(No Spoilers)

Back in 2002 when Wildstorm launched its mature-reader “Eye of the Storm” titles, a little 5 issue mini-series called Point Blank came out by a man named Ed Brubaker.  Little did we know that this little prelude would lead into the massively popular Sleeper series that followed.    

Brubaker took Wildstorm’s allowance for more mature-themed stories and ran with it.  He started by taking one of Wildstorm’s most popular characters, Grifter, and putting him in a noir-style mystery which revolved around his former Team 7 teammate, John Lynch.  Brubaker effectively played with this love/hate relationship between these two men who had been to hell and back together.  Brubaker even threw another fan favorite, Marc Slayton (aka Backlash) into the mix after he’d been out of commission for a while.  As if having three of Wildstorm’s coolest characters featured in this story wasn’t enough, Brubaker dung into Wildstorm’s history and found an Alan Moore creation during his Wildcats run and decided to use this villain not only in this series, but later on in Sleeper as well.  This villain’s name was Tao. 

Tao had already proven to be a formidable threat against the Wildcats because of his superior intellect but Brubaker took the character to a whole new level of villainy.  We only get a glimpse in this min-series of how manipulating and malicious Tao can be, but as fans of the Sleeper series know, this was just a taste of what was yet to come.

Finally, possibly the slyest move on Brubaker’s part with this series is his introduction of Holden Carver.  If you haven’t read any of these books, I wont’ tell you what’s really up with Carver but even after you get a big reveal with this character in Point Blank, there is still so much more to explore with him later in Sleeper.

Many fans miss these more mature offerings from Wildstorm but sales on Eye of the Storm titles unfortunately proved that while the market for mature-reader titles exists, it is a smaller audience.  But for those who do love more mature comic stories, this and the subsequent Sleeper series are must reads!