I recently read through Sleeper: Season One by Ed Brubaker. It’s a compelling undercover agent story set in the Wild Storm Universe, a comic book realm I’m not too familiar with, was purchased by DC in the 90s and in recent years subsumed by DC into the overall DCU multiverse (somehow).

WARNING: Plot spoilers below.

The main character of Sleeper is Holden Carver, who is tasked with infiltrating a highly powerful and influential crime organization comprised of super-powered criminals.  The leader of this organization is a man called TAO, who holds three criminals in his confidence, whom he calls his “Prodigals.”  Within the story, Carver works his way up to the level of Prodigal.  He then begins an affair with one of the other Prodigals, Miss Misery.

Like all the other characters, Miss Misery has a superpower of sorts.  She becomes stronger and more beautiful the more vile, malevolent, violent, and evil she acts.  For instance: she gains power from beating someone for no reason at all.

At this point I’d like to go on an important tangent.  I consider Sleeper to be unique for two main reasons.  One is the panel layout.  The artist, Sean Phillips, utilizes a unique style where on some pages he super-imposes small panels on a large splash page, and on others he has a more free-form, cascading effect.  An example of the former is seen on the first page of the graphic novel, below:

The other unique feature is the way Brubaker goes about telling origin stories.  In Sleeper, the criminals often work together as a team to complete their mission objectives, and there is a lot of down time between or after missions for the criminals to talk shop.  One of the things they do to pass the time is share their origin stories, which as a rule they have to tell in third person.

In Sleeper, we get to hear Miss Misery tell her origin to Carver.  Before she became Miss Misery, she was a good All-American girl, who always did the right thing.  She went to college, grew up, and maintained her goodness, but in graduate school she fell ill.  She was sick for over a year and no one could find out why, despite a barrage of tests and bouts of hospitalization.  Then one day, she’d had enough and she lashed out at a doctor who had talked down to her, and she ran out of the hospital.  She ran for blocks before realizing she suddenly felt better.  She didn’t know what to think, and got sick again.  Then to test out the theory, she stole a bottle of liquor from a convenience store, and drank it down.  She felt better immediately.  This put her on the path of becoming Miss Misery.

After telling her origin, she tells Carver that she is different than most “post-humans.”  She tells him (I’m paraphrasing): “You probably see your life before and after you got your powers as somehow changing you.  I don’t see myself that way.  I’ve just become what I always was.”

Miss Misery may be the most interesting character in Sleeper, at least in my opinion.  When you first meet her, she is despicable.  She only pursues a relationship with Carver in the first place because, in her mind, it is bad (she was in a loose relationship with TAO, their boss).

However, as their relationship progresses, Miss Misery begins to fall in love with Carver.  She no longer sees the relationship as wrong, and as a result, she begins to get sick.  When that happens in the story, you realize that she still has the same moral order, the same sense of right and wrong, that she did before she became Miss Misery.  That elicits a type of sympathy with the character you wouldn’t have expected.  She commits evil acts in order to stay healthy, and is therefore a prime example of the ends justifying the means.  But you have to wonder: is the supposed joy she takes in “being evil” her joy at being healthy, or is she taking joy in the act itself?  If it’s the former, then her story is ultimately a tragedy, for she has to betray her values every day in order to stay alive; if it’s the latter, then she really is as evil as she seems.

I haven’t read Sleeper: Season Two, so I don’t know how Miss Misery’s story ends, or if it does.  But one prevalant theme of Sleeper is that the characters are in one way or another cursed rather than blessed by their powers.  The main character, Carver, can’t feel pain, and has trouble feeling anything or anyone else outside of himself as a result.  Miss Misery, though she calls herself that because she creates misery for others, is likely just as miserable herself, forced to live in a condition of constant sin (sin is the best word to describe living in direct violation of your moral code)–because for her, ironically, the wages of sin is life.  Even if it is a miserable life.

“I sit down religiously every morning, I sit down for eight hours every day–and the sitting down is all.  In the course of that working day of eight hours I write three sentences which I erase before leaving the table in despair.  Sometimes it takes all my resolution and power and self-control to refrain from butting my head against the wall.  I want to howl and foam at the mouth but daren’t do it for fear of waking the baby and alarming my wife.  After such crises of despair I doze for hours, still held conscious that there is that story that I am unable to write.  Then I wake up, try again, and at last go to bed completely done up.  So the days pass and nothing is done.  At night I sleep.  In the morning I get up with that horror of that powerlessness I must face through a day of vain efforts….
I seem to have lost all sense of style and yet I am haunted by the necessity of style.  And that story I can’t write weaves itself into all I see, into all I speak, into all I think, into the lines of every book I try to read….I feel my brain.  I am distinctly conscious of the contents of my head.  My story is there in a fluid–in an evading shape.  I can’t get hold of it.  It is all in there–to bursting, yet I can’t get hold of it any more than you can grasp a handful of water….
I never mean to be slow.  The stuff comes out at its own rate.  I am always ready to put it down…the trouble is that too often, alas, I’ve to wait for the sentence, for the word….The worst is that while I’m thus powerless to produce, my imagination is extremely active; whole paragraphs, whole pages, whole chapters pass through my mind.  Everything is there: descriptions, dialogue, reflection, everything, everything but the belief, the conviction, the only thing needed to make me put pen to paper.  I’ve thought out a volume a day till I felt sick in mind and heart and gone to bed, completely done up, without having written a line.  The effort I put forth should give birth to Masterpieces as big as mountains, and it brings forth a ridiculous mouse now and then.”  -from a letter of Joseph Conrad’s to a friend.

Parts of this aptly describe how I feel much of the time.  And I don’t even consider myself a writer.  Not anymore.

This passage is quoted in The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain, by Alice W. Flaherty.

Second City Celebrates 50th Anniversary – Chicagoist.

Is it not by his high superfluousness we know
Our God? For to equal a need
Is natural, animal, mineral: but to fling
Rainbows over the rain
And beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows
On the domes of deep sea-shells,
And make the necessary embrace of breeding
Beautiful also as fire,
Not even the weeds to multiply without blossom
Nor the birds without music:
There is the great humaneness at the heart of things,
The extravagant kindness, the fountain
Humanity can understand, and would flow likewise
If power and desire were perch-mates.

10/GUI from C. Miller on Vimeo.

This is  a visualization of all the McDonald’s in the continental U.S.:

Click on the photo to read the article about it.  Apparently, you’re never more than 100 miles from a location.  Technically, 107 miles.  But you get the picture.