“I can hear the things that you’re dreaming about, when you open up your heart and the truth comes out”
Zander Cannon writes and draws Sleep, which is a nifty horror comic from Image. It’s a nice chunk of comics for 20 bucks, as it’s 200 pages long. Not a bad value! 
Let’s check this sucker out!
Our protagonist is Jonathan Reason, who wakes up one morning (for the most part, each issue is one day, although Cannon breaks this design at a crucial point) and gets a phone call from a friend of his, who tells him that something killed a bunch of cows overnight. Jonathan walks out his front door and finds some entrails right outside his house, which freaks him right out. At church that morning (the book begins on Sunday), he joins his friend, Tabby, and an old friend of his, Hippocrates (“Hipp”) returns to town — Hipp left to pursue rock-‘n’-roll stardom, but it didn’t quite work out, and now he’s singing Christian pop songs in his old hometown. Plus, there’s a crazy homeless dude painting red lines and strange words all across town. So, yeah, things are weird in town. When Jonathan wakes up on Monday, he has an unusual mark on his face and he’s pretty sure the thing that killed the cows and wreaked some other havoc is him. Cannon writes in the backmatter that he wanted to do a werewolf story from the point of view of the dude who turns, and while this isn’t actually a werewolf story, it has the same vibe — Jonathan falls asleep (or blacks out), and things happen, and when he wakes up, he doesn’t know what he’s done and we only see the aftermath. There’s a lot of violence, of course, but we see very little of it. It’s a neat conceit, and Cannon does a good job with it.
What makes the book good is that we’re really not quite sure what’s going on when Jonathan sleeps. As the book goes along, we do get witnesses to his — I guess we can call it a transformation — but no one wants to talk about it because it’s too horrific, I guess, and early on, we’re not even sure something is really happening to him. 
Cannon also takes his time explaining what Jonathan does and, crucially, why he does it, which works very well because it builds a lot of tension. Eventually, Jonathan isn’t asleep for what happens, so we can see it too, and it has a bigger impact than if we had been seeing it all along. He does leave a lot to context clues, so even as people around Jonathan die, it’s clear there’s a rhyme and reason to it all, and when it comes to the fore, it works very well. He does a nice job with Jonathan and Tabby, the two main characters in the book. Jonathan clearly likes Tabby, but, as nerds everywhere can attest, it’s hard to make the move when you think you’re just friends. Oh, Jonathan, you fool! Still, he’s an interesting character — someone who’s a bit shy, sure, but with a strong moral compass and a belief in the structure of the world, so when that starts to break down, Cannon makes you feel it. Tabby, meanwhile, hooks up with Hipp, which breaks Jonathan’s heart (although, I mean, you had your chances, dude!), and when it turns out the relationship isn’t the best, it breaks his heart even more. She wants to help him, of course, because she’s his friend, but Cannon asks if friendship can survive something so monstrous, even if it’s out of the person’s control? It’s tough question, and we don’t get a good answer — one of the problems of the book is that Tabby doesn’t really get a satisfactory end to her arc. For the most part, though, Cannon does a nice job creating those characters and the many others that populate the book — it’s a well-realized small town, and Cannon does a decent job showing how they’re all connected. The one thing I didn’t love about the plot is that Cannon drops hints about what’s going on with Jonathan but doesn’t really follow through with them. I get that you want to be mysterious, but that can slide too quickly into vague, and occasionally, he does that here. Now, he does have vague plans to do another series, so maybe we’ll see more and get some answers, but there seem to be a lot of hints about what’s going on with Jonathan that don’t get paid off, and it’s a bit frustrating. Perhaps it won’t be so frustrating if we get another mini-series.
Cannon’s line has gotten bolder and smoother over the years, even though he can still hatch roughly to “dirty” up the page a bit. 
His characters are interesting and easily distinguishable, which is good in a comic with a fairly large cast, and he gives us a very good sense of the town through his artwork. The bold, fluid linework sets us up nicely for the final issue, when we see what has happened to Jonathan, and Cannon roughens up the art so that it looks unnatural in this world, which is a neat touch. Of course, the violence in the book is handled very well, as Cannon shows us all sorts of broken things — guardrails, lampposts, buildings, animals, people — and invites us to imagine how they got that way, and his attention to detail means it’s not hard for us to do so. He does an excellent job with Jonathan’s mental degradation, until he’s almost dead from the sheer stress of his problems. His coloring is superb, too — a lot of the book is in grays, with splashes of red throughout, and as Jonathan falls apart, the red invades even more, until the final issue is almost all red. It’s a bold and excellent choice, and even when the grays predominate, Cannon does nice work with the jolt of whites sprinkled throughout. The colors have meaning (not just blood, although, of course, there’s that), and Cannon uses them wisely.
I’ve read a good amount of Cannon’s work, and generally enjoyed it (although I did hate the ending of Far Arden and had a nice debate with old buddy Seth Hahne about it), but Sleep is probably the best thing I’ve read by him. It’s scary and tense and humanistic, and I do hope that he’ll do a sequel, as it doesn’t quite seem like the story is over. But if not, this is very good as a standalone story. We shall see!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆
