In this review of Sleep #6, Jon and Tabby officially have a lead on how to combat Jon’s problem. But not everybody seems willing to listen.
Sleep #6
Writer: Zander Cannon
Art and Main Cover: Zander Cannon
Variant Cover: Matt Bors
Page Count: 32 pages
Release Date: October 29, 2025
This review contains spoilers
Sleep #6 begins with Jon waking the next morning, still in the mine where we last saw him. On the one hand, the place is a mess…but on the other, it’s a contained mess, which leads Jon and Tabby to one conclusion: Tabby’s hypothesis was correct.
He catches up to her outside of the mine, when he notices a few bruises on her face. As it turned out, Hipp was drunk (again), not letting her into his bunker, and had hit her. They start heading toward his home, when a coworker of hers comes along, revealing that the paint that’d been spread around town and some of the mining equipment are giving off similarly high readings (also detected at the police station).
As she talks with her coworker, Jon continues toward home. He encounters the guy with the paint again, who freaks out upon seeing him, talks about wanting people to see what he sees… We get more glimpses of the paint around town and the wreckage, before Jon comes across Mrs. Lawson, currently so drunk that she’s pretty sure her daughter Calie is there (rather than her former classmate Jon).
Jon nears home…but then he remembers Tabby’s condition. He takes a detour, heading for Hipp’s place. Hipp is a bit surprised to see Jon. Jon informs him that Tabby figured it all out, but Hipp dismisses Tabby’s findings. He’s still very much married to his theory that the attacks are all a Divine Intervention situation.
But Jon’s getting more and more upset. He knows Tabby was right, and that Hipp hit her. Hipp accuses Jon of being the devil and prepares to attack him with a shovel. Jon braces for impact, and chapter 6 ends.
BUT, as it turns out, there’s another scene after the letters page, where Jon’s been picked up by the lab. He’s subjected to experiments, and from one of the testing room’s observation windows, he can see an upset Tabby, who has for him one question…”WHY”.
Okay, so this series has been gripping and has invited so many theories since issue #1. But in Sleep #6, things really begin to click into place. The big thing is the readings picked up by the scientists. The fact that they’re really strong from the paint around town, the equipment from the mine Jon had spent that whole night in, the police station where he’d spent at least part of a night in (before his Other Side took hold) shows that there’s too strong of a connection to be brushed off as coincidence.
Jon’s monstrous side didn’t feel anywhere near contained until he spent that night in the mine. So if those readings are indicative of what can weaken that Other Side of his, then it makes sense that the readings from the equipment (one specific area), would be much stronger than those of the paint all over town, where it’s dispersed a bit more. Paint Guy had also been at that police station at the same time Jon was, and has a good amount of this paint/whatever substance is in it all over himself.
It was also interesting to see that they’d connected this case to an older one. It’s all but established that Calie Lawson had died some time before. Her father was made a pariah, her mother’s been living on the streets, and she was a classmate of Jon’s (which, given that he’s the one dealing with this whole issue, feels pretty damn significant).
I’m getting the impression that whatever’s been taking over when Jon sleeps was either responsible for Calie’s death some time before or came about in response to it (which would lend a bit of credence to Hipp’s theory about it coming for the wicked). Even if Jon wasn’t exactly close to her back in the day, it’s established that he’s a genuinely good person. So who better to exercise vengeance through than someone good?
By the end of Sleep #6, I was curious as to if Jon actually killed Hipp, or if he’d just severely injured him before the lab got a hold of him. A strong enough blow with the shovel (one that’d knock him out) might have been enough to bring out the monstrous side, and he was (understandably) incredibly upset with the guy for hitting his best friend. He’s not in control of that monstrous side when it takes over, but it’s also probably still weakened from that night in the mine. So that’d explain how the lab was able to apprehend him in the first place, but it’s unknown how much damage he did to Hipp in the meantime.
Even without the attack being shown, it’s clear that one certainly happened, going just by Tabby’s response to Jon at the lab. The woman is in tears as she leaves that question of “WHY” for him. She may have been mad at Hipp for hitting her, and being drunk, and basically dismissing her intelligence…but it’s clear that she wasn’t sure he deserved whatever MonsterJon did to him.
As Sleep nears its end, I’m looking forward to seeing how things turn out, and this next month or so between now and the next issue is going to be a wait…
Final Thoughts
Sleep keeps on delivering on the theory-fuel and narrative juiciness with Sleep #6. Also, read past the Letters page for this one. The story is just not letting go, and as more things get answered, more questions keep popping up and I look forward to seeing those answers.
