In this review of Sleep #7, Jon is put through experiment after experiment, and just wants to know why this is and where Tabby is in all this madness.
Sleep #7
Writer: Zander Cannon
Art and Main Cover: Zander Cannon
Variant Cover: Kevin Cannon, Zander Cannon
Page Count: 32 pages
Release Date: December 24, 2025
This review contains spoilers
As Sleep #7 begins, we come to Jon in the holding cell, where there are noticeable cracks in the walls where his mutated form has tried to escape. Some of the scientists come in to gather further data, also bringing him a quick meal. He’d like to see Tabby, but his requests to see her are ignored.
Same sort of drill the next day, and the next. On one of those days, she appears in the window. But the police chief also shows up, and he’s not too pleased with Jon and wants to kill him out of revenge for his own son’s death. But the lab’s not about to let that happen: Jon’s too valuable a test subject.
More experiments, and he eventually asks one of the scientists if he’s seen what he turns into. He has, and describes him as hard to describe…but says it’s like he doesn’t quite “fit”. He mentions Callie’s death so many years prior, and how her father had been responsible and then killed himself and the town saw fit to cover that up because, like MonsterJon, it just didn’t “fit”. Before he can learn more, the scientist is asked to leave.
During another experiment, he asks a scientist why they’re doing the experiments, figuring it can’t be to cure or kill him, at that point. That line of questioning had gotten Tabby removed from the project, but he’s told that the data they’re getting is amazing.
Jon, while face to face with this scientist, falls alseep on his feet and goes into monster mode again. When he comes to, he’s standing over Tabby, very much out of the testing room and having managed to wreck the straps of the straightjacket enough to regain some movement.
She has a pill for him that was created in a rush, so it may or may not help him. But he has enough faith in her abilities to try it (though tells her to get to safety just in case…).
This chapter of Jon’s story was teased at the end of issue 6, and we get to see it in more detail in Sleep #7. The recap at the beginning outright states that he’d killed Hipp in their confrontation, and there’s a strong possibility that, even if it’s not been shown on the page, he feels some level of remorse that it’d happened. Yes, Hipp had a tendency to drink and get violent with his girlfriend/Jon’s best friend, but Jon’s been established as a good dude overall.
But he doesn’t really seem to have a lot of time to think in his current circumstances. Each day appears to be a cycle of wake up, eat something, get nailed with another tranquilizer, and sleep.
Speaking of the eating, it feels like the lab doesn’t quite consider Jon to be a human. When he’s given the tray of food, he’s not released from the jacket at all and has to eat it right from the tray like an animal. They don’t even see fit to give him a srraw, and that makes me wonder if it’s an intentional thing on the creator’s part, to lean into the dehumanization.
Though between one scientist accusing a colleague of “contaminating” the test subject by giving him water, and Jon’s tendency to spit the water into the drain when nobody was looking, I wonder if there was something in that water they were trying to dose him with that they figured might help with the data collection.
If the pill does manage to cure him, the possibility of Jon’s life not really improving (and instead being ended at the hands of at least one angry neighbor) is very real. The police chief probably isn’t the only one that would love to see the creature that’s been terrorizing their town dead.
And once again, Tabby proves in Sleep #7 that she’s an awesome friend to have. She’d still probably love to know why he’d killed Hipp, but that’s not her first thought upon seeing him again. There’s a bit of fear, of course (which makes sense, given that he’s busted the straightjacket and is out of the holding cell and been known to turn into something horrible). She’s not given much to work with in terms of time. But she still manages to put together a pill that may actually help him out. She’s doing more to try and cure him than the other scientists.
Final Thoughts
Sleep has been one of the most consistently gripping comics on my list, and Sleep #7 is no exception. It does an effective job at showing the new level of desperation Jon finds himself in, and leaves me eager to see how it all ends.
