Sleeper is perhaps the archetypal critical favourite.  Critics love it.  Almost nobody reads it. 

The problem, for once, does not seem to be that the critics are out of touch with what readers actually like.  People who actually try Sleeper generally seem to agree that it's a great book.  It's just that most people don't get that far.

Sleeper's first "season" - the book is running in twelve-issue blocks - launched at the same time as the ill-fated Eye of the Storm imprint, WildStorm's mature readers line.  The line as a whole never really caught on.  Sleeper ended up bumping along the bottom of the sales charts, which was entirely undeserved.  Nonetheless, DC have apparently promised it another twelve issues - a brave commitment, given the book's history - which means that readers get another opportunity to try the book with confidence that the story isn't going to be axed halfway through.  With books like this, that's an important piece of reassurance for a publisher to give.

Last time around, Sleeper centered on the unfortunate Carver, a double agent placed inside the villain Tao's organisation by John Lynch.  Who then fell into a coma, leaving Carver stuck there - since Lynch had decided, for security reasons, not to tell anyone else.  With no real other choice, Carver has started to go native.  He's not really interested in either side any more, so much as trying to avoid getting himself killed.  It's a great set-up.

By now, Carver has been exposed as a double agent, but Tao has chosen to keep him around anyway.  Tao seems to think that he can get away with playing Carver off as an agent against the people who abandoned him, now that Lynch is back in the picture.  But just how native has Carver gone?

Sleeper works on a strange combination of paranoid conspiracy thriller and a dash of Silver Age superheroes.  While a lot of "mature readers" superhero books come across as faintly embarrassed about their backgrounds, Sleeper takes great pleasure in throwing in gratuitously odd superhero elements such as characters ritually reciting their origin stories to one another (in the third person), to blackly comic effect.

The book wouldn't work with standard superhero art, but photorealism wouldn't do the job either - this isn't an exercise in realism, so much as a different type of cross-genre story.  Sean Phillips fits the material perfectly, with his distinctive but stylised work.

It's as good a book as it ever was, and they're giving you a second chance to buy it.  You don't normally get second chances.  Take the hint.

Rating: A+

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