|
CBG SATELLITES
The ADD Blog by Alan David Doane
|
 PLEASE SUPPORT COMIC BOOK GALAXY BY VISITING OUR SPONSORS
Sleeper Season 2 #12
With issue 12 of “Season 2,” Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips conclude
Sleeper, their not-exactly-groundbreaking but phenomenal superhero crime
series, which alone was enough to keep me coming back to the store every
week to check for a new installment.
You’ve heard this before, of course. More has been written about
Sleeper than most any Big Two book continually selling under 15K. Despite
critical praise, much internet palaver and writer Brubaker’s occasionally
wild stunts trying to promote the book, the series comes to a somewhat
premature end.
Twenty-four issues isn’t too shabby for a new series in today’s
marketplace, although the fact that Sleeper couldn’t even make it to the
quarter-century mark says more about the marketplace than the book itself.
But no use crying over spilled whiskey. At the very least Brubaker
was able to wrap up the series on his own terms and write an ending that,
like the best finales, was both inevitable and unexpected.
For twenty three issues, Holden Carver has been beaten, manipulated,
deceived and tortured, and finally he gets his bloody revenge. Carver, a
deep cover agent, was torn from his fiance after a terrible accident that
left him with superpowers. While spying on the criminal mastermind Tao,
Carver’s only link to his government agency was shot in the head and left in
a coma. In trying to free himself from a tangled web of espionage, bullets
and broads, he came to discover that the only difference between the good
guys and the bad guys was the color of their hats.
Brubaker and Phillips weren’t reinventing the wheel with the series.
Sleeper is an amalgam of genres, John Le Carre meets Raymond Chandler as
interpreted by the pissed-off zombie of Jack Kirby. While Brian Bendis, Greg
Rucka and seemingly every other writer in comics try to strike a balance
between the seemingly opposed worlds of bright costumes and film noir,
Brubaker has done it. In most superhero/crime books the characters simply
engage in superheroics in a noir setting.
Brubaker, on the other hand, has truly created noir superheroes. He
takes traits prominent in traditional noir characters — the ability to
withstand pain, the power to manipulate minds — and filters them through the
hyperbolic lense of superpowers. Holden’s inability to feel pain (yet
superability to transfer it), Miss Misery’s need for abuse as sustenance,
Tao and Lynch’s hypermanipulative powers — these are noir tropes taken to a
logical extreme. This seamless blend makes Sleeper impossible to distinguish
as either a superhero book or a crime book; it is neither and it is both.
And while his characters engaged in the most unreal exploits, flying
cars and absorbing bullets, the philosophy of the book was grounded in grim
reality. The truth remains hidden. Nobody wins, nobody loses, and the
individual (Holden, in this case) is easily discarded as opposite sides
fight their way to an awful, neverending compromise in which everyone is
tainted. (For reference, see Washington D.C.)
Despite the consistency of the writing and the success of the high
concept, none of Brubaker’s ideas would have worked on the page without
Phillips’ powerful visual interpretations. Phillips, with his wonderful
motif of dark splash pages fragmented by overlapped panels, is asked to
render laser beams, flying cars and aliens as realistically as pistols,
rainy streets and office buildings. Perhaps the greatest signifier of
Phillips’ achievement is that the series felt just as gritty and immediate
when dealing with beings from outer space as it did during smokey barroom
talks between its hardened characters. That blend of the surreal with
extreme realism, the Phillip Jose Farmer with the Stephen Crane, is what
made the book so compelling, so outlandish and so honest, and is why it will
be so sorely missed.
-- Bryan Miller
|
Going to the local comic store (for me it’s the excellent Campus
Comics in Carbondale, IL) won’t be quite the same anymore.