Day 33: Incognito: Bad Influences by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips - 2011 02/02/13

Ed Brubaker's Incognito is a classic superhero book with the intensity cranked up. It is super strength and science heroes; It is patriotic avengers infiltrating seedy underworld alliances, but rather than a colorful world of broad-jawed boasting and moral absolutes, everything is tinged with the cynicism of real life, of adult life. Like Mark Millar's Nemesis, the story is set against a backdrop of sex and violence, peppered with R-rated dialogue, and follows its story from the villain's perspective. Unlike Nemesis, though, Incognito has heart.

Where Millar's lead delights in his sadism, Brubaker's protagonist is conflicted about the life he's led. This is not a story about a monster, but a human being with terrible impulses and no instinct for critical thinking, who is finally starting to recognize the moral consequences of his selfish life, and who confusedly, begrudgingly chooses to fight against his own inclinations.

Nemesis was an experiment searching for pure evil, a twisted story designed to haunt the reader. Incognito is an investigation into a huge evil inside each of us, and our continuous struggle to overcome it.

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