today.  It’s an English major and literary critics dream and by series end, I expect it to be appearing on the university syllabuses of more liberal-minded professors, right next to Sandman.  Yet, despite all that, it’s also got enough mystery and fancy to entertain and pull in the average reader.  And of course, its pop culture awareness is more than enough to grab anyone’s attention.  This is a must-read.  -Alex Evans

Batman and Robin – It’s difficult to argue against Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, dealing with the heir apparent to DC’s second biggest pair of boots (some might argue biggest). The amount of conflict, psychological tension and sheer creepy villainy set the bar for the noir avenger corner of the superhero industry.  -DS

Sweet Tooth – This is indie genius hitting mainstream, while managing to maintain its literary charm. Jeff Lemire’s Vertigo title offers us a fresh new journey/ coming-of-age story, while providing us a bizarre and post-apocalyptic world filled with violence and isolation– all the ingredients for an entertaining and relevant series.  -Ray

Incognito #5 – Review

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

The Story: Ava Destruction and Zack Overkill go to ground before Zack discovers the awful truth about his origins.

What’s Good: Everything you’ve liked about Incognito returns for another month.  Sean Phillips’ art is a key example of this; completely consistent in its style, tone, and quality without any dips or hurry. It continues to capture Brubaker’s weird mix of dark, hard-boiled noir and bizarre, ray-gun toting 60s sci-fi.  Incognito has been nothing short of excellent every issue, and #5 is no different.

I said it in my review last month and I’ll say it again now: I really, really like Ava Destruction as a character. Once again, despite her clear mental imbalances and homicidal tendencies, she remains impossibly likable. In that sense, the reader’s own relationship to her mirrors Zack’s. She’s dangerous, bloody, and generally awful. Yet relentlessly attractive and compelling.  It’s her very strangeness and ruthless and carefree violence that pull us towards her. And when Brubaker adds a level of vulnerability to her this month, it only makes us embrace her all the harder.

The twist regarding Zack’s origin occupies a central place in this month’s issue, and while it conveys, thanks in no small part to Phillips’ art and Staples’ neon colors and that throwback grindhouse/sci-fi feel, it also truly is a culmination of Zack’s existential struggles. In fact, Zack’s discovery and the subsequent conclusion of this issue are both beautiful in their being a concrete yet almost surreal manifestation of Zack’s loss of identity. Indeed, it fits the title “Incognito” perfectly. Despite its reliance on strong interior monologues, this series once again serves to question the nature of identity and whether the concept carries any validity at all. At the end of this issue, I’m leaning towards “no,” and yet paradoxically, I still see Zack as a distinct person that I’m invested in. This is testament to Brubaker’s skill as a writer that avoids clear answers.

Simply put, this is a highly intelligent issue that takes the book’s themes to an extreme new  level, setting up a bloodbath finale that is sure to define what it is to be “Incognito.”

What’s Not-so-Good: The short pair of scenes with Zoe Zeppelin didn’t feel particularly integral, especially given how awesome the rest of the book was. They’re clearly there as to explain the S.O.S’s presence in next month’s battle royale, but I can’t see why they couldn’t have been shortened, or combined into one scene. Then again, I’m biased as I really just want more Ava.

Conclusion: As I said last month, Incognito is a book that has given one of the best writers in comics today the freedom to do what he does best.  This is a writer in his prime, without constraints, making his ideal comic book.  Bottom-line? Buy the book, buy the trade, just read it!

Grade: A

-Alex Evans

Incognito #4 – Review

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

The Story: The S.O.S. has finally caught on to Zack’s night-time activities as our “hero” finds himself trapped in an unenviable situation.

What’s Good: Showing, not telling.  This phrase has haunted more or less every creative writing hopeful at one point or another, but in this issue, Ed Brubaker proves his mastery of the well-worn adage. Rather than have Zack tell us how his psyche is developing through textboxes, Brubaker uses his scenes and images to make these internal shifts all the more significant.

Two notable occurrences in this issue are the surprise office memorial for Farmer and the encounter with Amanda directly afterwards.  The former is a scene that shows Zack on the cusp of acknowledging an inexplicable positive in humanity and the “average Joe” he has so derided, yet due to letting the scene speak for itself, the reader almost seems more aware of this moment than Zack himself.  Meanwhile, the scene with Amanda plays up the feeling of paranoia that pervades this comic, making the reader actually share Zack’s anxiety right alongside him.

This is just a further nuance to the great writing that has continually propped up this series.  Paranoia is the game in this issue, and Brubaker plays it well.  Enhancing this is a further graying of the “good-guy/bad-guy” divide; not only is Zack hazy, but so too are the S.O.S., who turn out to be a far cry from SHIELD.

The character that sees the most development this issue is without a doubt Ava Destruction.  On the few pages that she appears in, she is utterly infectious.  Despite being terrifyingly insane and completely homicidal, she carries an undeniable charm and likeability.  The fact that we will be getting even more of her next issue has me excited.

Art-wise, Sean Phillips fans no what to expect.  The same dark, heavy pulp fare continues in this issue with no sign of slippage.  Phillips is nothing if not consistent.

What’s Not So Good: I didn’t feel that the internal monologue/textboxes were up the standard set by previous issues.  Don’t get me wrong, they’re still fantastic and were this any other comic, I would be enthralled; it’s only due to the unbelievably high bar that the series has set for itself that I find myself writing this.

I think a good part of it comes from what I mentioned about “showing, not telling.”  Due to Brubaker allowing the scenes to tell Zack’s emotions rather than the textboxes, the internal monologue becomes much more event-centered.  You don’t get the sort of overarching ruminating that you got in past issues.  It’s just feels simpler and more down to earth, with Zack more focused on his predicament than on the nature of his existence.

Also, I’ve always had a bit of a pet peeve for misleading covers.  Know that nothing close to a super powered battle between Zack Overkill and Zoe Zeppelin occurs in these pages.

Conclusion: Incognito remains an example of one of the top writers in comics today doing what he does best with complete freedom.

Grade: B+

-Alex Evans

Incognito #3 – Review

Ed Brubaker (writer), Sean Phillips (artist), Val Staples (colorist)

Story:

Zack Overkill is in a tight spot. As an unwilling participant in a witness protection program for villains, he’s having a hard time reconciling the liberties and excitement of his old life for the doldrums of his beige, office-filled existence. But since he’s been getting his powers back, things have changed – and not for the better. His so-called friend is mooching off his abilities, his parole officer’s pissed, and worst of all; his old boss, The Black Death, has agents on his trail.

And now, of all times, is when that “friend” wants him to go rob a bank, or else he’ll let everybody know who Zack really is…

The Good:

There’s good, and there’s loads of it. Brubaker’s writing, which has always found the balance between descriptive and evocative, finds a certain strength in combining his two passions – noir and superheroes – into a single project. The characters are amusing, intriguing, and, most of all, relatable, but to a stronger extent; many of us’ve had a fantasy of watching a maligned workplace burn to a cinder, but Zack Overkill could actually do it. And it pains him that he’s forced to work there, to troll around like a regular shmoe in a shit job, when he could be doing so much more.

The art from Phillips is phenomenal. As seen in his run on Criminal with Brubaker, he draws characters with personality and clarity. There’s distinction, perspective, and a certain stylization that makes everything easier to deal with – which makes the story that much more engrossing. His gritty style is a perfect setting for the story, and even with rayguns abounding, these elements come across as cool, rather than trite.

Val Staples brings a strong, savvy style of coloring that plays well with contrast and effect. It’s a great match for Phillips’s pencils, and is that third, truly crucial piece to bringing Brubaker’s words to life – because not only does it bring life, but it also brings personality to the pages. And when coloring can do that, you’ve really hit the nail on the head.

The Bad:

It’s very hard to find anything bad or disappointing about this book. It’s a cool, fast, fun, easy read with multiple layers to it. The colors are spot on, the art is great, and the writing is a perfect fit. If you can find something wrong with it, I’d imagine you’re trying far too hard. But, I do have one complaint – we were kept waiting almost two months between issue two and issue three. Brubaker apologizes profusely in the back of the book, saying that “from here on in, we should be monthly for the rest of the series and then we’re going right into the next run of Criminal, with no break this time.”

…I suppose we can cut you a little slack, because you two really delivered with this issue, and hopefully, the rest of the series.

Grade : A