Undercover in a world of super-villains. It's a great hook, and with a mature readers tag, Brubaker and Phillips are free to examine some of the more disturbing realities of undercover work, as it pretty much turns the cop into a criminal himself. Brubaker's strong appreciation of noir storytelling serves him well on this story, which is very much in the noir tradition of self-loathing, flawed heroes, and Phillips's artwork, while not quite as impressive as his previous work on Wildcats, is a good match for this type of story as well.
This story has its roots in the Point Blank mini-series, but it doesn't suffer from any kind of continuity or inaccessibility as a result. Holden's story is all told in this issue, and the first issue of Sleeper is actually more accessible in terms of standing free of the shared Wildstorm universe than Point Blank was. The villains are new for the most part, and the characters that are recognizable, Tao and Lynch, are important mostly for the roles they serve in this story, all of which is imparted in this issue.
Most of the issue is about setting up the mood and atmosphere of Sleeper. Gray morality doesn't even begin to describe it, as Holden is not only something of a grumpy bastard, he's forced to kill in the name of protecting his cover. It's easy to see where someone as deep cover as Holden might lose his own identity as a former secret agent and just go native, especially since his only contact to the outside world is basically gone. The internal conflict is played fairly subtly in this issue, as Holden seems pretty comfortable with what he's doing, but the way he expresses himself in the narration hints at a self-loathing based on what he's doing that his subconscious is trying to communicate to him. He does at least seem aware that playing around with the boundaries of what is right has cost him a little of his humanity.
Playing up the noir tone is Sean Phillips, whose gritty and realistic style is perfectly suited to the tone of the story. It doesn't look quite as nuanced as some of his Wildcats work, but I think part of the blame there belongs with the colorists, who turn everything a little too drab and dark in trying to give the book a moody palette. But even with it being a little too dark and not as well-defined as I'd like, Phillips is a great storyteller, and the final sequence is a quick and dirty action set piece that really works.
Sleeper has a feel that is part super-hero genre but mostly crime, and it reminds me more than anything else of stories like Goodfellas or The Sopranos, humanizing and exploring the lives of criminals from their own point-of-view. The obvious comparison to make is Wiseguy, which explored an undercover cop, but Brubaker is telling a story about a cop who is in much deeper than that, and as a result we're seeing mostly the criminal point-of-view, with the additional hook that the protagonist doesn't necessarily share it.
