I have never been quite so uplifted and quite so terrified at the same time. I've said it once and I've said it again, Phil Hester is too damn good of an artist to be this good of a writer as well, and I hope that the reason he isn't doing more writing for the big two is because he doesn't want to, because for someone not to have picked up on this talent would be a terrible indictment of the state of talent scouting in this industry. Which is my way of saying that, yes, Deep Sleeper #3 is every bit as good as the first two issues. I can't lay all of that credit at the feet of Hester, though, because Huddleston conveys the emotions just as strongly in his art. Huddleston excels at the Lovecraftian creatures of the nightmare realm, but he's just as good at the quiet horror of a man being faced by someone else who has stolen his body and taken his family from him, or at the cosmic event that happens to our protagonist Cole in this issue.
I could be misremembering, but I believe that Phil Hester, like myself, is a father. It would certainly explain the conversation between Calder and Cole in this issue. Hester and Huddleston really nail the horror that would come from seeing someone else live your life, being so close to your wife and your kids without you being able to do anything about it, but the most horrifying aspect of the discussion comes not from what Calder threatens to do but because, as a former father himself, he knows where to make Cole hurt. Any father has had the same nightmarish thoughts about what might happen to their kids if they don't do everything they can to protect them (or sometimes, even if they do), and to be confronted with that in an already desperate situation is as terrible as if Calder had done some of the things he had threatened.
And yet, for all that there's darkness and horror and fear in Deep Sleeper, Hester doesn't fail to make out Cole Gibson as a hero. He's got super-powers, but he doesn't know how to use them, and that's not what makes him a hero anyway. What makes him a hero is the tender moments he shares with his son in this issue, or the willingness he shows to do anything he has to in order to get back to his family. Cole doesn't bluster or threaten when he's threatened by basically everyone on all sides of this spirit war, instead he focuses in and does what he needs to get done. Sure, it comes after an attempt to dissolve himself, but even that is done more out of a sense of selflessness and sacrifice for his family than for his own peace of mind.
Huddleston's work on the book is as top-notch as the writing that Hester is doing. There's such intensity in the confrontation between Calder and Cole that you don't even realize that they're just talking at each other, because you can feel the battle of wills going on between them. The same is true of the love that comes through in the scene between Michael and Cole, or the anger in the confrontation between Cole and Dar. And for all that Huddleston is great with the expressions of these characters and the realistic element, he's even better with the more outrageous elements, like the look of Dar or the Dervish or Ramman's machine. I also quite like the way he depicts Cole and Perry's ghostly forms, fully realized but clearly separated out from the others.
Deep Sleeper is an example of a creative team with real synergy, and it deals with ideas and story elements that are damn near impossible to easily explain. The book defies explanation, actually, because you can't rightly call it horror or suspense or slice-of-life or anything else without missing something else. What I will call it is one of the best damn comics released in 2004, and I look forward to seeing how this creative team will wrap things up.
