Doktor Sleepless

Someone stole your future. Don't you ever wonder who?

-- Warren Ellis

About ten years from now, the American city of Heavenside is home to the "grinder" subculture: teenagers and young adults using extreme body modification - not decorative so much as functional, actually building computers into themselves - as a new way of life. Grinding began with the pioneering work of, among other people, the young genius and futurist John Reinhardt, who disappeared years ago.

One day, John Reinhardt comes back. In his time away, he has reinvented himself, and Heavenside comes to know him as the slightly insane pirate radio disc jockey Doktor Sleepless. As the Doktor, Reinhardt is practically a cartoon character, who deliberately affects the demeanor of a mad scientist, complete with a surly, scantily clad "nurse" as his sidekick. The authorities are helpless to stop him as he takes control of the airwaves, rapidly developing a massive following among the disenfranchised lower class in Heavenside.

Publically, the Doktor is a harmless crank, even going so far as to open free clinics for the poor and homeless in the city.

It's all part of a much larger plan. Soon his followers are taking part in wholesale gang violence that has Heavenside looking and sounding like a war zone, shielded from the security patrols by bizarre "anonymizer" masks that just happen to look exactly like the Doktor. Soon a growing number of people in the city have become afflicted with a bizarre disease called "St. Theresa's Eyes," which seems to make them see angels.

Doktor Sleepless has come back to Heavenside to destroy it. The only person who has any idea what might be going on is Sing Watson, who used to date Reinhardt years ago, and it's already too late for her to stop it.

Doktor Sleepless is a comic book series from Avatar Press, written by Warren Ellis with art by Ivan Rodriguez. It originally lasted for 13 issues, from July, 2007 to July, 2009. After issue #13, it went on an extended hiatus, and is supposed to resume publication sometime in 2012.

It has an extensive wiki of its own here.

Doktor Sleepless includes examples of:

• Author Appeal: It's like Warren Ellis distilled what he likes to talk about and injected the pure stuff into your eyes.
• Author Tract: Doktor Sleepless's long rants often come off a bit like this.
• Ax Crazy: Reinhardt's former caretaker is now lurking in alleyways with jet-black teeth and a rusty knife. "Nurse Igor" is a former hired killer with a penchant for knives.
• Character Blog: Sarah Berlin, a freelance blogger, comes to Heavenside in issue #11 to document the turmoil in the city. Through her blog entries, we see just how fast the city's devolving.
• Collective Identity: A device is mysteriously delivered to several grinder hotspots throughout the city. When turned on, it fabricates a thin mask of a smiling Doktor Sleepless... but when worn, it completely anonymizes the wearer from any electronic methods of gaining their identity. Soon, anonymous gangs all wearing Doktor Sleepless masks are terrorizing Heavenside.
• Deconstruction: self-deconstruction. This comics turns out to be taking the typical Warren Ellis protagonist, but in particular a hybrid of Spider Jerusalem and Elijah Snow, and making him an Omnicidal Maniac Villain Protagonist.
• Doppelganger: There are two John Reinhardts in Heavenside. One is a crazy pirate radio disc jockey who dresses like a cartoon character and who deliberately says he's not real. The other is being held inside a high-security jail cell and is frantically typing out a lengthy manuscript.
• I Want My Jetpack: The book starts off as being expressly about this. Then it gets weird.
• My Parents Are Dead: John's parents disappeared when he was a young child, and there's more to the incident than we've yet been shown. Whatever happened did so in their mansion's library.
• Schedule Slip: After issue #13, Doktor Sleepless went on hiatus. It is reportedly coming back at some point in 2012.
• Tome of Eldritch Lore: The Darkening Sky, by Henrik Boemer, was a short-run paperback that conflated fatalist philosophy, H.P. Lovecraft's Elder Gods, and a cyclical vision of history. When John's parents disappeared, The Darkening Sky was the only book out of the hundreds in their mansion's library that was at all disturbed, and John went on to read that copy of the book to pieces over the following years. One of the first things John Reinhardt does upon returning to Heavenside is print and distribute a new run of the book, which flies off of the shelves due to the Doktor's newfound popularity, and people who've read it immediately start acting just a little bit more creepy...
• Villain Protagonist: The only major characters in the series who aren't murderous or deranged are Sing and Sarah.
• Where the Hell Is Springfield?: Heavenside is a "Northwestern port city," founded by good Christian folk.
• Xanatos Gambit: Before he left, Reinhardt invented a number of things that are now in widespread use throughout Heavenside, like Clatter (an instant messenger system that's built into a soft contact lens), "tags" (a small injectable microchip that collects and stores medical data), and most of the "grinder" subculture. There's an entire feature of the city, H-Plates, that only he knows how to use. John Reinhardt built their entire culture, then went away for a few years and came back so he could more efficiently turn it against itself.