I say "anti-villainy", because you'd be hard-pressed to find a single hero in any of the six parts that make up Incognito. There's a protagonist, one Zack Overkill, who was once a super-strong villain but is now a heavily drugged civilian in the Witness Protection Program. He occasionally does the right thing, but never for the right reasons, and there are one or two truly unforgivable acts he commits along the way. Even the so-called good guys of this world, the SOS, are a morally gray, clandestine bunch who only recently stopped torturing their prisoners.

Brubaker chose to spin the universe of Incognito out of the pulp tradition of the 1930's, which is part of the reason this is now such a brutal world. As he argues in the collection's afterword, characters like Doc Savage and the Shadow were always more violent and ambiguous than the likes of Captain America and Superman, and the larger world of the pulps was one dominated by horror and noirish murder mystery.

Considering this background of pulpish adventurers and the current war between the omnipresent, villainous organization run by the Black Death and the heroic-by-default SOS, I couldn't help but be reminded of The Venture Bros. (There's another plot point that will really hammer home that connection, but I won't spoil it.) The comparison is a worthy one - both are superior explorations of how supposedly extraordinary people try but fail to lead ordinary lives, and the consequences of secret wars between good and evil for those caught in the middle. Oh, and they're both fantastic, if you prefer to keep things simple.

Between Sleeper and his truly epic run on Captain America, I'd rank Ed Brubaker as one of the top three writers working in comics today. After reading Incognito, you could definitely talk me into handing him the outright title. What's so impressive about his work here is that the story is grim, gritty, profane, ultraviolent, and more than a little offensive - and none of it feels gratuitous. He is telling a story from the perspective of a man without a moral compass, and there's no way such a story isn't headed for some pretty dark places. Still, because neither he nor Zack Overkill revel in it, all of the carnage feels artistically justified. Take note, comic book writers from the nineties. This is how mature comics writing is done.

At just six issues, the story barrels along quickly. Although the concept of a supervillian working an office job while in witness protection was the initial impetus for Incognito, Brubaker does not dwell on it for too long. He extracts a lot of great material from the premise - including Zack's one civilian friend and his rather inexplicable office crush - but puts a lot of other balls in motion while he does so. With at least five or six factions out for Zack, each with their own distinct interests, it's remarkable that the story is entirely coherent. Of course, based on Brubaker's track record, it's not exactly surprising.

Sean Phillips also deserves a great deal of praise for his work on the art of Incognito. A perfect visual fit for Brubaker's writing, he excels at bringing out the twisted, complex emotions of the book's characters. Although clearly capable of rendering an exploded head or charred corpse in all its exquisite glory, he too shows restraint, preferring to indicate the most horrific moments tastefully, rather than let them take over the panels. That isn't to say there isn't some brutal imagery in here - there definitely is - but much like Brubaker's script, none of it feels exploitative or gratuitous.

Incognito sets out to explore one possible fate of a supervillain and ends up tackling questions of morality, destiny, voyeurism, and whether there are limits to what humans can do to themselves in the name of power. It also takes the story of Zack Overkill and uses it as an opportunity to construct an entire world of pulp heroes and villains brought forward into the 21st century, one that Brubaker has promised he will return to. I can't wait.

One of the things that keeps popping up when writer Captain America writer Ed Brubaker and editor Tom Brevoort talk about Reborn is that bringing Steve Rogers back has always been part of the plan. As Brubaker told MTV,

There was never any thought on my side that we wouldn't bring him back, so it's not like there was ever a fight about it...I only killed him with the intention of bringing him back.

Brevoort has echoed this, and said something that caught our attention:

We've been planning the story of Cap's return virtually from the moment that he died... you'll be able to look back into [Captain America #25] and the issues that followed and see the assorted seeds we planted once we reveal what's been going on in Reborn.

Assorted seeds? Sounded like a reason to re-read the issues to us. But when we did, we realized that not only was that statement true, but that we were all idiots for not realizing what was going on first time around.

Let's start at the end, shall we? Steve Rogers' end, that is. We've known since the issue after he was shot that all was not as it seemed when it came to Cap's "death." After all, what kind of gunshot wound results not only in death, but in this?
In the same issue, main series villain the Red Skull meets with one of his minions, onetime Nazi scientist turned robot Arnim Zola, to discuss a recent acquisition from fellow evil mastermind Doctor Victor Von Doom:
See where we're going already? Don't worry. It'll become more obvious.

As the storyline's main thrust - which sees the Skull attempt to bring about America's downfall through capitalism and democracy while former sidekick and former brainwashed-assassin Bucky Barnes take over the role of Captain America to stop him - continues, the villains fall out, as tends to happen in these cases. One of the reasons for their rift? The treatment of their prisoner, and Steve Rogers' ex-girlfriend, Sharon Carter... who has a mysterious purpose that we only get hints about more than a year after Rogers' death:
What's that about a "platform"...? Well, here's where we take a slight leap of faith, but not an incredibly unlikely one. We know, after all, that Zola has been working on technology involving time travel from Doctor Doom, so we're guessing that he's talking about Doctor Doom's Time Platform, a Marvel Comics mainstay since 1963's Fantastic Four #5. But what's does this have to do with Sharon (or Steve Rogers, for that matter)? Later in the same issue - #41, for those of you out there who really want to know - the other side of the villainous rift, evil psychiatrist Dr. Faustus, talks to Sharon and spills the beans:
"The Constant"? To a generation of Lost fans, that phrase means only one thing: Desmond and Penny. So, if Sharon is Penny, then surely that means that Steve Rogers is, somehow, lost in time. Let's take another sideways trip off Memory Lane and look at Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five for a second, which has been cited as an influence on Lost's episode "The Constant". Mr. Vonnegut, would you please explain to the class what Billy Pilgrim learned about death in the classic novel?

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die... All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist... It is an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

What if the reason Steve Rogers' body shriveled up wasn't because he was dead, but because his soul had been ripped out of it, and sent bouncing around time without any control? After all, the recent Captain America #600 revealed that he hadn't been shot by a regular gun...

But without a body to come back to - and that body is gone, let's face it - what could Steve Rogers come back to? Well, let's look and see what happened when the Red Skull and Zola tried to use the still-unexplained device:
Oh, Sharon, if only you hadn't destroyed the machine at the point where the whole thing was going to be explained to us...

To add some fuel to our fire, you have Captain America: Reborn editor Tom Brevoort revealing more than he probably meant to in a Marvel.com interview:

All during these months, while the world thought him dead, Steve's been on a metaphysical journey of his own, and the experiences he's lived through during that time are going to have a profound effect on his state of mind.

A metaphysical journey like being trapped in time and forced to relive his life, perhaps? Such a journey would give Steve Rogers - when he returns - a new view on life as Captain America, new readers a chance to get acquainted with the character's possibly daunting backstory, and the preview pages we've seen from the first issue to be less straight-up flashback and more involved in the actual story than initially thought.

If our guess about exactly what's been going on is correct, of course. For all we really know, Steve Rogers has just had amnesia after waking up on the mortuary slab and swapping his body with a handy melting clone all those months ago...

Captain America: Reborn #1 is released on July 1st. Feel free to come back and tell me when I'm shown to be horribly wrong.

The sleeper of the title is Holden Carver - dig the dual allusion to Catcher In The Rye and Raymond - a superpowered intelligence agent whose undercover position in a criminal organization filled with supervillains has started to go wrong... and will continue to do so, to increasing degrees and with increasing complications, throughout the course of the book. Within that overarching plot, we're given some insight into the kinds of people who choose to be part of a criminal underworld, a love affair doomed by its very nature, and a moral ambiguity still unusual for superhero comics... In other words, a perfect noir story that just happens to star people who can do fantastic, unusual things.

I admit, I may have already tipped my critical hand by calling Sleeper Season One a "forgotten classic" above, but it doesn't feel like hyperbole; Sleeper - and particularly the first year of the series, which this book collects - offered not only a new take on superhero tradition and cliche, but the story and execution to back that shock of the new up, making this seven-year-old series feel as fresh and contemporary now as it did when it first appeared. Creators Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips both give some of their best work on the series; Brubaker's tense narration, double crosses and cruel streak finding a home years before his Criminal series, and Phillips' art coming across atmospheric but with crystal clear storytelling nonetheless.

Click here to read writer Ed Brubaker talking about the series.

This is, at heart, a book (and a series) that could never end happily, but that's not to say it's a joyless read; the "secret origins" that characters tell each other to pass the time offer grim laughs (especially Miss Misery's), and there's some strange sense of satisfaction to the way in which everything falls apart, and yet goes to plan, at the same time throughout, complete with last minute turnaround that makes the release of the second volume in September seem at least two months too long to wait.

The idea of "superheroes for grown-ups" has been promised many, many times in the twenty-plus years since Frank Miller made Batman old and Alan Moore took the underwear away from his glowing blue radioactive man, but rarely achieved. Sleeper manages it by downplaying the superheroics almost altogether, and instead concentrating on telling a story about people in desperate situations doing whatever they have to to survive... and then finding out that they made matters worse anyway.

Sleeper: Season One is released today by DC Comics/Wildstorm.

[Editor] Scott Dunbier and [Wildstorm VP] Jim Lee really liked the pitch I gave them for [earlier Brubaker series] Point Blank, and so Scott asked me to come up with something else. I told him I had no ideas, but then the minute I hung up the phone, it hit me, so I called him right back and pitched Sleeper to him, and he dug it. We immediately decided Sean Phillips should draw it and asked him, and he said yes. Then I ended up revamping my ideas for Point Blank a bit to turn it into a sequel. Originally, [Carver's handler] Lynch was going to get murdered.

Calling something "ahead of its time" always feels a bit like a polite way of saying "other people had more success ripping it off later," but Sleeper really does seem to have foreseen things like Mark Millar's Wanted and Marvel's Dark Reign. Was the series meant as some statement of where you saw the superhero genre going, or were you simply trying to mix the crime and superhero genres to find a new spin on both?

I was really trying to blend espionage and superhero comics. To take my love of John LeCarre and deep cover kind of stories, and throw them into the world of capes and masks. And to sort of have fun with some of the conventions of the genre, like the origin stories, and things like that. But I don't know that it's anything like what Wanted was, or what Dark Reign is doing. Sleeper was always a very tight contained character-driven book. Not big world-spanning action.

Sleeper feels, to me, like the first place where you really found the voice that you'd use on Marvel work like Captain America and Daredevil. Years later, do you feel like it was a turning point for you?

I don't think I can be the judge of that. I know it was incredibly hard to write, and it really solidified me and Sean as a team, so in that way, maybe. I think the work I was doing on Gotham Central and Catwoman at the same time really helped me figure out how I do whatever it is I do. Although, Bendis still thinks [1999 miniseries for DC's Vertigo imprint] Scene of the Crime is my best book, so who can say?

Now that you're a bigshot at Marvel - killing Captain America, bringing him back, writing the origin of the Marvel superheroes in The Marvels Project - what does Sleeper mean to you? Embarrassing earlier work, nostalgic example of a time when less people were paying attention to you, surprisingly public first date with Sean Phillips...?

I've always been really proud of it. It's strange, because I've been in a lot of meetings in Hollywood the past few years, and every single person I meet there has read Sleeper, which was easily my worst-selling title ever. So I figure the entire run just got sold in Hollywood or something. But it's always gratified me that this little book I didn't think anyone but me would like found so many fans who wanted to make it into movies and TV shows. If they ever get around to that, of course, it'll be very nice. I'm getting tired of waiting here.

All we know about Reborn is the creative team (Brubaker is joined by Ultimates artist Bryan Hitch), the price and the length of the series (Five issues). The only other information is that the official solicitation will be coming soon. But Brubaker's involvement suggests a Cap tie-in, and the solicitation for June's issue of the regular Captain America was certainly teasing that something big was about to happen around Rogers' death:

Where were you when Captain America died? It's the anniversary of the day Steve Rogers was killed, a day of reflection and mourning in the Marvel U...a time to look back on the things Steve did and what he stood for... or is this issue actually the beginning of the most wicked plot twist since issue 25? Yeah, actually it's both.

Of course, this is where the second guessing comes in - Brubaker's too smart to think that we wouldn't assume that a comic called Reborn would be about the return of the original Captain America, so maybe this is a swerve (That Cap solicit does promise a "wicked" plot twist, after all), but at the same time, maybe he assumed that we'd assume that it was a swerve, so it will be Steve Rogers after all... Unless he assumed that we'd assume that he'd assume that we'd assume, and... Well, you can take it from here.

Reborn #1 hits stores in July.

We've already told you that Incognito - the new series from writer Ed Brubaker (forever to be known as "The Man Who Killed Captain America") and his Sleeper partner Sean Philips - was the one essential comic to be released last week, but in case you didn't want to take our word for it, Brubaker offered up the skinny on the series on Newsarama.com over the weekend.

Calling the series "Apocalyptic Pulp Noir," the genre-bending series will offer "some real weird and alien stuff going on right next to these dark shadowed scenes of despair and sex" throughout its run, according to the writer:

I'd been thinking about how comics grew out of the pulps, in many ways. That many of our superheroes, if not all, have their roots in pulp characters - Doc Savage, the Spider, the Shadow - these harder-edged characters inspired Batman and Superman and a lot of others. And at the same time, I was thinking it was funny that noir in many ways grew out of the pulps, too - since Hammett and Chandler came out of Black Mask - but that no one had ever written a noir story in the worlds of Doc Savage or the Shadow.

And it just clicked — had no one ever done a noir pulp hero story? Taking two pulp staples and slamming them together? Was that possible?

The resulting story - about Zack Andersen, a former supervillain who is chafing at his new life in the supervillain version of the witness protection program - isn't necessarily what you might expect, even if you're familiar with the two creators' earlier series Sleeper (currently in the process of being adapted into a movie by producer Sam Raimi):

As you know, Sleeper is about a spy forced to live among the enemy for so long that he loses sight of which side he's on, lost in the shades of grey of his world, losing his moral compass. So I was thinking, what about someone having to go the opposite path? What would that story be? And I thought, it'd have to be about a bad guy, a real villain, who's somehow put into a position where they start doing decent things, accidentally saving people... stuff like that, and then you'd see what happened next — how that changed them, and what it would do to whatever life they're living.

Not that everything will be laughter and candy, as our anti-hero turns towards the light, of course:

The bad guys are definitely a lot of fun to write, but I think it's just figuring out what character you're going to write, and getting in their head to tell the story that drives me. And there are really messed-up things in bad guys heads.

The first issue of Incognito is in stores now.

Ed Brubaker: 7 Things to Know About 'Incognito' [Newsarama]

Another similarity between the two awards ceremonies was the lack of ability to stick to running times; as MC for the evening Bill Morrison - writer and artist for Matt Groening's Bongo Comics - said at the end of the evening, "I'd really hoped to bring this to a close before 11pm, but gave up on that idea somewhere around 9:30. At least I brought it in before midnight!" Nonetheless, from the opening speech from a potentially inebriated Frank Miller (who - ironically for a man who's abandoned comics for Hollywood - told the audience, "If you're trying to do comic books: Forget the movies, forget the games. Don't try to do three things at once. Give me a really good comic book.") to the closing appearance by Miller's Spirit leading man Gabriel Macht (The Spirit was the main sponsor of the ceremony), the event was a questionably enjoyable mix of everything that makes up the comic industry these days... including the unexpected celebrity endorsements.

While the crowd went wild when Samuel L. Jackson appeared to present three awards - displaying a much-needed self-aware humor when winners took awhile to walk the long distance from their seats to the stage in silence - Jane Weidlin's attempts at humor were much less successful, if only because making jokes like "Get these motherfrakking snakes off this motherfrakking plane" wouldn't even have been funny when Snakes On A Plane was released two years ago. That said, her accompanying troop of the Empire's Finest provided some much needed spectacle to what was, otherwise, a fairly dry affair despite the best efforts of co-hosts Gerard Way, Tom Kenney (the voice of Spongebob Squarepants - which doesn't seem to be that unlike his own voice, really) and Reno 911's Tom Lennon and Ben Garant, who at least offered those who didn't win awards some much-needed solace:

We've all heard people say that 'if you're nominated, then you're a winner.' Usually that's bullshit. But tonight, everyone who's nominated for the Best Penciller/Inker of Penciller and Inker Team award really is a winner, because if you don't win, you'll go home with a George Foreman grill. The cash value of the grill may be higher than that of the award, we should warn you.

The best acceptance speech of the night came from Best Writer Ed Brubaker - the man who killed Captain America - who seemed genuinely shocked by his win:

I was texting somebody because I was so sure I wouldn't win... I'm gonna get out of here, because [Y: The Last Man writer] Brian K. Vaughan should've won. And don't you guys know who Joss Whedon is? I mean, Jesus Christ.

Joss probably didn't feel so bad, however; his indie webcomic Sugarshock won the Best Digital Comic award, while the Buffy The Vampire Slayer series won Best New Series.

The award winners in full:
Best Writer: Ed Brubaker for Captain America, Criminal, Daredevil and The Immortal Iron Fist
Best Writer/Artist: Chris Ware for Acme Novelty Library
Best Writer/Artist (Humor): Eric Powell for The Goon: Chinatown
Best Penciller/Inker or Penciller/Inker Team: Pia Guerra and Jose Marzan Jr. for Y: The Last Man
Best Painter of Multimedia Artist: Eric Powell for The Goon: Chinatown
Best Cover Artist: James Jean for Fables, The Umbrella Academy, Process Recess 2 and Superior Showcase 2
Best Coloring: Dave Stewart for BPRD, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Hellboy, The Umbrella Academy, The Spirit and many others
Best Lettering: Todd Klein for Justice, Fables, League of Extraordinary Gentlement: The Black Dossier, Crossing Midnight and many others
Best Continuing Series: Y: The Last Man
Best Limited Series: The Umbrella Academy
Best New Series: Buffy The Vampire Slayer
Best Single Issue: Justice League of America #11, by Brad Meltzer and Gene Ha
Best Anthology: 5 by Becky Cloonan, Fabio Moon, Gabriel Ba, Vasilis Lolos and Rafael Grampa
Best Publication for Kids: Mouse Guard: Fall 1152 and Mouse Guard: Winter 1152
Best Publication for Teens: Laika by Nick Abadzis
Special Recognition: Chuck BB for Black Metal
Best Archival Collection/Project - Comic Strips: The Complete Terry And The Pirates, Vol. 1
Best Archival Collection/Project - Comic Books: I Shall Destroy All The Civilized Planets!
Best Humor Publication: The Perry Bible Fellowship: The Trial of Colonel Sweeto and Other Stories
Best US Edition of International Material: I Killed Adolf Hitler
Best US Edition of International Material - Japan: Tekkonkinkreet: Black and White
Best Comic-Related Periodical/Journalism: Newsarama.com
Best Comics-Related Book: Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean by Douglas Wolk
Best Publication Design: Process Recess 2, designed by James Jean and Chris Pitzer
Best Digital Comic: Sugarshock by Joss Whedon and Fabio Moon
Best Short Story: Mr. Wonderful by Daniel Clowes, from the New York Times Sunday Magazine
Best Reality-Based Work: Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow
Best Graphic Album - Reprint: Mouse Guard: Fall 1152
Best Graphic Album - New: Exit Wounds
The Bill Finger Excellence In Comics Writing Award: Archie Goodwin and Larry Lieber
The Russ Manning Most Promising Newcomer Award: Cathy Malkasian, for Percy Gloom
The Will Eisner Spirit of Comics Retailer Award: Brave New World in Santa Clarita, CA
The Bob Clampett Humanitarian Award: Paul Levitz, President of DC Comics

Image by Marvel Comics' Agent M.

Talking about the relocation of Marvel's favorite mutants on the WordBalloon podcast, Uncanny X-Men writer Brubaker took responsibility for the decision:

When we were sitting down and talking about what to do with the X-Men post-Messiah Complex... and it was, yet again the Mansion had been destroyed and all this stuff, I just sort of threw out the idea because I remembered that Daredevil had lived in San Francisco. I just thought 'If I were the X-Men, I would move to San Francisco. Like, get as far away from Tony Stark and all those people, stop rebuilding your mansion where there's, like, a huge target for any anti-mutant person in the world and go somewhere where you're going to be able to let your freak flag fly and be loved... It just seemed like, why not go somewhere where people will think that you're cool?

Ellis' new series No Hero doesn't exist within forty years of distraught continuity full of explosions and death, but he explained to us that his choice of setting has much more to do with San Francisco's real-life colorful history:

NO HERO comes partly out of the notion that there was a cultural move in Sixties San Francisco to bring forth a new kind of human (not least through neurochemical roadtesting and devoted ingestion of whatever old shit had been scraped off the bottom of someone's bathtub). Timothy Leary even said that The Beatles were "prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species." Notably, in the same statement, he also called them "mutants." Where else should we be telling stories about the evolutionary future of strange Americans?

It seems that, at least as far as the cape and cowl set goes, San Francisco is finally ascending to take the cultural crown of the US that it so richly deserves.

Both Uncanny X-Men #499 and No Hero #0 hit stores today.

Warren Ellis' No Hero [Avatar Press]