Jan-ken-pon – Incognito #1 review, new series from Brubaker and Phillips

Issue #121

January 11th, 2008

Ed Brubaker is probably now best known for his current run on Captain America. It’s one of those rare examples of runs that have even people prone to be mired in their childhood waffling and accepting the fact – even if not sharing – that Captain America is the best it has ever been.

How did he do this?

Brubaker became the preeminent writer of the American Icon, by pulling off the biggest crime in recent memory, and doing it in brazen and economical fashion – you can’t kill Captain America any other way. He just had him got.

Brubaker is a crime writer.

He got to his story by murdering somebody.

That’s Crime 101.

It’s not meant to be a statement that places limitations; crime is universal – in every era, every locale. It is society’s mazes – the rat race if you will – that Brubaker chose to examine in Incognito. What does one do when he is above the herd? What occurs when what allows for your lofty vantage is taken away? Upon getting such stature back, how does one react– what would somebody learn? Do you escape the maze just to be put into a cage?

These are the questions that the central character of the first issue, Zach Overkill, confronts. A past that involves him having superhuman abilities, using them for crime, being captured, turned, and neutralized. Assimilation. What happens when the means and the mask of self-importance is removed? There is a bit in the issue, a confrontation with a female who takes umbrage – one can’t even laugh at oneself anymore without somebody thinking everything occurs on their personal, mobile stage. When Zach is berated, he is not mad at the act; he is mad that he no longer resides above that stage. What shouldn’t be lost are the classic environments Brubaker does choose to further a meld between down-to-earth, life shit, teetering to the nearest edge of super hero fan consciousness. If our heroes don’t have some definitive occurrence happen to them in an alley – from Batman to Spawn – which of them don’t find perch on the edge of rooftops? The art moves effortlessly in making both worlds one, where in those alleys could dwell both common muggers and super-villains alike. Where drugs remain a common escape, or act as super pills.

I felt that if such an attack, a two-piece on two fronts was the desired effect– it worked out rather well. I base this on my first thought on seeing the art, supplied by longtime Brubaker collaborator Sean Phillips. I felt like it was a grimmer, less romantic version of what I saw in the flashback scenes in Vaughan’s The Escapists (see my review), itself a homage to a pulp love letter by Michael Chabon. Overkill is whom the Escapist may have thrown blows with. He could be the villain in that Chabon-verse grown up.

The end shows that there rarely exists a lack of assumptive masters, but what one comes away with from the first issue is what makes the first issue of Incognito successful are not the questions raised and offered for examination. The success is that the psychological and social commentary is able to be put aside, understood, and forgotten long enough for an issue wrap up that is essentially an old-school, pulp villain mad scientist; whose maniacal laughter is sure to come, and something we still hear even when there remains no panel left to give echo it.

There runs some risk in wanting to have their cake and eat it with Incognito. It is the opportunity for such risk that make American comic books a unique creative medium, and it is the ability to assess precarious opportunity that a criminal duo earns its rep from.

They don’t come more infamous than Brubaker and Phillips.

    
* As is custom with Criminal, there is an essay at the back of the issue. Many people who are BookSpot Central readers may be familiar with Jess Nevins. He has written some essential non-fiction work like The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana. In an era where a lot of extra material in the back of comics either simply don’t exist or exist as pure flummery, Brubaker continues his anthology of specialists. Nevins delivers an essay on the pulp pillar, The Shadow, a rather apt subject, and cataloged by perhaps most qualified to do so. It’s damn find reading.

_{Jan-ken-pon is the time traveling, force-walking, multiverse crossing column of Jay Tomio, owner of 1/3 of everything you see currently on screen, and the editor of Heliotrope. His pulp self fights crime under the name Ear Muffs. Not because he wears one, but because it’s the only thing he wears. Some call him the Bodhisattva.}

About Jay Tomio

...Jay Tomio is the co-owner of BSCreview and BSCkids--check out Jan-ken-pon, his time traveling, force-walking, multiverse crossing column. More fun awaits at the Vogue Immunity