4 out of 5

So close to godliness, this series.

Though he seems to have fully embraced it, I do wonder if Brubaker years to get away from the crime / noir scene.  I wonder what he’d do if and when he stretched his wings.  There are moments of his best series that elevate it above just being action, or crime, and go into that world of ponderous morality that noir was made to chip at.  And though – sorry, Brubes – his characters tend to stick to a few different personality types, and thus we get repeated phrasings, repeated “realizations,” and etc., still, the highlights are when he lights onto something at just the right moment to spike the story into the stratosphere of make-ya-feel-weird vibes.  I like stories that make you feel weird.

In Sleeper, you’ll see the template for “Criminal.”  You’ll absolutely see “Incognito.”  But – at least in its “season 1,” the first 12 issues – you’ll also see an intense blending of comic pulp and thematic layering that totally caught me off guard, and hasn’t really been equaled in similar comics (not that there are too many super-powered noirs that aren’t penned by Brubaker and aren’t just “hey it’s in black and white = NOIR”) or, honestly, matched by Brubes again, though he does boil away the super-reality in some Criminal arcs and Scene of the Crime to tell some truly affecting crime tales, but that’s a review for another… review.  Season 2 of Sleeper – a second 12-issue run – by necessity gets wrapped up more in flushing the plot to an ending than on twisting the knife for the reader via the character’s experiences… I honestly would have been so happy with season 1 being our conclusion, as it leaves things on such a gloriously, coldly open note.  But that’s not really Brubaker’s style.  He either likes the relatively happy ending or the fuck-yer-life ending – it’s just too bad because about six issues into season 2, when you see the first elements of this – lazy (I’M SORRY ED IT’S JUST MY OPINION I WRITE REVIEWS ONLINE NOBODY READS) Brubaker narrative trick where the character’s thoughts are just detailing what’s happening on the page (generally involving some kind of plot to stir shit up, and stating – “so I hit him,” as Phillips draws him hitting him), ending with a forced GASP! – e.g. “Little did she know everything I said was a lie.”  GASP!  He does this a lot, and yeah, it’s only in retrospect that I see that it’s fairly cheap, but I can clearly remember devouring Sleeper season 1 (via trades, fine) and then feeling like Season 2 lost just a lil’ something.

It’s not all downhill, it just gets bumpy.  The entire series is absolutely worth reading, as there are some last minute hiccups in our character’s journeys that just can’t happen outside of a superhero book, and there traits are just too perfect for the genre – Miss Misery, for example, who gets physically ill if she starts to feel that she’s doing the “right” thing – that it’s worth the shrug of the last couple issues to get some final bleeps and bloops of how these people think and work.

So what’s it about?  Holden – his power being unable to feel anything, pain or pleasure, with the hitch that any pain inflicted is passed on to whoever touches his skin – has gone deep undercover for the bad guys.  In the lead-in series – Point Blank – we get the set-up for all great “spy in the cold” stories, where his last link back to rescue is severed, leaving him a sleeper agent with no one to vouch for him.  Cue so much greatness about the struggle between good and evil within oneself, as Holden begins to consider his “fellow” enemies friends, and start to draw frightening comparisons between his missions as an evil agent and his missions as a good one…  All of Season 1 trawls through this, his struggle to stay afloat as a couple hands reach from the dark to offer him a glimmer of salvation…  AAand in season 2, he’s essentially made up mind that it’s better to stay evil.  This puts the ball more in Holden’s court, and so when he gets restless for freedom once more, there’s not as much desperation to it as in series 1.  Sure, threat of death and all that, but it’s just all a bit more… big budget?  The colors suddenly look like they have a gloss of computer to them and Phillips paneling starts to take on a more predictable feel, before he would transition to the straight box-panel style of Criminal.  I don’t want to bash it too much, as Ed establishes such great characters and knows them by this point, so the second portion has its rewards, but it was a step toward the more predictable yarns that would pop up in some Criminal moments and especially in Incognito.

Which is an interesting comparison.  Incognito was about a super-villain who essentially goes into witness protection, and is then placed “undercover” back with the bad guys – with the good guys hounding him the whole time, reminding him that if he truly goes bad, they’ll be there to shut him down.  Sort of familiar, yes?  Take all of the high gloss and lazier elements of Sleeper and rough them up with more profanity (which Sleeper has, but it matches the characters, versus Incognito’s “let’s sound tough” talk) and… yeah.

But enough.  I wish it were perfect, but it wasn’t fated to be.  Brubaker was playing in someone else’s pool, after all, and had to arrange the pieces in such a way that someone else could still rearrange them when he left.  Sleeper starts out ballsy and surprisingly deep, then slowly tapers off into some biff-bang-pow trickery to get to an ending.  But – out of Brubaker’s hero crime stuff, besides Gotham Central, Sleeper is top of the pops, and gets an edge on GC by being able to get more down and dirty with subject matter thanks to being published through Wildstorm.