Sleeper: All False Moves

By: Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips
Published By: WildStorm / DC

It'd be easy for me to just say I loved Sleeper and tell you to buy it before it dies the horrible death of Stormwatch: Team Achilles and WildCats 3.0. However, as I sit down to dissect what it is that drew me into the story, I find myself unable to point to any one thing. The first time I read Sleeper Vol. 1, I was intrigued but not overly impressed. I buy a lot of Wildstorm titles and figured it couldn't be too bad if Ed Brubaker was writing it. After I read it, Babar told me that he read that Point Blank sets up the story in Sleeper, so I wandered into a semi-local shop that has a lot of trades and found a copy. For some reason, reading Point Blank brought a clarity to the story that I didn't see before. I'll admit to being rather obsessed with continuity and character history, which is one of the things that draws me to comics like JSA, and for me, Point Blank grounded the story in Sleeper. Part of what I enjoy about Sleeper is the idea that Tao is so firmly entrenched that no one from the Authority to Cole Cash seems to be able to do anything about him. I couldn't imagine a story where we find out that Wolverine has been tricked into putting Nick Fury into a coma, but what set that story apart wasn't the uniqueness of the plot device but the lack of resolution. We are left with Cole running around only vaguely aware of the fact that something is wrong and a glimpse of a spy who has been left to his own devices.

At this point, we enter Sleeper. One of the things I love the most about the book is the care given to fleshing out both the characters and the setting into something believable. None of the major characters seem to take the idea of superheroes and villains that seriously. They respect the powers involved, but titles like Genocide Jones feel more like an odd nickname than a serious alias. The reader is drawn down the same path as Holden as we start to become more and more interested and perhaps even attached to the "villains". As Holden searches for meaning in his actions, both he and the reader are forced to compare him with the people is supposed to be stopping. Even Tao is a contradiction. On one hand, it is almost impossible to not consider him a sociopath, which is almost the only black and white element in a story of grays, yet his motivations are believable and you can realistically picture him succeeding. Not many superhero books (even pseudo superhero books like this one) can convince me of the hopelessness of the hero's situation, but as I read it, I found myself wondering just how close to the edge Holden is. All in all, it is an engaging comic that only seems to be getting better.