Writers "do best when they're mean to their characters," wrote Brubaker in his afterword to Sleepyhead. Indeed, its protagonists will face hard times, but the reader will also have his piece of difficult work to do.
A chip of the world, the whole story
Sleeper was released in imprincie Wildstorm, who is also the next DC Universe. It includes series such as WildC.ATs and The Authority . The events of Brubaker’s comic are somewhat related to the larger context, but as the writer assures: “everything you need to know is […] in this book.” You don’t need to learn from other titles to understand the plight of two tough guys, a bit lost in the world of secret agents and conspiracies. However, you will need time to properly focus on this volume. Like the books of Le Carré or David Hutchinson, it challenges the reader to extract the plot from a somewhat dreamlike, non-chronological, and full of understatement narrative.
The first of two volumes of Sleepyhead consists of a miniseries Point Blank drawn by Colin Wilson and developing a piece of the WildStorm world invented for her needs, the title comic book about a superhero pretending to be a super villain. Or vice versa – that’s one part of the complexity of the story. As befits Brubaker, the whole thing fits in the convention of a noir thriller populated with people after the passage, none of which can be considered unambiguously good or bad by us.
Who’s gonna watch the watchmen?
Since 1986, it has been one of the most important questions in a superhero comic, at least the dark and realistic one. It is related to the question of the havoc that violence, even justified, causes moral compasses to all defenders of the weaker and disadvantaged. The case seems important to those with both feet on the side of the law, but it gets hotter when we think of double agents working out criminal organizations from the inside out. And about any strike teams allegedly in the service of the government, but feeling like mercenaries who are never told why they should carry out this or that brutal pacification.
In Targeting, we are following someone like that – a guy who is now unemployed but still in touch with his old boss, a fat boss at an agency that employs and researches posthumans. Cole finds the trail of a conspiracy that, being a veteran, he can only track by running around old acquaintances and unpleasant dives. Wilson’s drawings do not illuminate anything, the self-proclaimed detective moves at night around the almost cyberpunk city. Sometimes it’s really hard to understand his reasoning… and that’s what Brubaker meant. This miniseries is a headlong leap into a spy scandal that we know is wide-ranging, but we and Cole will probably only get to claustrophobic scraps of the whole.
Who is Carver?
Who is the main character? A mole, a dormant agent abandoned by his boss, a guy trying to smash a criminal organization from the inside out. Equal guy who has to pretend to be a villain. A citizen dangerously close to compassion, to befriend criminals. Yes, Carver is definitely a man with a past. Working for Tao, quite an intriguing evil who wants to destroy the world, he will finally meet his woman after the ordeal – Miss Misery.
Brubaker and Phillips can write great female characters, we know that from Fatale for example . In Sleepyhead, the unfortunate maiden, the supervillain’s right hand, was more intriguing to me than the main character himself. The girl has no doubts or scruples, she is cynical and rational, but what connects her and Cole is that they did not go over to the dark side of their own accord. When creating this heroine, the authors also allowed themselves to make interesting visual experiments – this classic femme fatale sometimes looks like a cut from a much less realistic comic book, as if it was just an image of a person, some distillate of a bad woman.
A sleepyhead is very different from his prequel, Targeted . The story is told here rather linearly, the plot can be easily recreated, Brubaker is more interested in the inner lives of the characters and the pessimistic vision of the world that Tao reveals to them. In turn, Phillips allows himself more than Wilson, he usually uses a very dynamic system of frames superimposed on the board showing the wider background of a given situation or simply the place of action.
Inception
When Brubaker insists that we don’t need to study the other WildStorm items to understand Sleepyhead, he is obviously not lying. It screwed us up a bit by suggesting that it would be easy. As a decent spy thriller, this comic book is complex and the reader needs to focus to understand the intrigue and riddles faced by Cole and Carver. Especially in The viewfinder we can not believe the hero and his story – as he says, none of his detective, rather fizol dirty work. How easy is it to wrap up and deceive such a man? And a double agent? How wrong are both of them when they believe in their organization, their intellect and their methods of reaching the truth?
Sleepyhead is a piece of good literature, combining elements of crime fiction and thriller – genres definitely for adults – and a superhero comic. Had it not been for the assignment, Brubaker could have probably got rid of the latter … or perhaps quite the opposite. This screenwriter once again allows us to see that questions about posthumanism, even if moderately realistic, are questions about ethics or understanding the world. Wilson and Phillips realized his visions in a seemingly very realistic way, and on the second reading revealing intriguing experiments on pictorial storytelling . Read on and see in this and the next volume where the maneuvering robot led the hero, for whom everyone was quite mean.
