What I’ve Been Reading: January 2, 2009

Incognito #1
As with Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillip’s  Sleeper, a familiar noir trope is getting a superpowered rerub:  the former supercriminal Zack Overkill, now drugged into normalcy and on parole, is struggling with his government-enforced rehabilitation and longs for the power he once possessed.  As with Criminal, the plot and story are onlyhalf of the pleasure I get from reading Brubaker’s script; the construction is frequently elegant in its simplicity and the way he manages to surprise even when tinkering with the hoariest of clichés is envious.  Phillips and Staples, again, serve as the perfect counterpart to Brubaker’s script, deceptively minimal, reinforcing the point that less is more: murky swaths of digital watercolor underpins Phillips’s strong composition to help tell the story better than any amount of Photoshop gradient ever could.

The Winter Men Winter Special
It’s been two damn years, people.   I’m going to have to find my back issues before I even think about reading this thing I brought home.  I’m frankly a bit surprised that Wildstorm even bothered to put this out; I can’t imagine it’s sold enough to pay for its print run at this late date, but I’m sure they’d rather placate the few thousand buyers who’d whine about a collection containing a conclusion they weren’t able to buy off the stands.  (In other words, expect to see an unread copy show up at Goodwill or the like during my next big purge.)

Final Crisis: Secret Files
If I’d looked beyond the very nice cover by Frank Quitely and realized that the majority of this special revolved around Len Wein giving a proper origin to Libra (who I think was used by Morrison because he was a blank slate, serving his story needs as required while giving the instigator of Final Crisis the sort of tie to the universe at large that a lot of DC fans expect,) I wouldn’t have purchased it.  It’s a great deal of “What went on before” for a character that really didn’t need it.  There’s also two text pieces (Grant Morrison “explains” the Anti-Life equation in a very ugly page that’s facing a page from the Crime Bible) and some sketches by J.G. Jones and Morrison.

Punisher War Zone #4
Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon could burn my home down and as long as it formed the shape of the Punisher’s skull emblem, I’d be OK with it.