Sleep #4 // Review
Jon is waking-up Wednesday morning. He wasn’t expecting that. He wasn’t expecting to wake-up that morning. He wasn’t expecting to wake up...at all. He did, after all, try to hang himself. Now he’s waking-up on a pile of dead bodies. And as horrifying as that is, at least he’s waking-up. The horros continue around the edges of Jon’s awareness in Sleep #4. Writer/artist Zander Cannon continues his descent into small town hell while revealing a little bit more of the mystery that’s driving the drama. Cannon continues to carefully craft a sharp, little small town horror.
You generally don’t want to wake-up and walk out of a mine. If you have to do something like that, you generally don’t want it to be a situation where you’re walking away from a whole bunch of corpses in the process. Jon’s going to make it back into the town. He’s going to try to actually tell someone about what it is that he thingks that he might be doing. And then he’s going to go to church because...y’know...a situation like this just might turn out to be some kind of demonic thing and maybe they could help with that.
Cannon cleverly balances all of the different characters in the ensemble. The small town setting keeps it simple for a mystery that seems to have an obvious progression ahead of it. And though it DOES seem as though it might be simple and predictable, Cannon has been lowering-in a lot of hints around the edges which seem to suggest that something larger is on the horizon for the series. Above all, Jon seems like a very sympathetic character who is making a lot of very rational choices. As a result, he feels really relatable.
The emotional connection with the reader is maintained with a sharp sense of emotionality thanks to a very clever use of minimal color and detail. It’s a very distinctive world that Cannon is bringing to the page as an artist that fits more or less perfectly with the overall simplicity of his writing style. There are a few extended dialogues that might have otherwise come across as disinterested talking heads. Cannon frames the drama from some interesting angles. Emotions are exaggerated on the faces of the characters without compromising a simple realism that feels respectably anchored into Cannon’s script.
Cannon continues to work his way through something that will play well both as a single-issue serial AND a completed trade paperback. There aren’t that many series that fit perfectly into that sort of dual format. Most series work better one way or the other. They might be perfectly successful in both formats, but one of the two feels more natural. Sleep really feels like it could benefit from either format in different ways. It’s quite cleverly crafted with respect to the larger formatting. There’s also the possibility for further exploration of the world in which Sleep rests. The entire series is limited to the one small town. There’s real potential for a larger exploration of a world where someone like Jon might exist.
