Every time I think Brubaker can't find anything else to punish his protagonist with, he finds something else to turn the knife a little more. However, Sleeper isn't just an exercise in putting the characters through the wringer, it's an exploration of morality that is truly "mature readers" married to a suspense plot involving conspiracies and espionage with global stakes. Brubaker and Phillips play the story of these world-shaking power plays against a smaller, more personal stage, and they do so with a terrific blend of character interaction and rapid-fire, movie-quality action. Sleeper is back, and it's better than ever.
One of the things I've really loved about Sleeper is that we've seen the character of Holden Carver grow throughout the series. Not in terms of psychiatric personal growth, as he's still the same miserable bastard that we first saw in the pages of Point Blank, but in terms of learning more about him and seeing him develop into the role he's been forced into. Seeing the backstory of Holden, that he suffered not only the death of his entire team but the loss of his fiancee before he went undercover, and lost his best friend and became involved in a tortuous love affair after he went undercover, one can't help but feel the raw deal that Holden has gotten, and it's not hard to see why he might be trying to emotionally close himself off.
The trick is, and it really comes through in this issue, Holden remains human. For as much as he tells himself nothing can hurt him, or that he's given up on hope, it's clear that there's still some decency in him. Brubaker's script lets us into the character's thoughts, and so we see now just his outward actions but the motivations behind them. So we know that his brutality at the end of this issue is more directed at himself than at his fiancee, that he is trying to give her the fresh start he thinks she deserves. We know that while he seems to be going on a mission for Tao, in fact he's out seeking revenge for a friend, a most human trait and a nice nod to Genocide, who was a character I really loved and really miss already.
While the focus of this issue is an emotional showdown, however, Brubaker as always does a terrific job of including more physical action as well. And Phillips, while he's no slouch with the subtle emotional requirements of the character stuff, is just as good if not better on these action sequences. The sense of motion and destruction as Holden weaves in and out of alleyways, ducking sniper fire and causing car crashes and firing with abandon, is the kind of thing you don't get in most comics, and I'd definitely put Sleeper up there with Losers and Human Target as one of the best homes for cinematic violence in comics.
Sleeper is a hard book to pin down, and just saying the high concept of "an agent undercover in a super-powered conspiracy" doesn't begin to touch on the depth of moral exploration and twisted plot dynamics that drive this book. However, while the question of what Tao and Lynch, two chess masters working for different goals, is certainly one that keeps the plot of the book moving, the real strength is in seeing how Holden deals with the various difficult (and sometimes impossible) choices that life continues to throw his way, and how he maintains his sanity in an insane situation.
