Ed Brubaker's Calling Card - Sleeper: Season One

Ed Brubaker is a prolific writer and he’s seen his words grace many a publisher; Top Shelf, DC, Vertigo, Wildstorm, Marvel, Icon, to name just a few. He’s handled plenty of characters from the world’s best superheroes to cops and a bit of most things in between, and he’s also managed to have his tales span many different eras. He’s a powerhouse in the industry now and his name is almost a genre to itself and to pick just the one work to define him has been hard but I’ve given it a go. Hit the jump to see why I think Sleeper: Season One sums up the man and his work perfectly.

Ed Brubaker has to be considered one of the best comic creators from the last decade and this becomes all the more obvious when trying to pick just one work to be his calling card, and even then you’ll see that I’ve picked an oversized collection. I almost wanted to pick Incognito as being his calling card but as much as it’s possibly my favourite story of his I don’t think I can honestly say it’s the one work that can define him, though it would probably take second place, or third. I don’t think the very oversized Criminal collection would work as a calling card, nor would I have actually chosen it, but I’d at least drop it down to an arc storyline for this purpose. And that arc would be Bad Night, if I were choosing Criminal but I am not. I'm not even choosing Gotham Central, so that shows how many classic stories he's penned. Instead I'm choosing:

Ed Brubaker's Sleeper: Season One

Sleeper is a perfect pitch idea. A superhero goes undercover with the villains and then anyone who knew he was actually good gets themselves into a situation where they can no longer vouch for him. It’s a simple noir trope and Brubaker does a brilliant blend of mixing in super tropes as well and just flat out scripting great characters. This story, the entire first season of it, make for the perfect introduction to the world of Brubaker where it doesn’t matter if you wear a cape or not, or if you have super powers or just fists or a gun, what matters is your character. What matters is whether or not you can handle the heat and make the right choices.

Sleeper is littered with great character, one of which is the title sleeper, Holden Carver. He is just the sort of man whose questionable motives, emotions, and actions are perfect for Brubaker to paint this bleak grey canvas. You feel for Carver as he knows he’s stuck and his choices, in so many situations, are to make a run for it and risk his life or to just join in with the villainy and at least buy himself more time. Another great character is Miss Misery, a woman that stirs up quite a lot of interest in me. Interest being the mild word. She’s a sad soul who needs to commit evil acts in order to stay healthy and young. Brubaker manages to take this character who could have been completely one sided and turn her into a study of absolute pain. The rest of the cast are still human characters, even though firmly the villains. Because we spend so much time with them we see that they have their reasons for being whatever they are.

Watching Carver struggle to understand who he is even while he does these other atrocious things is a brilliant tale. It’s tense and terse and I could have read plenty more trades of it. In the collection of the first 12 issues, the first season, you are given a very firm idea of the brutality that Brubaker is fine with penning, even adept at doing so, and you also see the emotion that he puts behind the action of every single one of his characters. No one feels like a caricature. Everyone has reason, motive, logic, and determination. This is Brubaker’s strength, he can write a story about the worst people in the world and still draw you in and make you want to know more about them, even love them in spite of their flaws, if not for them.

Having Sean Phillips on the artwork provides the best way to view Brubaker’s work. Phillips simply gets these words and stories like he’s lived them before. The collaboration is symbiotic and I could not imagine this story looking or feeling any other way. It’s dark and covered and feels like it’s been fed through an old movie projector that still makes the flicking sound.

Conclusion

Even if Brubaker were to just use the first trade, which comprises the first half of the first season and a quarter of the overall story, I think he’d still win over a bunch of lifelong fans. But with the whole season you can see just how long form Brubaker works, and how constantly great he is with a series. This comic is exceedingly good, exceptionally rereadable, and was maybe the third or fourth trade I ever bought when getting back into comics. Sold me for life. Plus, the second, and final, season is pretty nice too.

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