Bullets: Wired, Sleeper Extras, Incognito Merchandise.

A couple quick points as the weekend begins...

• Wired Interview with Brubaker. Wired's "Underwire" blog just posted a brief interview with Ed Brubaker, covering things from his favorite noir, to his work on Captain America, to the upcoming mini-series Incognito. About the latter, Ed explains that the comic is "about identity and morality on a few levels, as well as this twisted noir supervillain explodo fantasy."
  
  
• Upcoming Sleeper Extras. In one particular thread at the Jinxworld forum, Ed has been discussing Incognito quite a bit. The entire thread's worth browsing, but the most interesting news that hasn't already been covered here, concerns the new editions of Sleeper that we mentioned earlier. Ed relayed that he doesn't yet know the release date(s) and that the books might not be hardcovers, but he also wrote that the books would be longer, including a reprinting of a prequel story for the book's second "season." Ed elaborated that this prologue isn't the Coup D'etat story but is, instead, from a WildStorm sampler. So far as I can tell, this story hasn't been republished before.
  
  
• Incognito Merchandise. Finally, over at his blog, which fans should frequent anyway, Sean Phillips announced that he is already offering Incognito merchandise through CafePress: two tee-shirts featuring the logo and a poster of the artwork for what is presumably the cover to issue #1.

We'll keep rolling along here with news and notes about all of Ed and Sean's projects, but if anyone has a scoop, please do leave a comment or shoot us an email.


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Brubaker on INCOGNITO.

Newsarama has just posted an interview with Ed Brubaker about the upcoming comic book he and Sean Phillips are doing, Incognito.

In brief, it's a five-issue story that Ed admits is something of an inversion of Sleeper. Instead of a superhero pretending to be evil, it's a villain pretending to be good while in Witness Protection. Like Criminal, it not only features a wraparound cover and bonus material in the single issues, it's being promoted with a "teaser" that appears to be included in the Newsarama article, and which Ed is asking fans to pass along.

Criminal will be put on hold while Incognito is being released. Ed suggests that he and Sean might interrupt the Criminal story once "every few years" to try new stories and new approaches. The hope is that Incognito might draw new readers to Criminal, but the occasional productive break might be good for Criminal either way.

Ed confirms that Criminal will return quickly after this short break. The new arc, which will begin with issue #8, features the much-anticipated return of Tracy Lawless.

UPDATE: The Comics Reporter has the press release for Incognito, including larger images of the cover art and two-page teaser. The highest-quality images of the teaser are available at Sean's blog, here.


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Sleeper: CBR Interview, New Editions Forthcoming.

A couple brief notes about Sleeper.

First, a couple weeks ago Comic Book Resources featured an early, somewhat lengthy interview with Ed Brubaker, about the news of a possible movie for his and Sean's Sleeper. He explains that the story's use of characters from the wider WildStorm universe doesn't pose a significant problem, as the movie could rename and slightly tweak these characters while keeping the basic narrative structure intact.

Ed notes, "all but four characters were created by me and Sean just for 'Sleeper.'"

For the life of me, I can only think of three "outside" characters: Lynch, TAO, and Grifter. Sleeper's prologue, a mini-series called Point Blank, features a couple others, including Midnighter and Hawksmoor, but I can't think of a fourth such character that was in the story of Sleeper proper.

Second, last week Sean posted at his sight early drafts -- here and here -- of artwork for "a new printing" of Point Blank, by Ed and artist Colin Wilson.

(Sean also revealed an insightful and quite amusing look at a reference photo he used for Criminal, for what it's worth.)

In the notes at the back of the excellent new issue of Criminal that was released yesterday, Ed confirmed what Sean's blog posts suggested:

"...for Sleeper fans, there are new editions of Sleeper in the works, I just found out, so keep your eyes peeled for those."

This doesn't appear to be the Absolute edition I'm hoping for -- and I do hope that that comes out right before the movie, at the latest -- but this is very cool news nevertheless.

We'll keep readers posted on new info about Sleeper, in print and on film. In the meantime, how about "Bad Night"? The understated revelation about how Jake was crippled, and why, was simply brutal.

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