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Incognito #1
Posted 10 Feb 2009
Writer: Ed Brubaker
Artist: Sean Phillips
Colors: Val Staples
Publisher: Icon/Marvel
5.00 out of 5 Stars
Reviewed by Adam McGovern
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It’s in the strange, open-source nature of comicbook culture
that writers and artists can rise to be the best at genres (and
sometimes, even storylines) that others created. The workaday
superworld pioneered in Astro City and refined in Top
10, Powers and Wanted comes to life in some of the
most vivid ways seen yet in Brubaker & Phillips’
Incognito.
This novel tale of a drug-dampened supervillain playing out an
office-drone’s life in a witness protection program draws on the
division of existence into gray-flannel professional purgatory and
deep-shadowed outlaw hell that the creative team know well from the
film-noir sources of their established classic, Criminal. The
slight divergences into science fiction grow entirely plausibly from
the kind of world Brubaker & Phillips have set up in that comic,
with the superhumans being simply magnifications of real-world
personality types run through a fictional filter of what many of us
would do if we could.
Brubaker’s laconically revealing scripting is in top
form, Phillip’s mythic squalor is at its best, and Val
Staples’ brilliantly bizarre Expressionist candy-box of
colors sets the whole thing quietly on fire. Shades of ambiguous
morality and layers of inventively sinister pulp plotting are in
store as the protagonist walks the tightrope of a precarious and
illusory normality.
It’s only February, but the best series of 2009 may
be here.
—CCdC—
Cover image used without explicit permission in accordance with the "Fair Use" provision of US copyright law.
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