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Review: Incognito: Bad Influences #5

By | April 1st, 2011
Posted in Reviews | % Comments

Written by Ed Brubaker
Illustrated by Sean Phillips

THE SUPER-PULP-NOIR GOES OUT WITH A BANG! Face-to-face with his target, Zack Overkill is forced to question everything about his past and future and the nature of good and evil. A nightmarish finale that will leave you reeling. And as with every issue, our Professor of Pulp Culture, Jess Nevins is back with another great essay on forgotten pulp history, available only in the single issues of INCOGNITO!

The long partnership between Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips (and silent partner Val Staples) is one of the safest possible bets you can take, when it comes to new comics. From Sleeper on through Criminal, they became the go-to men for gritty, neo-noir sturm und drang. Among their shared bibliography, Incognito was proof that no matter how tonally similar their works were, their ability to twist convention hadn’t suffered: call it a surprisingly playful approach to a series about people breaking necks and smoking crack.

So how does Incognito‘s sequel fare, both as a continuation of the story of Zack Overkill and as a continuation of the story of Brubaker, Phillips, and Staples? Let’s have a look at Bad Influences after the jump.

Up above the cut, I mentioned that there was a surprisingly playful quality to Incognito, which is admittedly a bit of a strange way to look at it. Incognito was the story of Zack Overkill, a former supervillainous skullcrusher who was withering in the ennui of Witness Protection. With his twin brother Xander, the world was his to bully and exploit. When we first met him, though, he was consigned to the indignity of being an average nobody, getting to live the rest of his life like a schnook. Obviously, that didn’t last long, because at some point a story had to happen. After a forced relapse into his wicked ways, Zack ended the last series in the service of SOS (think SHIELD), fighting the people he once called his comrades.

From that plot synopsis, you might ask: “So what’s especially playful about that? That just sounds like a Dolph Lundgren movie.” Structurally, sure. What separated Incognito from the rest of the gritty revisionist-superhero noir stories out there there are more than you’d think) was a series of sly sidesteps that kept genre conventions at arm’s length. The characters in Incognito were never quite damaged in the way you’d expect; Zack’s dopey drug-buddy co-worker ended up an oblivion-chasing maniac, and a damsel-in-distress moment went awry when, after “saving” the woman, Zack discovered that he’d interrupted a staged, consensual sex game. Zack Overkill wasn’t (and isn’t) a ‘hero’ in the traditional sense, or even much of an anti-hero, because we can never be sure of his moral convictions — he’s a selfish, thrillseeking opportunist. Incognito performed a clever sleight of hand to get us on his side, though, because everyone in the “normal” world was even more screwed up than him.

In Bad Influences, though, Zack has been on the side of the angels from the start, casting his own doubt in his convictions into a sharper light if only because suddenly, he’s surrounded by people who are unquestionably pretty good. Bad Influences is like the story of an addict teetering on the edge of relapse. Assigned to infiltrate a criminal organization and capture an SOS operative who’s gone native, Zack has threatened and beaten his way through his old haunts. With every punch he lands, the question grows more insistent: Isn’t this more fun than playing things straight? One thing Bad Influences has reinforced throughout its run, though, is that you can’t go home again. With the taint of SOS on him, no one will ever trust Zack again, and the people who help him are signing their own death warrants.

When Bad Influences #4 ended, one of those allies had just hung himself, and in handling his corpse, Zack got the last, potent hit of the guy’s hallucinogenic powers. This led to his capture by Level Nine, the sci-crime faction headed by Simon Slaughter, the undercover agent he’s been chasing. In #5, things get wrapped up, but as ever, not really in the way that you’d expect.

Continued below

Bad Influences is comparable on a lot of levels to an addict story, like I said above. Zack’s dilemma is broadly the same. It’s a lot easier to be lazy and do what’s comfortable, to live in the world he knows, just like it’s easier to score than it is to brave the DTs. If Zack stays on that road, though, his “old life” will kill him. The second Incognito series is driven by no-win scenarios and the choices people make when they realize that no matter what, they’re still damned. Following that line of logic, though, we come to the most obvious inspiration for Bad Influences‘s conclusion: Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.

Apocalypse Now is one of my favorite movies of all time. For those unaware, it’s the story of an Army captain during the Vietnam War, given a mission to make a long, difficult trip up-river into Cambodia, to assassinate a colonel who’s conquered an indigenous tribe and set himself up as their leader, teacher, and god-figure. When the captain confronts the colonel, he doesn’t find a fighting-fit war machine; he finds a haunted, crazed intellectual, who’s been broken by trying to fit his experiences of the war in Vietnam into the black-and-white framework he’d constructed for his reality. The lines separating dualistic concepts began to vanish: good and evil bled into one another, just like life and death. So it is with Simon Slaughter, who claims to have glimpsed beyond the veil of the patterns of human experience.

Despite its ambitious neo-noir tone and its commitment to subverting expectations, Bad Influences gives us a big superhero climax. Zack and Slaughter bash away at one another, firing rayguns while explosions rock the building they’re in. That’s not as interesting as what they’re saying while they do it: Slaughter raves about his new conception of reality, eerily calm in his apparent madness and doing things seemingly for the sake of doing them. He proposes an entirely nihilistic world view: at the end of the fight, defeated, he notes without irony that Zack constituted his “Plan B.” That alone calls into question everything he’d just said; faced with a no-win situation, Slaughter seems to have just done whatever he felt like, until it was time to go ahead and lose already. Did he truly touch on some higher level of reality, or did he just stop caring? Is there a difference?

I’ve re-read this issue a couple times now. At first, it felt unsatisfying: a major plot-point is resolved via a seemingly throwaway mention of time travel, the moral quandaries that formed the first four issues’ core go away in favor of rock-em-sock-em good guy vs. bad guy, and the ending is just a downer, flat-out. The more I look back at it, though, the more I see Brubaker and Phillips once again playing games with the form, hiding it in weird pockets like the series’ multiple references to violence against children, which just read as shock tactics on first pass. Instead, Zack’s disgust at children being used for organized pit-fighting is confirmation of his severance of his past; after all, he and his brother were child experiments themselves. The more you take the series in, the more it yields in return. Bad Influences is not a solipsist meta-rumination like Alan Moore’s work, or a hypercontextual distillation like Grant Morrison’s, or a structuralist genre-tweak like Warren Ellis’s. It’s something else, something more elusive on first reading.

Brubaker’s best work as a writer usually deals with the difficult choices that come with responsibility, and the ensuing consequences. Look at the plight to save the Winter Soldier in Captain America, Matt Murdock’s struggle with his guilt over his wife’s state in Daredevil, or Selina Kyle taking up protectorship of the East End in Catwoman. The closest cousin to Bad Influences is another story he did with Sean Phillips, Sleeper, about (dig this) a villain going undercover to get close to a villain who deems himself beyond good and evil.

Sleeper was about a man trying to get away with it all, by playing both sides against the middle and trying to reap the benefits. Bad Influences is about a man stuck between two sets of convictions — selfish kicks and white-hat morality — with no foothold in either. Zack doesn’t have the ambition of Sleeper‘s protagonist. Despite being the nominal hero of our story, whose struggle with the bad old ways has engaged us for five issues, he’s still a pawn. Look at the art in this issue: Phillips, delivering his dependably solid and moody storytelling, rarely shows us Zack’s face without obscuring it in shadows. He’s an average costumed nobody. He gave up the faceless hell of Witness Protection, sure, but he traded it in for the consequences of everyone knowing exactly who he is. It’s a no-win situation.

Except for the readers, that is.

Final Verdict: 8.0 – Buy


Patrick Tobin

Patrick Tobin (American) is likely shaming his journalism professors from the University of Glasgow by writing about comic books. Luckily, he's also written about film for The Drouth and The Directory of World Cinema: Great Britain. He can be reached via e-mail right here.

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