A few years back, this creative team gave us the horror story The Coffin, about a scientist who trapped his soul in a machine of his own creation after death. Deep Sleeper is their next collaboration, and it starts off every bit as strong as The Coffin did. The story introduces us to a writer whose dreams haunt him, and whose waking life is good but on the verge of slipping away, and then provide him with a greater destiny and a step into a larger story. It's a terrific mix of vivid imagery, strong characterization and a very intriguing plot, well worth seeking out for anyone who enjoys the slow, moody build of M. Night Shyamalan's films in particular and anyone who enjoys a good mystery in general.
What I love about the work that Hester and Huddleston have done with Oni is that it's almost impossible to reduce them to a soundbite and get them across. Even the high concept of The Coffin given above doesn't really give any idea what the book was really about, and that's going to be the case with Deep Sleeper and this review as well. There are a lot of things going on in this first issue. A struggling writer with a wife and daughter hoping for his big break. A self help guru who appears to be a lot more than he appears. A pair of strangers who have powers and destinies of their own. Even a monastery full of powerful monks and their encounter with a general from a large nation. All of these elements come together to create a gripping narrative, a story that is grounded in reality but takes the reader very much on flights of fancy at the same time.
Despite the unreal circumstances he quickly finds himself in, I found myself very able to relate to Cole Gibson. Sure, I'm not having bizarre dreams or getting involved in what looks like a war between extraplanar beings, but I do have a wife and daughter and I am always struggling about whether I'm doing enough to support them, or if I'm following foolish dreams to their detriment. Cole's real life, with a likable family and work difficulties, makes for a very grounded place from which Hester can take the story into more fantastic territory. I buy into Cole's world, and that makes the revelations about the mystical elements of the story more powerful and fantastic, not less, because there's a reality to contrast them against.
Huddleston is very capable on both sides of the story. With a few well-placed objects, he defines the city streets, or the Gibson home, and he has done excellent character designs for Cole and the real-life versions of his foes and friends. It is in the more fantastic aspects of the story that Huddleston really shines, though. His depiction of the monastery in Gibson's story, or the monks performing feats at the monastery, is fantastic, and the full-page splash of the "real" forms of the two strangers that Gibson meets is a beautiful piece of work. Huddleston's work is dark and inky, but never lacking in terms of detail or clarity, and it struck me on reading Deep Sleeper that his work sometimes resembles that of Scott Morse, an artist whose work I love.
Deep Sleeper is off to a very interesting start. It explores themes of personal responsibility and goals, but at the same time is expanding the theme into what responsibility we have to the cosmos and the larger nature of reality as well. That it does this by means of extraplanar beings, mixing in elements of a magical shadow war and the "things from beyond" of HP Lovecraft, doesn't make it any harder to relate to, and in fact it adds to the creepy factor. However, so far at least, Deep Sleeper isn't a pure horror comic either... there's a core story about faith and self-awareness that seems pretty uplifting, even amongst the spooky "things man was not meant to know" vibe that I'm reading as well.
