I have successfully read Sleepwalker issues one through five (written by Bob Budiansky and mostly drawn by Bret Blevins) and will now report my findings.
These issues are largely setup for the book, of course, so I’ll go through the elements of the series and see what I think so far and what I remember from my youth:

Firstly, there’s Rick Sheridan, the human “star” of the book. The deal with the Sleepwalker title is that Rick is not a superhero, he is the human host of an otherworldly being that comes out when he is asleep. It’s not a Captain Marvel/Billy Batson situation, it’s a Captain Marvel/Rick Jones situation. They’re switching places, only one active in the world at a time. That said, Rick is a fairly standard “Peter Parker for a new generation” character like we’d find in the Nova or Darkhawk and so on. He’s a film student (for some reason at Metropolitan University in Brooklyn instead of Marvel’s go-to fictional school, Empire State University) with a girlfriend named Alyssa, both things that are complicated when he has to start dealing with Sleepwalker. But unlike those other Peter Parker-alikes, Rick doesn’t even get to be a superhero. He’s a victim, if anything. The first issue is less superhero origin than it is horror story. He suspects that the creature he sees in his dreams is coming into the real world while he sleeps, so he prevents himself from sleeping and it ruins his life. I do now and did as a child always want more horror elements in my stories, so I can see why this appealed to me.

Now, the real star of the book (he’s got the title after all) is the Sleepwalker, though we don’t get his point of view until the second issue and don’t get his history until the third. He an alien being from mental realms who has been trapped in Rick’s mind by an enemy, and he knows that being in a living being’s mind can be harmful to it, so he comes into the real world while Rick is asleep. Once we get things from Sleepy’s point of view, any sense that he is a horrific being is gone, he’s a noble creature sworn to protect others, but his attempts to understand Earth can be amusing. He does stay in Rick’s dreams long enough to tell his origin once it becomes a problem that Rick doesn’t know what is going on, but after that they have to communicate by leaving notes or phone messages for one another, which I like. Right now a lot of his backstory is just hanging over him waiting to be stories for later, and while I don’t remember it being satisfying to Little PDR, I do think Budiansky has probably put more thought out than anyone did into the comparable mysteries over in Darkhawk’s book. And even to this day, I like Sleepwalker’s look. The green-and-purple colours, usually those of villains, make him seem more mysterious, and his warpbeam power allows for cool visuals. One of the memories I have of reading this as a kid is that as the book progresses, Sleepwalker goes from his lanky, elfin body type (which I like a lot) to a more generically buff “superhero” form (which I don’t like as much). I remembered there being some kind of explanation given in-story about him being on Earth too long or something, which I assumed was a garbage excuse being utilized to make the character look more appropriate for a stereotypical ’90s superhero comic. And yet, going back to these early issues I find that they’re already setting up something about Sleepwalker being stronger when close to the Earth and if he floats up to high his power weakens. I have no idea the point of this so far, but it seems to be setting up those muscles I didn’t like from the beginning.

The last significant non-villain character in our cast is Alyssa Conover, Rick’s girlfriend. So far she exists only so that Rick can have something to lose by the newfound complications in his life (and she has broken up with him with supposed finality by issue five), but hopefully she will go on to better things as the book continues.

But then there are our villains, starting with 8-Ball. If I’ve said that I want the book to lean more into the horror genre than typical superhero fare, 8-Ball is a hard veer back into the superhero side of things and I can’t help but love it. This guy’s costume, as designed by Blevins, is just a great classic supervillain design that seems like it could have fighting Spider-Man in the Silver Age. It’s no wonder that this character (or at least other villains using the identity) have gone on to nearly as many appearances in comics beyond this series as Sleepwalker himself. Just a perfect super-criminal look here. In his issue, Sleepwalker tries to learn about crime and theft and stuff and 8-Ball is happy to help, and even escapes thanks to Rick waking up at just the right time.

When Sleepwalker finally reveals his origins, we learn of Cobweb, who is, to my memory of my original reading, kind of a generic evil monster villain with no motivations beyond an “evil” nature to make him interesting. I will give credit to Budianksy for how he set up Cobweb here, though, in the past tense as it is. We’re told that Cobweb is his big archnemesis and we are temporarily threatened by this mental depiction of Cobweb, but the real Cobweb doesn’t appear yet. The threat has been set up, so we know its there for later.

Issue four’s Bookworm was the Sleepwalker villain I thought about most as a kid. He is a student at the school Rick goes to, he gets his powers from the energies from the Mindscape to conjure figures from books to do his bidding, blending the real world with fiction. It seems like he ought to be a great recurring villain for this book. That’s why it’s so unfortunate that after his first appearance here, he isn’t in the book again (though he has apparently made some recent non-Sleepwalker appearances).

And our final issue of this batch just has an ordinary human crimeboss being called “Crimewave” and his assistant Carmela as the baddies. In this issue Sleepy is meeting Spider-Man for the first time, so I guess it makes sense that they are a Spider-Man-appropriate threat, but something better could have been done, surely. Crimewave is an up-and-coming crime guy trying to break into the NYC crime scene ruled by the Kingpin. Utterly uninteresting so far, though the issue ends on a cliffhanger with him about to kill Spider-Man. Presumably when he does so next issue, I will care about this guy.

It’s kind of impressive that they waited until issue five to do the Spider-Man crossover, given that that is a tradition that pretty much every new superhero goes through, to be given the Spider-Man stamp of approval. The very first issue did actually mention Spider-Man on the news, setting up that he exists, so it would have been easy for him to show up in the fight against 8-Ball, but instead they exercised patience in gettintg there. In fact, these first five issues do a good job of not overwhelming the reader with any connections to the greater Marvel Universe, which I appreciate. In issue three Rick summons up dream versions of dozens of the big-name superheroes, people he would have heard of as a citizen of Marvel NYC, but the real versions aren’t brought in for crossover yet.

Four of these five issues are complete stories. They have mysteries and subplots that continue, but you can get a self-contained tale out of the issue, which is how I think comics should work. Issue five, though, ends on a cliffhanger. I’m assuming that it will wrap up that plot in the next issue, and hopefully we’ll go back to some self-contained things, though I doubt it will last forever.

The verdict so far: I like Sleepwalker.

Much like when they were trying to detonate that anti-matter bomb, this is one where the Invaders are just trying to do massive amounts of damage. And this time, they do a good job of it. They create a hurricane that does damage to a bunch of towns and the only reason David Vincent comes to investigate (other than the fact it was a hurricane in February) is because they spared the town they were in. But David Vincent does indeed come to investigate, but gets amchurched (which is when you get ambushed in a church, as you all know) and even though he manages to take out one of the attackers with his own weapon (I don’t even know if I’ve mentioned that the aliens have these little weapons they can stick on people to make it look like they died of natural causes, but Vincent turns it on one of the aliens here), our boy is still beaten up. But, luckily, he fell on the church organ, so before they can kill him, some people come to investigate the noise.

As I assume must have been normal in the ’60s, because Vincent was injured in the church, he has to stay with the priest at the rectory. Probably hospitals weren’t invented yet. Anyway, the priest is more or less the main character in this one. His friend was killed by the Invaders, his housekeeper is secretly an Invader, and his church is being used as a hurricane-making headquarters by the Invaders. This is his episode as much as Vincent’s (though Vincent gets to take up a huge portion of it by getting drugged and taking forever to walk down some stairs). Anyway, the priest is turned against Vincent at first, but then it made to realize who the real villains are and becomes Vincent’s latest ally. They defeat the Invaders, but not before one of them actually throws himself on the sci-fi weather controls and kills himself so that they all dissolve with him as he dies. Gotta give that one Invader credit for his devotion. Against Vincent’s wishes, the priest lets the other Invaders escape alive because of his religion or whatever.

This was a decent episode and, for whatever reason, the focus on a priest kind of mentally moves the story from the purely sci-fi space it usually occupies to something closer to, say, the John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness. There’s no real focus on religion in the episode. Sure, the priest prays, but there’s no God Magic unless you count David Vincent’s cool alien-fighting skills. But somehow the mental shift is there, and the episode feels more like cosmic horror to me, and I like it.

Oh, by the way, there’s been a war going on this whole time. Time for it to be in the Superman shorts.

They use the version of the opening with the “higher than ant plane” bit, which is appropriate for this short, and then we see a Daily Planet announcing that the world’s biggest bomber plane has been constructed. And so a Japanese man in an office somewhere hits that button that all Japanese businessmen must have that transforms their Statue of Liberty picture into a Rising Sun flag. If the title of the short wasn’t clear enough for you, it should be clear now that we’re in propaganda town. The short is basically saying that no matter how American they seem, any Japanese person could turn out to be a spy. Just great. And yes, the lead Japanese spy is a buck-toothed guy who looks like Daffy Duck should be messing with him.

Anyway, Lois and Clark are checking out that new big plane. And it is a big friggin’ plane, they weren’t lying about that. It definitely fulfills the sci-fi component for this short. Anyway, Lois and Clark are there and when they are supposed to leave, Lois hides and stays on there and obviously that means she’s there when the plane is hijacked. A Superman fight ensues and in the end Superman catches it before it can crash into the city.

Leaving the wartime propaganda element aside, I’d say that the first of the Famous shorts doesn’t seem that much like a visual quality dropoff to me. The takeoff sequence isn’t anything special, I guess, but I like the transition with the burning newspaper.

On a whim I have decided that I want to re-read the Marvel comic Sleepwalker from the ’90s. To make it feel like an accomplishment in some way, I will write about it on my little website here. That’s correct, I will be posting thoughts about a Marvel character other than Rocket Racer. He’s not even a character I’d want to cross over with Rocket Racer. Just a whole different thing.

I remember liking Sleepwalker as a kid. I’ve read the whole run, I’m pretty sure, but I don’t remember much. As I recall, it’s the tale of an entity from mental realms that is bonded with a human and thus winding up in the physical world whenever his host, Rick, went to sleep. It’s a decent supernatural setup that I have since decided would have fit in with the Midnight Sons books I also read in those days, but which I think I could have been greatly improved by having a character like Sleepwalker in there.

From what I recall, I don’t remember caring much about Rick. I do remember liking some of the book’s villains (8-Ball and Bookworm stand out). I feel like the book went off the rails, but probably not as bad as its contemporary Darkhawk. But anyway, I’m just here to make the announcement, not to make predictions. So now the Summer of Sleepwalker begins.