Truth In Advertising (For Real, This Time)

When the Wildstorm comic series Sleeper, by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, was running earlier this decade, I didn't give it a look. All I knew of its central concept was that it was about a deep cover operative (a 'sleeper agent') in an evil organization of some kind whose sole contact on the outside goes missing or becomes unavailable in some manner. Interesting concept, but since it didn't seem to feature superheroes and I hadn't yet discovered just how great a writer Brubaker is, its 24 issues came and went with little notice by me.

Today, however, I'm a big fan of Brubaker's comic work. And Sean Phillips, his Sleeper artist, has worked with him on the Criminal and Incognito series (from Marvel's Icon line), both of which have been excellent. So a few months ago I went looking for old issues of Sleeper to discover what I'd missed. Along the way, however, I decided to try to get the stories in collected form, rather than hunt down all of the original issues. Much to my surprise, though the stories had been released as trade paperbacks, they weren't available anymore. I was just about to return to my original plan of scouring the back issue bins, when I read that Wildstorm was about to release new collections of Sleeper (entitled Season One and Season Two). At that point I happily asked my local comic store guy to order each for me, as they became available... and I settled back to wait.

Then, just as Sleeper Season One was due to arrive, I read an advertisement that proclaimed that the Point Blank miniseries (also by Brubaker and published by Wildstorm) was a "prelude to Sleeper" (you can see it, right there on the cover!). So now I added that to my order at the comic store, too. And despite receiving my copy of the Sleeper Season One collection first, I held off until Point Blank arrived, a few weeks later.

This morning, I finished reading the prelude. It was a good, solid read, but it was also firmly rooted in the Wildstorm Universe, which I barely know. I'm sure that I would have enjoyed it more were I a fan of that particular set of characters, but I could still make sense of it all and appreciate the little twists and turns that Brubaker built into the proceedings. At various points, though, I really began to wonder just what this story had to do with the one about undercover agents that I had actually been intrigued by.

Fortunately, in the text page at the end of Point Blank, Brubaker explains the connection. Now I can see that the events of the earlier miniseries feed directly (both thematically and through one particular character) into Sleeper. While I suspect that I could have just picked up the two Sleeper editions and been fine without having read the earlier miniseries, at least it wasn't disingenuous of them to refer to Point Blank as a prelude to Sleeper. For a while there, though, I'd been beginning to worry that I'd been conned into buying the proverbial pig in a poke!

And more importantly, now I can finally start reading Sleeper Season One. It sounds like it'll be September or October before the second collection is published, but that shouldn't be too long of a wait (compared to, say, the 5-issue Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds, which is just now finishing up what started last October!)