Review: Incognito - Bad Influences #1
When the first series of Incognito dropped last year it was instantly the book everyone at my comics shop was buzzing about. I was excited by it, the staff were excited by it, even the owner was breathless with his enthusiasm. It was all extremely well-deserved, too, as that book allowed Ed Brubaker to blend his prodigious gift for pulp with the superhero genre and generate a world of his own making that mirrors the structure of any heroes-and-villains cosmology already familiar to us but completely free of the baggage those worlds necessarily contain. Instead of having to play by anyone else's rules or with anyone else's characters, Brubaker trusts us to know already the rough structure of the world his characters inhabit. It's an exhilarating read in its own right - an excellent mix of action, film noir, Office Space and gallows humor - but it's made all the more amazing for the opportunity the reader has to make assumptions about how the world works and have them confirmed. Reading Incognito felt like creating a world with Brubaker.
So how can he possibly top that? By looking back to Incognito's pulp roots for inspiration.
Read on for thoughts on a really excellent debut of this highly-anticipated sequel!
The thing that makes pulp adventures, hard-boiled detectives and capes burdened by their own powers - all the Sam Spade Marlowe knock-offs, all the tomb raiders, all the dark avengers of the night with or without boy wards, all the teens who love Mary Jane - so incredibly digestible is the way they repeat themselves. At the start of every Philip Marlowe novel the protagonist tells us a little about whatever rented home or apartment he has at the time of the story, what he's driving, whether his personal finances are a little up or a lot down, and those are basically all we ever see change; once those are out of the way it's straight on to a client that lies, a love interest who's trouble, a dead body or two and at the end a cop who somehow makes sure Marlowe doesn't really get paid for his efforts. These stories never seem to be about glamor or good times but I find myself drawn back to them as a reader, over and over again, because the escape is so satisfying. My love for that fictional life and the way it's described to us is so great, in fact, that I have left unread the last twenty pages of Farewell, My Lovely for years now because I'm not ready to inhabit a world without more Chandler left to read. I'm pretty sure I know who did it and I'm pretty sure I know Marlowe won't get paid in the end; the details are all icing and I'm not ready to be out of icing.
That lather-rinse-repeat formula is what comics as a whole have been using for nearly a century at this point and Brubaker knows not to mess with a good thing. Whereas the first book told us about an ex-science-villain who turned back to crime because he was suffocating in his life as a protected witness, Incognito - Bad Influences tells us about the same character's new life as a hero - one who lashes out at those around him in reaction to the equally smothering life of a superhero with a secret identity to protect. That the lives of heroes and villains are mirror images of one another isn't exactly news - it's central to the genre - but seeing it alternately stretch out before us in a yawn and then sit up and give us glimpses of Zack in action against cut-out caricatures of the sorts of villains we know all too well (what is it with malevolent primates as a villain meme, anyway) does to the next chapter in Zack Overkill's story exactly what Brubaker does so well in so many other titles: it humanizes it, slows it down to a walking pace and lets us understand that the characters are people first and suits second. Any number of titles in every genre try to do the same thing but most have as their strategy to make their characters seem human by forcing bad choices onto them. Brubaker avoids that; he simply lets Zack be human enough to want to have fun and to gripe about it when he can't. Even when Zack is being a jerk it's easy for us to sympathize with his essential humanity. After all, Zack just wants the same sense of escape that brought me to this comic in the first place.
The art in this book is definitely up to the high bar set by the first but it's also - fittingly - much brighter. Whereas in Incognito there were countless night scenes and other sequences that demanded dark backgrounds and shadowed environments, Bad Influences starts off being about Zack's life in the light and so we see plenty of bright whites and sunlit streets. It doesn't feel like a separate and distinct world from that of the first book, though; it feels like the old one with the stage lights turned up.
The story itself seems like it's pretty easy to chart or anticipate - much as the first one was until the reveals started piling up at the end - but I'm A-OK with that. We all crack open our comics every month pretty sure that Our Hero will still be there in the end and a villainous plot will probably have been foiled. This is a book where I'm not actually sure Zack Overkill will survive the overarching storyline but the individual components of it Brubaker begins to assemble in this first issue are all familiar to me: betrayal, a love interest who lies, a dead body or two, a life that's being lived a little higher or a little lower on the proverbial hog. I'm OK with that, too. More of the same, in this case, is exactly what I want. Somehow Brubaker has managed to give me that and still turned the sock inside out on how the story is constructed. I cannot wait for issue #2.
Klarion
Posted to Comic of the Week, Review on 4 November 2010
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