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Although there is often nothing better than a good Batman story, the comic book industry has always been about variety. The expression of the imagination, limited only by the imagination, has created a cornucopia of images and ideas that found full voice through the stories of the writer and the images of the artist. As you move out from the centre of the industry, from the big two of Marvel and DC, the variety of choice on offer increases. To those uninitiated in the current trends of comics, the periphery is a frightening place away from the comforts of familiar icons. However, for those knowledgeable in the ways of this grey area, certain treasures can be found. One such treasure is Wildstorm’s Sleeper.

Despite it’s brevity, Sleeper’s run caused quite a stir in the industry, ditching the classical image of spandex and bright colours for a dark, complex, character-driven tale that credited the reader with intelligence. In a viciously twisting plot Holden Carver is a double agent, working undercover for the most dangerous person on the planet, Tao. Carver’s problems start not long after establishing his credentials sufficiently to gain a place in Tao’s organisation. Due to the highly secretive and sensitive nature of Carver’s placement only one other man, Lynch, knows that Carver is a double agent and that man has just been put in a coma.     

Carver is no ordinary run-of-the-mill spy however. Formerly a soldier for the U.S government, Carver was part of a team sent to investigate a mysterious object, which crash lands on Earth from the Bleed (the space between Space that the Authority’s ship travels in). Upon contact with the object, Carver is imbued with the ability to transfer any form of physical pain he suffers onto another person. These powers come at great cost, Carver, upon first touching the object, suffers a level of pain his body cannot survive – unless it is immediately transferred. The pain is transferred to his teammates who are all killed as a result.

Unlike the obligatory powers of super-strength, heat vision, super-speed etc so many super-clones have been created with over recent years, Carver is very much a human character deserving of the reader’s empathy. His treacherous situation in conjunction with some serious moral dilemmas produce genuinely ambiguous situations, issues that Superman and the boy scout brigade have never begun to tackle. The ability to feel no pain adds layers of depth to Carver’s character as it prevents him from feeling anything, slowly killing him on the inside while remaining totally invulnerable on the outside. Not an ideal state of affairs for a patriot and idealist driven to serve his country by such emotional ties, indeed Carver’s battle for all the outward darkness and grandeur, is one of the soul and conscience. This is in essence the freedom a mature label allows in creating more compelling storylines unhampered by the necessity for PG-13 material. Love, lust, depravity and brutal violence are just some of the societal taboos Sleeper deals with through visceral invention and intelligent storytelling. More importantly though, they are relevant elements of the storyline. This isn’t titillating material for the sake of itself, nor is it overly gratuitous. Instead, Sleeper walks a path between over-used and non-existent exemplified by Carver’s partner, Miss Misery.

Miss Misery’s powers and very health stem from immoral acts. Think about it. She is a ‘villain’ because otherwise she’d die. Now certainly it is convenient but when did a comic book actually make a kind of weird sense with so much style? I can’t think of many. Miss Misery enjoys beating up and killing anyone; for all that she does Tao’s work it would be utterly irrelevant who she associated herself with because she’d still have to pursue this line of work. But as the story progresses Brubaker begins to make the reader consider whether this immorality is purely for physical satisfaction, and who exactly Miss Misery is underneath the brutality. These questions of ambiguity, deception and morality are a continuous part of the complex plot, which is all but impossible to anticipate due to some fantastic writing and plotting. Brubaker really should be credited for keeping the narrative moving along at such a pace with so many events happening and several difficult threads to juggle. Not only does he do this admirably but adds a slick coating of satire and humour - one issue begins with the annual meeting of the world’s secret corporate rulers – that prevents Sleeper from taking itself too seriously and from becoming too dark for it’s own good.         

There is plenty more I could say; about Tao’s somewhat oedipal, one-up relationship with Lynch, about how plain funny Genocide’s ‘Population Control’ t-shirt is and how much of a gut-wrench the ending is, but you’re better off reading it.

Owen Jones © 2006