Sleeper: Season Two (27)

Image via Wikipedia

Sleeper: Season Two by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips (2009, Wildstorm). This is where not being a regular reader of Wildstorm comics and not having read Point Blank becomes a hindrance to my enjoyment of what had been an incredible series. It's still great, mind you. Holden Carver's situation goes from bad to worse and the double cross on top of double cross structure of the first half of this collection creates a great sense of tension and dread. You hope beyond hope that Carver is smart enough to get out of this but you never quite believe it. So many terrible things, awful choices, and wrong decisions have been made, you just don't know.

But, in some ways, I don't care nearly as much as I did in the first collection. The secondary characters lose a bit of their realness and meaning. Their vibrancy from those earlier stories is dimmed as it becomes apparent that Lynch, TAO, and now, our anti-hero, Carver, are using them all as pieces on their chessboard. Nobody's life and well-being seems to matter in this spy game.

Ultimately, though, it ends satisfying enough and, probably, as true as it can be to the premise and moral of the story. It occurs to me, now that I'm thinking about it, that I don't think I've read another comic book with pages that are literally this dark. Nearly every panel is full of inks and shadow. There is rarely a moment of daylight drawn.

It, too, serves to ratchet up the dread.

Recommended, but not as much as Season One.