Don't let the title fool you... though the characters from Sleeper play a major role in the beginning of the Coup D'Etat saga, this is much more an Authority story than a Sleeper one. It serves several purposes, including kicking off the crossover, giving a preview at Brubaker's take on The Authority (which he's rumored to be taking over) and returning Jim Lee to the universe he helped create. Honestly, while I respect Jim Lee as a creator, his is a style that I didn't really want to see return to the Wildstorm universe - I prefer the shadowy, moody work of Nguyen, Phillips and the like - and there's an overly pretty quality to a lot of these characters that just feels wrong. However, on the more action-oriented sequences featuring The Authority, Lee's work looks pretty good, and Brubaker's story, a parallel to modern-day politics with a covert op/superpowered edge appropriate to the Wildstorm universe, is intriguing.
Though this story begins with agent Holden Carver and Miss Misery working under the auspices of super crimeboss Tao, even that story is of a different tone than the ones that took place in Sleeper. As of Sleeper #12, Holden's cover is blown, and he seems to have gone native inside Tao's organization, a villain nagged by conscience rather than a hero seeking a way out. So there's bound to be a bit of a change in tone of those stories, and Coup D'Etat: Sleeper is the first hint of that. Holden's role in this story is as a dupe, an unwitting pawn who helps create a massive catastrophe, and the guilt he feels gives a pretty good indication of the status quo he'll be facing in working for Tao under these new circumstances.
That's about as far as C'oup Detat: Sleeper goes in being connected to Sleeper. The Authority shows up on page 9 and pretty much takes over, and from there this reads like an Authority story. Big ideas, strange dimensions, massive property damage and deaths, it's all there. Keeping in mind that I think The Authority is a concept past its sell-by date at this point, I think Brubaker did a pretty good job capturing what makes the team interesting. The notion of a race of giants falling from the sky as a rain of fiery corpses is a great image, and the Doctor's uses of his powers, which was always a fun and imaginative aspect of The Authority, is a good one here.
Actually, you also have to give credit to Brubaker for tailoring his story to his artist, because this story works much better for Jim Lee than a more espionage-centric Sleeper tale would have. The rain of fiery giants is an image captured to perfection by Lee, and his muscle-bound body types work pretty well for capturing The Authority in action as well. I'm not as enamored of his take on the characters of Sleeper, as he turns the seductive Miss Misery into your standard bombshell and, even more unforgivably, craggy hero Holden into a Hollywood pretty boy. Fortunately, Brubaker's script keeps these elements to a minimum, and instead focuses on the storytelling that Lee excels at, namely high octane action, whether it's a government team in a firefight with a pair of supervillains or The Authority trying to stop a fiery rain of death from destroying Florida.
Probably the most intriguing aspect of Coup D'Etat is the one that doesn't show up until the last few pages and which serves as the linchpin of the entire crossover. Stories of heroes taking over have been done, but always in an alternate world where the consequences on a shared universe didn't have to be considered. It seems that Coup D'Etat is aimed at making this kind of status quo change more permanent, and I expect that it will make for an interesting crossover as we see how the powers-that-be (government, corporate and superpowered) react to these changes.
