Daily Breakdowns 045 - Incognito

Incognito
Written by Ed Brubaker
Art by Sean Phillips
Published by Marvel Comics. $18.99 USD

With Incognito, Brubaker and Phillips attempt to put a spin on their classic deep cover superhero/villain epic, Sleeper. Instead of a basically good guy finding his morality eroded by undercover work with supervillains, we have a supervillain forced to turn on his boss and put into witness protection, a target for the bad guys if they ever discover he's still alive. To keep him under the radar, Zack Overkill has to take powers-canceling drugs that make him just like any other shlub. Brubaker emphasizes this by making Zack a mailroom guy in a corporate office, a low level peon until he just can't take it anymore. It's not so much that this is a specific riff on Sleeper; it's actually similar to most of Brubaker's work as far as having the lead character be a guy who (like Holden Carver or Tracy Lawless) just likes to turn his brain off and make a big fucking mistake, often followed by another, and another.

In those scenes of Zack among the normals, it's most similar to Mark Millar's/J.G. Jones' Wanted in how the reader identifies with the character's life of joyless drudgery and wants him to have the opportunity we don't have, to break out of it and bust things up. It is pretty fun when Zack gets to do this.

Unlike Sleeper, Brubaker doesn't try as hard to give nuance to the villains. The leader, Black Death, is pure evil, and the eternally youthful Ava Destruction is a total psychopath. Even the characters on the "good" side, like Zoe Zeppelin, are manipulative and pretty flat. As the names suggest, Brubaker is working with a broader, more pulp-influenced style here on the edges, although again the main character is written in standard Brubaker style, with lots of terse but self-examining inner monologue.

There's a good deal of copy in the collected edition that tries to tie the story to the pulp traditions of Doc Savage and others, but those elements aren't much more than window-dressing in the execution. That is, some of the peripheral character names and back stories are fun and all, but while I'm not complaining, there is not much in the way of growth or stretching for Brubaker here. Nor is there for Phillips, though it's appealing to see him draw more outlandish characters and his painted covers are excellent. Oddly, I was a little disappointed that nothing in the story itself gave me the same feeling the cover of the collected edition did, which has a very American Psycho feel. Whoever that guy is on the cover probably has a good story to tell. I liked the story here fine, though, and there are some fine scenes as Zack deals with the humans and post-humans in his life, and how he handles the revelations of his past. If they do more, I'm in, but as Brubaker has set a high standard with past Phillips collaborations, I'm hoping he digs just a little deeper next time.