CSBG Archive
Incognito #1 Review
Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips take a break from their excellent Criminal series to create a new comic which is just as good as Criminal.
Incognito is about a former supervillain who is now in the witness protection program, but, well, if you’ve ever read a single issue of Criminal, you know these things never go smoothly, and soon human nature (and illegal drugs) cause things to go a markedly different way than was originally intended.
The main character, Zack was one half of a brother super villain duo who were given powers by a mad scientist. Eventually, Zack turned on his super villain boss and was placed into the witness protection program and is living out his life as basically just an ordinary guy, except he is an ordinary guy who knows that we live in an extraordinary world – one of superheroes and super villains – only the government makes sure that the populace doesn’t know about the battles going on around them (there are a lot of freaky natural disasters in this world – or so anyone watching the news would think).
Brubaker tells the story in non-linear fashion, but he tells it so neatly that it almost FEELS like a linear story, as the flashbacks fit so well into the thought process of Zack that it all seems like a natural train of thought.
Zack Overkill is a strong pulp protagonist, in the sense that he is certainly not a great guy, but at the same time, he may very well be the lesser of many evils in the world, when it comes to a rooting interest.
Sean Phillips has drawn this basic type of thing when he was doing Sleeper with Brubaker (not the concept, but the basic designs of the super villains – Phillips’ brings a very realistic design sense when it comes to super villains – no garish looking costumes here), and as you would expect from any Phillips’ drawn comic book, the storytelling is excellent and the characters drip with personality from his facial work (the panel layouts, by the way, seem to almost be intentionally bolder than those in Criminal – I wonder if that’s just my imagination).
As Zack slowly finds himself drawn out of the shell of a fake life he’s had created for him, we see a killer ending that spells a whole lot of trouble for Zack in the future, and if the future issues are anything like this first book (or Criminal, for that matter), then readers are in for one heckuva series.
Highly Recommended.
7 Comments
Joe Rice
January 3, 2009 at 8:46 am
Were I a pithier man, a quick one-line review of this book would be “Wanted if it were good instead of retarded.”
Anonymous
January 3, 2009 at 10:57 am
It’s not your imagination. Criminal layout is purely a strip, without exception. It’s very rigorous. Sleeper was a backdrop with a single image and a myriad of smaller panel above it. Here we occasionaly have a vertical panel at the left side of the page. Philips knows his shit.
Chris McAree
January 3, 2009 at 11:19 am
So looking forward to getting this! Shame I get all my months comics in one large instalment and have to wait 30 days to read it!
Criminal has probably been my favourite book of the last two years and I just hope this lives up to the insanely high standard.
Ian A.
January 3, 2009 at 7:40 pm
There were no issues of Incognito when I hit the local shop today.
Thought I had it on my pull list, but I guess it didn’t take.
Bummed me right out.
Ed Brubaker
January 4, 2009 at 7:40 am
Ian – Did you check with the store? I heard some shops may not have received copies because of holiday shipping delays. Although I’ve been hearing of an insane amount of sell-outs all around the country, too, so it could be they just didn’t order enough.
stealthwise
January 4, 2009 at 6:09 pm
Joe Rice:
LOL. Seriously.
Fascination Place » This Week’s Haul
December 1, 2009 at 12:22 pm
[...] (Brian Cronin liked it, too. And, you can read the first nine pages of the first issue here, although the second half is better than the first! Also, you can see the covers of the first three issues.) Leave a comment [...]