With Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ current collaboration Criminal restarting this week as the initial issue of their new arc The Sinners is being released, I could only think of one book to recommend this Friday: Sleeper. Sleeper was the second collaboration between Brubaker and Phillips and it was the first thing I ever read by Brubaker, who has ended up being one of my favorite writers in the industry.
With Criminal restarting, this series finally being collected again after going out of print for a while, and Sam Raimi and Tom Cruise collaborating to bring this to film, this is the perfect time to get on board with one of the most underappreciated gems from the past few years: Sleeper.
Sleeper is both a follow up to Alan Moore’s run on WildC.A.T.s and Brubaker’s own series Point Blank, but neither are required reading. It follows an entirely new character named Holden Carver (aka “The Conductor”…but he hates that name), a man who was a member of one of Wildstorm stalwart John Lynch’s (from Gen13 and Stormwatch) black ops teams until he came in contact with an alien artifact that gave him a unique power set: he became impervious to pain, a healing factor (ala Wolverine), and the ability to take any pain inflicted on him and to give it back to others via skin contact. Once he gained that power, Lynch saw an in and got him to go undercover in arch-rival TAO’s (from WildC.A.T.s) criminal organization, and then Lynch was promptly shot by Grifter, sending him into a coma.
Of course, this left the freshly undercover Carver looking like a defector from International Operations (think SHIELD but in the Wildstorm universe) with absolutely no contacts that knew the truth about him. He was a man that was on an island of one, surrounded by the worst people in the world who were practically inescapable.
This series does an incredible job of redefining the word “intense”, as Brubaker puts Carver into so many precarious situations that each page permeates a sense of dread and paranoia. Told over two seasons, it’s never a question as to whether or not TAO will figure out Carver’s secret, but when, and what will Carver do once he knows he is found out. Those questions and more are answered within these pages, and helping up the dramatic tension in the series are the relationships Carver develops, particularly with the masochistic, disturbed and completely ravishing Miss Misery. Their relationship forms the bizarre and emotional backbone of the story, giving us something to root for besides simply hoping that Carver will survive into the next issue.
Sean Phillips brings his standard noir style to the story, fitting the series perfectly. His ability to ably handle both the superpowered action scenes and the more personal and emotional scenes is incredibly important, as for all intents and purposes he really is the perfect collaborator for Brubaker. Perhaps the only thing more stylishly gritty than Brubaker’s scripts is what Phillips brings to the table in this series, and in my mind is the best work he’s done to date.
In many ways, this is the super-powered sister story to Criminal, even moreso than the duo’s further work Incognito. The way Brubaker deftly intertwines Carver’s desperation to survive and get back to a normal life with his seemingly easy fit into the criminal lifestyle acts as a precursor to such tainted heroes he creates later like Tracy Lawless. Carver truly is one of Brubaker’s best creations, as the amalgamation of Bru’s deep love for noir and his position as a head writer for a mainly superpowered universe is a resounding success, with each arc being a pitch perfect representation of what can happen if you pair the two seemingly disparate genres.
At this point, Sleeper is an easy title to get access too, yet it still has faced far less commercial success than even Criminal and Incognito have seen, despite their relative lack of success as well. If you’re a fan of comics, Brubaker, Phillips, noir, or by god, all of those things, you owe it to yourself to pick this title up.
You certainly won’t regret it.
