3 out of 5

This one just didn’t work for me.

It’s interesting going over Brubaker’s career.  He started out in the indie pseudo-bio realm with Lowlife, but crime definitely crept in early on, combining for things like Scene of the Crime, which hint at the down and dirty dealings to come but maintain that sorta indie thinking man’s vibe with the characters.  In his initial stints on Detective Comics and Batman, he worked some of his crime chops through fairly generic storylines, getting used to stretching comic confines for his name-making run on Sleeper, which was heading for darker territory, and then finally Captain America – which exploded Brubaker onto like 50 other Marvel books and stretched his abilities to appeal to comic fans and douse it all in noir shadows.  Criminal started up around then, and almost like a backlash to being involved with heroes, he no longer held back the noir, and just went all out, making some of the most awesome crime stories we’ve seen in recent past.

Incognito could be seen as a return to the sort of Sleeper vibe, the dark and dirty superhero.  Liberated of needing to work within a previously created world (Wildstorm for Sleeper), Brubaker pitches a story of an ex-villain sorta in witness protection who gets thrown back into the mix, unsure if he’s working again as a villain or working undercover as a hero…  Unfortunately, noir has a tipping point where it just gets too mean, and Incognito goes into that territory.  It’s too swear-laden to seem to be written well, and no one is particularly likeable.  The storyline also suffers, as it doesn’t properly present its concept before swinging into the moral dilemma of its lead, making the superhero world Brubaker wants to create feel rather thin and the crux of its 2 story arcs (as of this review) not grabbing enough as it doesn’t really have any context from which to spring.

Except that we trust Brubaker by this point, we trust the noir world, and I guess swearing and violence when painted with Sean Phillips’ sketchy pencils are just supposed to make us automatically think ‘cool’.  It does.  It works, and it is a cool and quick read, but it’s too easy this time to stop and not care.  It works a lot better when we care about the characters and the world.  This particular hero/villain formula was much better applied in Sleeper, and the noir formula is equally originally applied in Brubaker’s much smoother followup series, ‘Fatale.’