Whenever a storyteller invokes a primary motivation so obviously and universally alarming as “family in danger,” there’s always the likely possibility of laziness and/or cheese. The storyteller should always have to work hard to make us believe, to make us care, to make us understand. That’s the point. Too often, when invoking the so-called “universal verities,” like, say, love for family, a weaker creator or creative team may assume that there is no need to flesh out the motivation. It’s obvious! The man’s family is in danger! Now on with the story! But there’s no point in bringing those kinds of motivations into play, unless they are going to be explored well enough to be understood in a new light, or at least in the new context of the particular character and the story in question. Otherwise, they’re just a plot device, which cheapens both the character feeling the emotions, and the audience vicariously living through that character. Even the popcorniest popcorn flick depends for its effect on our ability to respect the reality of the character’s situation. And reality, like the devil, is always in the details. “Man with a family in danger” is a generic yawn. “This specific man, with these unique characteristics, participating in this carefully-delineated set of relationships with these individual and well-rounded characters, who happen to be his family, and who happen to be in danger” is the basis for a damned good story. In Deep Sleeper, a damned good story, Phil Hester and Mike Huddleston play “the family in danger card” smartly enough to avoid sentimentality and cheap melodrama.

That’s no mean feat, especially for a work that lives within an easily definable genre (working within a well-defined genre has a way of tempting artists toward cliche) — in this case, the genre is fantasy/horror, a genre in which some of the most successful creators in the field, like Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and Grant Morrison, have done their best work. That, of course, adds to the challenge immensely. The set-up, for example, reads like something out of early Sandman or Hellblazer: struggling freelance writer Cole Gibson discovers that he is capable of stepping outside of the everyday, mundane world, into a shadow-world of space-faring demons, sad lost souls, and astrally-projecting tourists, superimposed upon our own reality. He also learns that he has become something of a superhero to the inhabitants of the shadow-world, thanks to his incredible adventures fighting demons and monsters every night, which he had always thought were simply bad dreams. There is an ancient villain whose plans put all of “real” reality in danger, and who has specific designs on Cole himself, and, as I’ve mentioned, Cole’s family. And so on. Blah, blah. Doesn’t sound like much, does it? That’s because, a). you’ve read stories like this before, and b). when you’ve read stories like this before, the creators, more likely than not, depended on the trappings of the genre, and your own understanding of those trappings, the knowledge you bring to the table about “how these stories work,” to set the scene and lay the foundations of their tale. Hester and Huddleston don’t allow themselves that luxury: they take the time to develop their own milieu, and make it seem real in and of itself, rather than relying on the fact that you’ve probably already read enough Alan Moore or Neil Gaiman (or Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, for that matter) to fill in the blanks. Nothing is easy here. They flesh out their fantasy world on their own terms, and expose the rules it runs by, as thoroughly and carefully as they flesh out their characters and reveal their plot. That’s something that we should take for granted in our fantasy entertainments, but, especially in comics, we cannot.

Huddleston draws the scenes in the “mundane” world in a style that I can only describe as clip-art-like: here’s a generic cityscape; here’s a generic woman holding a bunch of papers; here’s a generic man on the phone. Expressions, especially of the characters in the backgrounds, are deadpan and happy-happy, precisely what you’d see in the illustrations that accompany a typical PowerPoint presentation, or an ad in a cheap magazine. And the overuse of zip-a-tone (or whatever they call it these days) is downright suffocating — deliberately, I think. The generic drawing style and 1970s shading effects add a filter of stiff ugliness on top of the “mundane” world, reinforcing the set-up. Thematically, as the story progresses, Cole begins to feel that the everyday world has become (or has always been) shallow and meaningless, a hollow mockery of what matters, easily dismissed (even when it comes to the “family in danger” storyline, surprisingly enough, but I can’t talk about that too much more without spoilage — I may have overstepped the line already). It is only the fantastical world that engages his attention. Huddleston renders that shadow world with a lush, painterly line (excepting the villain, who often appears, even in the shadow-world, surrounded by the dreaded, crisp, zip-a-tone). The contrasting art styles push the underyling meaning of the story to the forefront, yet somehow manage not to call undue attention to themselves. Besides that little trick, the man has serious storytelling chops anyway, in either style. It’s beautiful work, very nicely done.

But, well, okay. Let’s put the brakes on. My praise has been effusive. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. Let me be clear: this is not “the Citizen Kane” of comics, by a long shot. We’re not talking about a soul-shattering work of literary genius (though it does have some ambitions in that direction). It’s more like the “original Matrix” of comics, or “The Bourne Identity” of comics: a solid, tightly-constructed genre entertainment that takes its characters and its themes seriously enough to make them seem to matter, in a big, philosophical kind of way, while also offering up plenty of good, old-fashioned quasi-superheroic action/adventure at the same time. And that’s enough. That’s more than enough. Most non-literary, genre comics never even come close to this level of serious goodness.

Highly recommended.

One complaint: my book had a page missing, followed by two copies of the next page. It didn’t matter much (world-swapping, psychedelic stories like this can get by with an occasional weird transition, which is what I thought was going on, at first), but it is worth noting. I don’t know if this was a problem with my individual copy (not likely), or if all the books in this batch were also flawed (likely). Like I said: not a big deal, but I wouldn’t feel right not mentioning it. Maybe they’ll solve this problem in future printings, if there are any.

Title: Deep Sleeper
Creators: Phil Hester and Mike Huddleston
Publisher: Oni Press
Price: $12.95 (trade paperback)

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!