CBR News spoke with Brubaker about the book, published through Marvel Comics' Icon imprint. This week, Brubaker and Phillips bring Zack back for another morally murky exploration of good and evil with the five issue miniseries 'Incognito: Bad Influences.' This time, however, Zack must venture back into the criminal underworld he left behind. Life in witness protection proved to be excruciatingly mundane for Zack, and he eventually donned a mask and became a superhero, not out of a desire to do good, but for his need to regain the thrill of living on the edge. Raised Zack from birth and trained by the Black Death, when the organization murdered Zack's twin brother and tried to kill him, he turned State's evidence and was placed in a witness protection program for supervillains.

In last year's 'Incognito,' Brubaker and Phillips examined morality in a pulp fiction-styled world of super-powered people through the story of Zack Overkill, a former super-powered enforcer for a secret criminal conspiracy called the Black Death. Their creator-owned series'Criminal' often focuses on stories about bad men with noble intentions.

But he is at his best as a noir crime comics writer that’s his niche.Sean Phillips' cover to 'Incognito: Bad Influences' #1When it comes to most comic book stories, it's easy to tell who the heroes and villains are, but the creator-owned works of writer Ed Brubaker and artist Sean Phillips are much more morally complex. I would say not quite, I didn’t like this nearly as much, but there are aspects of the work that show the promise of today, for sure.īrubaker did superhero comics for years, such as Captain America, Daredevil, and Catwoman that are among the best runs ever on those characters, bringing a fresh sense of noir humanity to them, while demonstrating that he has read and absorbed every single issue of what has come before. Since I am reading Brubaker and Phillips’ wonderful 2019 Criminal series, and recently reread their The Fadeout, and I saw that Sam Q had gone back to compare the new stuff to the older stuff, I thought I would reread Incognito to see whether he was actually just as good then as now.

Incognito, Vol. 2 by Ed Brubaker