Sleeper: Out in the Cold
Sleeper: All False Moves
by Ed Brubaker and Sean
Phillips
(Wildstorm/DC Comics, $17.95 each, 144 pages each, trade paperbacks;
published in January and August 2004.)
Ed Brubaker first came to comics with the  autobiographical
Lowlife, but his true voice -- terse, hardboiled fiction -- started
to emerge with 1992's An Accidental Death.
He is particularly adept at conceiving tough but tortured characters
teetering on the line between moral paradigms, and Sleeper, an
unabashedly nihilistic and darkly sardonic crossgenre espionage series,
is a prime example. Out in the Cold and All False Moves
collect all twelve issues of the first Sleeper series.
Secret agent Holden Carver defects to a terrorist organization headed
by a genetically engineered mastermind named Tao. Only one man, Carver's
minder, John Lynch, knows the truth: that Carver's defection is an undercover
mission. To everyone else, Carver is a traitor and wanted criminal.
When Lynch falls into a coma, Carver is plunged deeper than ever into
a world of murder and depravity.
Increasingly, Carver sympathizes with his new comrades-in-arms and
asks himself if the atrocities he commits in the name of Tao are any
different than those he used to perpetrate as a black ops agent for
 the
US government. Meanwhile, Tao learns that a double agent has infiltrated
his organization, and Carver fears exposure.
Brubaker deftly portrays Carver's vertiginous identity crisis and succeeds
in making every decision hurt and every action have harrowing consequences.
Sleeper unfolds in a world where superpowers are acquired with
alarming ease. Carver himself, while recovering an alien artefact for
the government, gained the ability to store pain and release it back
to anyone he touches. Brubaker injects grim humour into the series by
having Tao's supercriminals swap absurdly unlikely -- and brutal --
origin stories.
British cartoonist Sean Phillips provides dense, claustrophobic visuals
that perfectly capture Carver's sense of being trapped and manipulated
at every turn.
Sleeper is a tensely involving saga that never flinches and
never fails to surprise.
Originally published in
The Montreal Gazette, Saturday, 4 September 2004.
Claude Lalumière's Fantastic Fiction
is a series of
capsule reviews first published in the Saturday Books
section of The Montreal Gazette.
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