Sleep #1 // Review
Jonathan is waking-up Sunday morning. The phone is ringing. He was sleeping on the couch, so it doesn’t take him long to walk over to the phone. (It’s a landline on the wall between the living room and the kitchen.) Evidently it’s Tabby on the phone. She was going to meet Jonathan before church, but he slept-in. And there were horrors in the night that Jonathan is going to have to explore in Sleep #1. Writer/artist Zander Cannon brings a stylish horror to the page with an engrossing first issue of a very promising new series.
The sermon is on virtue. Jonathan gets-in a little late. Couldn’t find his cat Mittens. Back when his mom was alive, Mittens belonged to her. So much has changed. This becomes quite apparent when Pastor Stephen welcomes a musician to the stage. He’s Jeremiah Lawson--an old friend of Stephen’s from high school who finds himself back in the small town he grew-up in. There’s a monster out there somewhere. Jeremiah might have returned to town at just the wrong time. Things are going to start to look pretty strange for Stephen in light of the recent feline disappearance.
Cannon takes his time setting-up what appears to be a very deep and winding mystery. On the surface it seems to be something as simple as a case of Jonathan being a lycanthrope, but there’s enough around the edges of the narrative to suggest that there’s a far deeper mystery going on and the monster that stalks the town while Jonathan is asleep is only a part of that mystery. Cannon paces the story to match the reduced pace of life in a small town. Moments play-out in a casual pac that will likely contrast against the tension and intensity of the horrors to come in the series.
Cannon has a brilliant way of laying-out the atmosphere on a page in a way that embraces a very calm mood whil also suggesting that htere might be something unspeakably awful underneath the surface of it all...something that could potentially tear a cow to shreds on the front lawn of a barista’s home. Black, white and shades of grey are contrasted against little, highlighted pops of red that punctuate so much of the immersive atmosphere of the series. Through it all, Jonathan is seeing the world from glasses with red frames that might be blinding him to the darkness around the edges of everything.
It’s a fun opening to a potentially impressive series. With so much of the basic story still shrouded in mystery, the reader’s imagination is fully engaged at the outset of the story. The challenge for Cannon moving forward is going to lie in maintaining the readers’ attention while revealing bits of the mystery. If it DOES end-up being just another werewolf-like story, Cannon’s going to have to do a little bit more to sell it given how much potential the series is exhibiting in the opening issue.
