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 art is simply gorgeous. Phillips just draws everything well. His faces are emotive and appropriately moody. He makes good use of background (or lack thereof) and so much work is done in small panels that he makes a 1/3 page full-bleed panel seem like a splash panel. It’s very nice. Colorists don’t get a lot of credit normally, and this is a comic that could probably get away with being black-and-white, but Mr. Staples proves that color does matter. Mostly his colors are very subdued, but this just makes the occasional bust of bright color all the more dramatic. It takes a lot of skill and confidence to color lots of panels reddish-brownish because you know it’ll make that special panel on page __ just sing with color.
What’s Not So Food: Nothing. Great issue.
Conclusion: A really good kick off to a new volume. I wish these guys could sell enough of this and Criminal that they could quit their Big 2 work and do nothing but this stuff.
Grade: A-
– Dean Stell