The Fade Out #1 – Review

By: Ed Brubaker (story), Sean Phillips (art), Elizabeth Breitweiser (colors)

The Story: You can’t wish on a fallen star.

The Review: I’d like to start off this review of Brubaker’s latest work by saying a few words about his last one. In the end, I’m not sure it was the most entertaining or impressive or even memorable series ever (already the why and how of Jo’s life is slipping my mind), but Fatale sure was different. It’s rare to come across a work so minimally derivative and also so well-written. Brubaker may not have gotten his point clearly across, but his storytelling was unparalleled.

With his elaborate, urgent prose style, Brubaker often comes across as a novelist whose medium happens to be half-visual. His choice of subject for The Fade Out is certainly untypical for a comic book, being firmly set in the real world, in a real historical period, with no fantastical, sci-fi twists or spins. There’s no invitation to suspend your disbelief; Brubaker challenges himself and Phillips to tell a purely human drama convincingly without the caveat of overt fictionalization.

Fatale #24 – Review

By: Ed Brubaker (story), Sean Phillips (art), Elizabeth Breitweiser (colors)

The Story: Doomed by a beautiful woman’s kiss…

The Review: I’m kind of surprised to see the end come so soon, but I suppose allowances can’t be made just because I caught on to the series late. [Speaking of late, these reviews are late because I’ve been traveling—post-Bar relief, you know. More on that later.] Anyway, I have a feeling Brubaker realized that he was quickly reaching that limit when trying to plumb anything more from Fatale would just bum us out.

As you can probably expect, things don’t end very well for anybody in this series. In fact, they don’t end well at all. The more accurate evaluation of the situation is that things don’t end as badly as they could have for a couple people. [Spoiler alert!] While Nick and Jo do manage to survive the tribulations of the issue, there are scars. For Jo, all the years of her unnaturally long life finally catch up to her; Nick is left catatonic in an asylum, with Jo his sole visitor (and not for much longer, by her estimation). For all that, Jo reflects that “she’s the lucky one, not Nick. Because she got to escape.”

Fatale #23 – Review

By: Ed Brubaker (story), Sean Phillips (art), Elizabeth Breitweiser (colors)

The Story: Nick and Jo engage in a little…what’s the opposite of sexual healing?

The Review: Even though I’m a self-confessed romantic, there’s one thing about modern-day romance that never fails to irritate me: when someone decides to set aside a perfectly functional, stable, loving relationship just because they’re not “feeling it.” And that doesn’t even compare to the outright dismay I feel when that same person decides they feel it a lot more with someone who practically lives in a city of red flags. Call me a downer, but that doesn’t sound much like love to me.

That’s pretty much the situation Nick finds himself in now with Jo. He claims that what he feels for her renders all past dalliances as pathetic imitations, that it’s enough to make all the pain she’s made him go through, even to the point of mutilation, worth it. I’m inclined to be skeptical, but once the two finally get it on, the experience is so mind-blowingly fantastic, so sublime and ethereal, that even I’m halfway convinced that they’re not just having sex, but making love.

Fatale #22 – Review

By: Ed Brubaker (story), Sean Phillips (art), Elizabeth Breitweiser (colors)

The Story: Even being evil can get pretty drab after a while.

The Review: As a relative latecomer to Fatale, I feel like I’ve dealt with my lack of background knowledge pretty well. The one character I still struggle with understanding is Sommerset, Jo’s scaly, blinded archnemisis. To date, I still have no idea what his deal is. Besides the basic questions of where he comes from and what he’s after, there are more specific curiosities. Why is he scaly? How was he blinded? What’s his exact problem with Jo? With Wikipedia pretty much useless when it comes to recent Image series, I was afraid I might just be left in the dark until the end.

Fortunately, it seems that I’ve only been operating in the same darkness as everyone else, as this issue provides a fairly complete summary of Sommerset’s life from his first resurrection to his present schemes. Just to make it clear what kind of man Jo’s dealing with here, Brubaker takes us to San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake, depicting it as the product of a hellish ritual to make Sommerset into the new bishop of hell on earth, with the ensuing casualties as his empowering sacrifices. Whatever forces he’s worshipping, they are very real and very powerful.

Fatale #21 – Review

By: Ed Brubaker (story), Sean Phillips (art), Elizabeth Breitweiser (colors)

The Story: It’s just as everyone feared—tattoos do make a guy cooler.

The Review: As intrigued as I’ve been by Jo’s invariably sordid encounters with various men, I’ve also been hoping to get a broader sense of what Fatale is really about. Again, immortal woman who drives men crazy is entertaining enough—certainly, it’s been viscerally horrifying enough. But I’m much more interested in the why’s and how’s of all this.* How immortal? Why men? Why crazy? And what for? Surely it can’t just be for the pointless torment of this poor woman and the men around her.

Fortunately, it seems like I’ll be getting my wish pretty soon, as Fraction reveals that Jo has been working on those very same questions herself. She is helped in this regard by Otto, a geriatric scholar who also happens to be the only man unaffected by Jo’s sway. This alone makes him an immediately arresting figure, especially once you take in all his body tattoos, placed on him as a child by his Native-American grandfather. That suggests a certain degree of foresight on someone’s part, doesn’t it, at least in regards to Jo?

Fatale #20 – Review

By: Ed Brubaker (story), Sean Phillips (art), Elizabeth Breitweiser (colors)

The Story: Jo demonstrates her own brand of vigilante justice by kissing a serial murderer.

The Review: Coming on this title as late as I did, I never got much of a chance to see Jo as she presently stands, which is to say, at her most competent.  Not that being vulnerable has made her any less dangerous; if the fates of Amsterdam are anything to go by, Jo can definitely bring the “fatal” in “fatale.”  But that’s only made me even more interested in seeing how Jo handles herself when she has all her physical and mental faculties in order.

Unsurprisingly, she’s much more calculating.  From the outset, Brubaker reveals that Jo would have been fine with Nick languishing in jail until she was ready to use him: “She wasn’t supposed to be out here yet at all.  But when she heard about Nicholas Lash’s escape from custody, her carefully laid plans went right out the window.”  She rescues Nick not really out of true affection, but simply because she needs him for some other purpose.

Fatale #19 – Review

By: Ed Brubaker (story), Sean Phillips (art), Elizabeth Breitweiser (colors)

The Story: Jo successfully completes her mission to Yoko a band.

The Review: Although the implosion of Amsterdam is really a small-time accomplishment for someone like Jo, it’s also given us a glimpse of all the kinds of things Jo can do to people, especially men, with her talents.  If nothing else, it’s been fascinating watching each of the Amsterdam men—Skip, Tom, Jon, and Lance—have a completely different experience with their memory-stricken guest, even though they all inevitably break down in the end.

Though they’re all ultimately doomed by their relationship with Jo, the nature of their decline varies according to their individual personalities, at least where Tom and Jon are concerned.  The songwriter’s already self-destructive genius eventually consumes him from within, while the guitarist’s tendency to follow the lead of his bandmates is amplified, allowing their actions to build to the point where he can’t avoid the splash damage.  For these two, Jo seems to intensify their inherent failings, but the effects she has on the others are more difficult to classify

Fatale #18 – Review

By: Ed Brubaker (story), Sean Phillips (art), Elizabeth Breitweiser (colors)

The Story: They don’t have skeletons in the closet, but do they have bodies in the basement.

The Review: I may be speaking from a position of ignorance here, but up to this point, I still don’t know if I find Jo particularly compelling as a protagonist or not.  Of course, this may just be bad timing on my part, having jumped aboard the title just when most of Jo’s personality was wiped by amnesia, but my ambivalence remains.  Not that it matters all that much.  The things that happen around her are thoroughly interesting, even if she herself remains an enigma.

For example, I still don’t know if I genuinely empathize with her or not.  All the time that she’s shedding tears, sending rivulets of mascara down her face like she had her makeup done by Alice Cooper, my instinct is to shrug.  She’s a tragic character, obviously, but looking at what happens to the people around her, I say she has very little complain about.  Of them all, she alone retains the ability to control her actions, and with that free will, she chooses to relinquish control and hide from the responsibility that entails.

Fatale #17 – Review

By: Ed Brubaker (story), Sean Phillips (art), Elizabeth Breitweiser (colors)

The Story: Let this be a lesson to all the boys—“no” means no.

The Review: Once you get to a certain age and gather around you a certain group of friends, specifically one made up of both young men and women, you’ll start having a lot of long, earnest discussions about the differences between men and women.  If you start on that tack, it won’t be long before you start talking about who suffers the break-up more.  In some ways, the debate is moot; we all know that though the symptoms vary, the pain is the same stabbing one we all get.

That said, it’s more common to see the brokenhearted woman in her sweats, curled up in a snuggie, watching TV and eating ice-cream,* but as this issue of Fatale demonstrates, the jilted man is quite a mess himself.  Granted, Brubaker portrays the many abandoned men of Jo’s life at a fairly extreme level of devastation, but their emotional craziness does hint at how deeply the guys can feel the loss of their girl.  What’s really well-done about all this is how convincingly Brubaker can paint so many shades of romantic madness.

Fatale #16 – Review

By: Ed Brubaker (story), Sean Phillips (art), Elizabeth Breitweiser (colors)

The Story: Jo proves that being a groupie and a muse are not mutually exclusive roles.

The Review: “Magical realism” was a term we threw around a lot back in my creative writing days.  It seemed a fancy concept back then, but now I think it was just people’s way of getting shoehorned into certain genres: fantasy, sci-fi, horror, occult, etc.  At any rate, the phrase is a useful way of describing the most convincing supernatural elements, the kind that feel as though they can exist, barely perceptible, in the real world.

The most impressive quality of Brubaker’s craft is the how, even though he’s made it clear that a very real mysticism is at work in this series, he grounds it so well in the ordinary world that you don’t always know when you’re seeing magic or simply the spectacle of human behavior and psychology gone wrong.  This is the wellspring of one of Fatale’s most compelling questions: whether Jo’s allure comes from her unusual nature, or whether it’s simply the byproduct of being a charming, sensitive, utterly beautiful woman.

Fatale #15 – Review

By: Ed Brubaker (story), Sean Phillips (art), Elizabeth Breitweiser (colors)

The Story: A windfall of (stolen) money and a beautiful (wounded) woman—lucky for him.

The Review: I was in a bad romance, once.  I won’t turn this into a confessional, but suffice to say, it was one of those things where the attraction was so strong that it overshadowed everything else—almost.  Even though all along I sort of knew she was wrong for me—wrong for anyone who wanted to live a peaceful life—that magnetism kept us in place for a long time, until our problems got to the point where even that couldn’t save the relationship.

So I get how romantic entanglements that seem doomed from the start can happen, and how you can get caught in that snare again and again, even against your wishes.  Granted, for the men in Jo’s life, this is more the byproduct of her supernatural powers than anything else, but that only makes their bewildered, desperate attachment to her more sympathetic.  They seem incapable of resisting her allure, even from a distance.

Fatale #14 – Review

By: Ed Brubaker (story), Sean Phillips (art), Elizabeth Breitweiser (colors)

The Story: It’s not a good idea to sneak into a Nazi camp armed with just a pretty face.

The Review: The one nice thing about striking a bunch of titles from your pull list is that it frees up some funds to try out new ones.  For me, I’d heard a great deal about Fatale, nearly all of it good, so after having recently Dropped Constantine, Demon Knights, and Katana, it seemed like a prime opportunity to pick up the series.  Besides, I’m a real sucker for the supernatural and classic pulp, and Fatale seems to promise both in great abundance.

My timing couldn’t have been better.  As it turns out, this issue is something of a transition chapter, a flashback to Josephine’s earlier days.  In many ways, it could have very well served as a debut issue, as it quickly introduces you to our lead, the series’ premise, and some of its most important mysteries.  On the same note, however, if you’re a long-time reader of Fatale, it’s entirely possible the developments in this issue will be redundant to you.

Fatale #11 – Review

By: Ed Brubaker (story), Sean Phillips (art), and Dave Stewart (colors)

The Story:  Flashing back to the 1930s, Jo goes out to the desert to meet a dying pulp writer whose creepy tales are a little too close for comfort.

The Review: Expanding beyond its initial maxi-series format,  Brubaker and Phillips make the absolute most of the done-in-one, making it tell a complete, self-contained story that nonetheless manages to have nice links to the rest of the series.

Much has been made of Fatale‘s Lovecraftian flavours, but this single issue feels by far the most Lovecraftian of all in its story-telling.  Not only does it hint at those lurking, greater evils that lurk just beneath the surface, only ever hinted at, but the pace and atmosphere also mirrors Lovecraft.  Namely, there’s an overarching dread to the comic; you’re always aware that there’s something really, really horrible just out of sight.  There’s one absolutely magical moment in the comic where I was actually afraid to turn the page, distressed at what would be revealed.  That is horror comics at its absolute finest.  It’s the sort of reading that grabs you by the throat and squeezes.

Fatale #8 – Review

By: Ed Brubaker (script), Sean Phillips (art), and Dave Stewart (colors)

The Story: Nick realizes that he met Jo a lot earlier than he thought, Suzy discovers Jo’s secret, and apparently Jo’s enemies are just as enduring and tenacious as she is.

The Review:  Fatale is a very unique Brubaker/Phillips joint.  It’s not only the generic question, with that heavy element of Lovecraftian horror (and boy, we get a heavy dose of that this month) but also the way the narration is structured.  With a lot more issues to work with, Fatale is in many ways a more leisurely read, one that takes its time and sets a very controlled pace.   What keeps this from being decompressed and boring, however, is that this pace allows Brubaker to insert a lot of moving parts, so much so that it can be difficult to keep track of everything if you’re reading the book monthly; it’s a book that really makes you think as it immerses you in its world.

As such, when you get an issue like this that starts making connections, it’s an extremely satisfying experience.  With this story-arc taking place in a different time period from arc prior, it’s really a lot of fun seeing Brubaker make strong connections and links between them.  There’s a strong sense that everything is related and nothing in the comic happens or is present “just cuz.”

Fatale #7 – Review

by Ed Brubaker (writer), Sean Phillips (art), and Dave Stewart (colors)

The Story: Josephine finds herself pulled into Miles’ and Suzy’s world of Hollywood cults and sacrifices, which may be more familiar than she thought.

The Review:  As much as I’ve been loving Fatale, two issues in, and I think this second arc is actually better than the first.  With only one time period to worry about, the series is more coherent and the plot elements easier to keep track of.

And speaking of time periods, Brubaker is knocking his creepy, occult 1970s Hollywood theme out of the park.  Hollywood has never felt seedier.  Brubaker’s use of hard to believe true stories of Hollywood cults and Sean Phillips’ art, which is portrays a world permanently stuck in a dusty, blazing hot sunset filled with desperate characters, Fatale is an immersive read that is truly evocative of the time period and location.  The best way I can describe it is that it feels as though the entire comic, its world and its characters, sweat.  The world is dark, shadowy, and seedy with horrors lurking just below the surface in a manner that is a mix of conspiracy thriller and Lovecraftian horror while characters seem to all have a vice over them, gradually crushing and closing in with every passing page.

Another aspect that, for me, has made this arc stronger is the Miles character.  Miles is very, very reminiscent of the very best characters of Brubaker and Phillips’ Criminal.  Once again, we have a bad guy finding himself doing good things.  The result is a character that is locked in a really compelling grey area, pursuing goals that completely contradict and run contrary to each other.  He’ll help out Jo, while secretly trying to profit from selling out Suzy.  The result is a character that’s in a kind of moral existential crisis – he’s a scoundrel and proudly defines himself as such, and yet he finds himself doing good things again and again, playing the hero and putting his neck out in doing so, doing things that run counter to the scoundrel he is.  So while he shoots up with heroin while plotting his betrayal of Suzy, he finds himself slinking around with Jo in graveyards filled with murderous cultists.  Miles’ narration in these situations is fantastic, as he finds himself unable to explain these contradictions.

Fatale #5 – Review

By: Ed Brubaker (writer), Sean Phillips (art), and Dave Stewart (colors)

The Story: Battles rage in secret tunnels under the city with cultists and Cthulian squid-men aplenty.

The Review:  One of the things that has made Fatale such an alluring series is the constant sense of horrible, unknown things lurking just beyond what we know or are aware of in the comic.  This month, in the final issue of the first storyarc, Brubaker lets us peek behind the curtain.  In other words, we actually get to see the cultist society in action, we get to see the secret tunnels that exist beneath the city, and we get to see Bishop’s true face.  Thus far, we’ve only really seen the surface levels with hints of Lovecraftian hoodoo below, but here, Brubaker lets us see what lurks beneath.  There’s a sense in which Brubaker is letting us see what he’s been hiding from us for the past few months, only ever letting us use our imaginations, and the result is immensely satisfying.

Moreover, this issue works so well because of the complete difference in pacing.  When the horrors beneath the surface of the city and the powers of Bishop were only ever hinted at, the series felled taut and controlled.  Now, however, that we’ve stepped behind, or rather below, the curtain, that control is completely lost.  Action and violence abound and what we get is 27-pages of non-stop thrills, twists, and excitement.  It’s an absolutely wild read completely juxtaposed to the past few issues.  The fascade of hints, dread, and control has been lifted and instead, Brubaker and Phillips immerse in a breathless frenzy of mayhem.

Fatale #1 – Review

by Ed Brubaker (writing), Sean Phillips (art), and Dave Stewart (colors)

The Story: Mysterious assassins in bowler hats!  Exploding airplanes!  Cultists!  Nazis!

The Review: Breathe a sigh of relief:  Fatale is just as good as you were hoping it might be and only further substantiates the fact that the team of Brubaker and Phillips can do no wrong.

However, Fatale is a very different beast from Criminal, Incognito, or Sleeper.  While, by Brubaker’s own admission, all of these series were meant to be distillations of everything he and Phillips love about comics, nowhere does this feel truer than Fatale.  This is clearly a book where Brubaker and Phillips have thrown together all the stuff they enjoy and the result is a book that feels exciting.

This is particularly the case when it comes to the books genre.  At different points, it’s a noir/crime comic, a mystery, a horror, and a pulpy action/spy comic.  Really, in one issue, Brubaker touch upon so many different sorts of pulp fiction that it’s actually mind-boggling that this actually coheres.  But cohere it does, and what we get is one very unique and compelling kind of beast.  It’s a hybrid of all these genres with all of their various strengths.  The horror elements are gruesome, the action/spy stuff is exciting, and the crime/mystery elements tantalize.

And really, what all this leads to is a comic where you never know what to expect.  You’re never sure when and where the high-spots will come.  As such, Fatale is a book that keeps you riveted and keeps you reading.  On one page, you get a thrilling car chase reminiscent of the famous airplane sequence in North by Northwest, at other points you get that psychological, moody narration fans of Criminal will be familiar with, and then, flip the page, and you’ve got gruesome Satanic rituals and hints of the paranormal, and mysterious Nazi flashbacks.  Fatale is truly a book that is full of turbulence, constantly throwing you for a loop yet always keeping you anchored to its world and it’s developing story.  Not only do you not know what to expect, but Brubaker leaves us with so many fascinating questions.  In many ways, it’s a crime and noir comic where the presence of the paranormal makes anything possible.

Criminal: Last of the Innocent #3 – Review

By: Ed Brubaker (writer), Sean Phillips (art) & Dave Stewart (colors)

The Story: Will Reilly get away with killing his wife in this Archie-inspired Criminal series?

What’s Good: I’ve heard writer Ed Brubaker give interviews saying that once he’s done being a hot-shot “Marvel architect”, he’d like to spend the end of his career writing Archie comics.  Well, I guess we now know the kind of Archie comics he’d write.  He’d tell us a story of Archie (a.k.a. Reilly) killing Veronica (a.k.a. Felix) by stabbing her in the eye with an icepick and tricking Jughead (a.k.a. Freakout) into giving up 4 years of sobriety just so that Archie has a good alibi for his whereabouts at the time of the murder.  Even all the supporting characters in this Criminal story are from Archie:

• Liz, the sweet girl-next-door, is clearly “Betty”
• Phil, Felix’s father and Reilly’s father-in-law, is clearly Mr. Lodge (Veronica’s dad who always hated Archie)
• Teddy, the childhood rival with whom Felix was having an affair and whom Reilly has neatly framed for the murder, is obviously Reggie

It all just lines up perfectly and I’d probably read more Archie comics if they came with these sorts of storylines.  Can you imagine the scandal: Archie kills Veronica and Reggie for the murder.  Ha!

Of course, an Archie gimmick isn’t going to be enough for these creators.  So, we also have customary Brubaker/Phillips noir-ish atmosphere as Reilly tries to keep up the act of a grieving husband who is getting away with murder.  The next phase of the story also starts to come into play as we learn some interesting new information about Teddy and see that at least one of the characters is still pretty suspicious of Reilly.  I do wonder how Brubaker plans to introduce these new elements and wrap this series next issue, but that’s where you just have to trust a dude with three Eisner awards.

Oh, and there’s even a neat Easter Egg in here for long-time Criminal readers that helps to tie this series with the other story arcs and place it in time.  It isn’t anything that will be bothersome if you haven’t read the rest of Criminal though.

Criminal: Last of the Innocent #1 – Review

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

The Story: A man returns his small town home when his father becomes ill and becomes embroiled in some nasty family drama.

What’s Good: What a nice first issue.  We’ve been without Criminal for about a year since The Sinners wrapped up and the creative team cranked out Incognito: Bad Influences.  Incognito is good, but after reading this issue of Criminal I feel like every issue of Incognito is stealing from us.  If all comics were like Criminal, no one would ever had any shame at reading a comic in public.  This is proper fiction for grown-ass-men!

The set-up for this story isn’t anything we haven’t seen before: man returns to hometown after years due to sick parent, sees old friends that have grown, assumes his parents’ obligations, etc.  Toss in some adultery and yearning for old flames and you’ve got a pretty basic noir story.  If you wanted to be cynical about the story, you could almost imagine Brubaker having a felt baggie and just pulling out chits with common noir themes written upon them, almost like a game of Clue.

But, what sets this story apart is the execution.  For one thing, you never read a sentence in Criminal and feel mentally out of breath.  Everything is quick and well paced as the reader is guided through the action on each page.  The story is just effortless.  You read this and you can see why Brubaker has 3 Eisner awards for best writer.

Phillips does a great job of showing us this story.  This comic is a great example of old-fashioned comic storytelling: You could take the words away from most panels and get a pretty good idea of what is going on.  I don’t think there is a single scene in the issue where Phillips doesn’t strongly establish the action:  He shows a picture of a train (they’re on a train), then shows the protagonist walking down the aisle (the train is crowded), they show him sitting (and because of the set-up, you can’t wonder if he is sitting in a diner or living room).  He also uses a neat shift to an Archie-like artistic style for the flashback scenes when Riley was a boy.  Then, on top of that, the art is just beautiful from an aesthetic standpoint: characters are well drawn and shaded, cars look like real cars, buildings look like real buildings….  Just super nice stuff and that’s what you get when artists use proper reference materials.

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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WCBR Quick Hit Reviews – Week of Dec 29, 2010

We at WCBR all get more comics that we could possibly review in full every week.  Rather than let them go unmentioned, we run though the remainder of our pile here.

Astonishing Spider-Man & Wolverine #4 – This time hopping series continues and puts Logan and Spidey in yet another awesome situation: Logan is thrust into Spidey’s youth as his wrestling partner (i.e. after the spider bite, but before Uncle Ben’s death) whereas Spidey is sent to Logan’s youth.  Of course, Logan was a nasty feral forest monster back then.  Aaron writes both of these characters really, really well.  I’m amazed at how well he writes a humorous Spidey considering the man also writes Scalped and PunisherMax.  Kubert shows off about 3 different art styles in this book and they’re all pretty.  Oh and we also learned the identity of the big-bad.  Any old-time X-fan will be pleased.  One thing that helps this comic is that although it is supposedly not in continuity, the fact that it is a time-jumping tale makes it feel like it could be.  Grade: A-   — Dean Stell

Incognito: Bad Influences #2 – Damn do I wish that Brubaker could sell enough copies of Incognito and Criminal that he could create a couple more series of this quality level and quit screwing around with normal Marvel properties to pay the bills.  This is a really good series and you should be buying it.  The set-up for this is that Zack Overkill (a former supervillain who had his witness protection spot ruined in the first Incognito), is being sent by the good guys back into the lions den: They need him to pretend to go back to being a supervillain.  So, what we end up with here is very much a double-agent, espionage tale as you can see that Zack is sorely tempted to just go back to being bad…because being bad is fun. Meanwhile, the other supervillains trust Zack about as far as they can throw him.  Sean Phillips and Val Staples (again) provide stellar art.  Grade: B+  — Dean Stell

Echoes #1 –  We need more horror comics. If you’re looking for a promising one to pick up, you could do a lot worse than the first issue of Echoes by Joshua Hale Fialkov.  In this issue we meet a ~30-year-old man who is going through a big transition in his life: His wife is about to give birth just as his father is about to succumb to Alzheimer’s.  While sitting with his father right before he dies, his non-lucid father jabbers something about how he must search the basement of their old home because that’s where he hid the bodies of all the little girls.  Whoa!  WHAT!?!?  Chilling, huh?  Rahsan Ekedal lends very atmospheric B&W art.  The only thing holding it back from a higher grade is that they played up the young man’s stress a little much and it made parts of the comic confusing.  Pretty sure that was intentional, but I think the basic story is good enough that you don’t need to screw around.  Grade: B+ — Dean Stell

Osborn #2 – This is a very solid comic book detailing Osborn’s time in some off-the-grid prison where he is being held until someone decides what to do with him OR he rots… whichever comes first.  Of course, Osborn is not one to stay locked up and as he breaks out he brings the other weirdoes of the prison with him.  So, neat story by Kelly Sue DeConnick and great art by Emma Rios.  The only fault with this series is that I don’t see the purpose of the Norah Winter’s story.  I like Norah as a supporting character in ASM, but after two issues we haven’t seen why pages should be devoted to Norah yet.  It seems like every bit of the story featuring Norah could be told via the more interesting Osborn story thread.  Grade: B — Dean Stell

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.

7 Psychopaths #1 – Review

By: Fabien Vehlmann (writer), Sean Phillips (art), Hubert (colors) & Troy Peteri (letters)

The Story: As World War II turns against the Allies, a crazy plan is hatched to send 7 Psychopaths on a mission to kill Hilter and end the war.

What’s Good: I’ll give Boom! a lot of credit as a studio for growing their line beyond the licensed stuff from Disney.  Those licensed characters ARE really good, but you have to assume that at some point Marvel will be publishing that stuff since Marvel belongs to Disney, so Boom! has really been stepping up their game and bringing us more mature comics.  7 Psychopaths was originally a French comic form the year 2007 and is being rereleased here in English

The basic plot is not an unfamiliar one.  Stories about missions to kill Hitler and “end the war” have been around for a long time, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one that suggesting using crazy people, so this story is part Inglorious Bastards and part Mariel Boat Lift.  This first issue sticks 100% to the team building and we get to meet the folks who will run the team and its first few members.  They’re weird and insane, so I’m curious to see how they’ll function on a mission.

Probably the best thing about this issue was the Sean Phillips art.  If you’ve ever read a single issue of Criminal, you know what I’m talking about.  His art is just perfect for this style of book and he nails it.