My book report on Sleepwalker issues six through ten coming up:

I guess I’ll start with the main characters again. For Sleepwalker himself it is muscles time. He is fully drawn as a buff guy now, something I had thought didn’t occur until later it the run. I don’t care for it and no in-story justification has occurred yet. Otherwise this batch of issues just continues his story of going about on Earth and learning about things while helping people. The focus here is that no matter how helpful he is, people still don’t trust him because of his “monstrous” looks. I have to say, that even though we as the reader are given access to his thoughts and he seems ultimately noble, it’s interesting that the top copy in the issues still says that he “claims” to be a guardian of the Mindscape. I don’t remember what happens when we meet the other Sleepwalkers, but his thoughts and actions genuinely don’t leave the audience suspicious.

Sleepy’s human host, Rick Sheridan, gets the short shrift in these issues, which I suppose is inevitable given his role in the book is to sleep through the action. My favourite bit in this batch is when he goes outside to see the neighbourhood is being destroyed by baddies so he’s like “I have to do something to help!” and then almost immediately realizes that the only thing he has to offer is going to sleep and letting Sleepwalker out. His most active role in this bit is when Alyssa is trying to help Sleepwalker and gets herself into trouble, so Rick follows her. He doesn’t save the day, but he’s involved in the plot in a way he often is not. Rick and Alyssa remain broken up during these issues, his film school friends make only a minor appearance, and we see his parents for about one page, but mostly Rick’s role is not the focus.

If I gave the first five issues credit for being minimally involved with the larger Marvel Universe, I can’t say the same here. Issue six wraps up the Spider-Man story, issue seven ties into the Infinity Gauntlet crossover (with Rick being one of the people snapped out of existence), and issue eight has Deathlok guest starring. But each issue still gives a complete story explains what you’ll need to know, so I have no big complaints about it, beyond how much the guest appearances mean stealing pages from this book’s own supporting cast.

I guess next I report on the villains:

Crimewave, the up-and-coming crimeboss Sleepwalker fought alongside Spider-Man failed to come up. To me he seems like a young rich guy who thought it would be cool to be a big-shot criminal and absolutely failed to be good at it. His assistant Carmela betrays him to work with Kingpin and I wish she’d actually continued to make appearances with him over the years. Instead, neither ever appeared more.

During the Infinity Gauntlet issue we meet four criminals who escape prison during the universe-shattering chaos of the crossover and wind up with powers, but only as long as they are chained together. With their contrasting personalities and friction caused by them, they remind me very much of those criminals making up the Wrecking Crew, one of Marvel’s go-to teams for heroes to beat up, though these guys aren’t on their level. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the Chain Gang, as they call themselves, is that during this crossover issue Sleepwalker beats them by stranding them in the Mindscape and then reality is rewritten to undo all the damage the crossover called, with the Chain Gang simply thought to have “disappeared” from the rebuilt version of the timeline. The Chain Gang, unlike so many Sleepwalker villains, will return and we’ll see how it matters that they are among the only people to remember the Infinity Gauntlet occurred when they get out of the Mindscape.

The villain in the Deathlok crossover, Mr. FX, feels like something straight out of an old pre-Silver Age horror comic. He is a supposedly a world-famous special effects guy who secretly kidnaps people and makes them look like monsters to use in his movie career or, as in this story, in a haunted house ride on Coney Island. The heroes break up his operation here, but Mr. FX escapes without ever being identified and never comes back in this or any other comic to date. One has to assume that there are big blockbuster movies in the Marvel Universe where you can point at a scene with a monster on screen and say “Did you know that was filmed with a kidnapped person made to look like a swamp monster?” Apart from my repeated insistence that Sleepwalker is a book that belongs on the horror end of the genre spectrum, I don’t think he’s especially interesting.

After that we have a young woman called Lullaby, ostensibly a mutant in Marvel’s terms, who has the ability to sing people to sleep and make them her hypnotic slaves. And she’s a real prick about it. She tries to make Sleepwalker her slave, but it doesn’t end well for her. Her power being sleep-related means she fits the themes of the book (I could see doing a story told from the point of view of a person under her control trapped in a dreaming version of reality that tries to make sense of her commands) and she seems like the type who would take a defeat as an excuse to try to get revenge on a hero, but she never comes back to the book. Maybe the time for her Sleepwalker return is gone and she could show up in some X-book someday?

Issue ten has agents of a secret government agency (the Office of Insufficient Evidence) come in with the intent to “protect” the neighbourhood by roughing up the locals and causing all sorts of damage. Imagine that: people in a vague official position using their power to push people around. Could you even think it? Anyway, issue ten ends with Sleepwalker surrendering to these guys so they will stop causing damage so I assume I will have more cogent thoughts about them after the story concludes.

While the OIE are tearing up the neighbourhood we get multiple civilians who had been saved by Sleepwalker in previous issues make return appearances to defend him, and I very much enjoy seeing them saved come back. It adds a kind of verisimilitude to show that their lives continued beyond the pages in which they met Sleepwalker (I assume they don’t appear again after this, though). We also meet Detective Cecilia Perez, the NYPD officer who had been tracking Sleepwalker and who, in a moment of weakness, admits that she can’t handle it so she agrees to let the OIE take over. Perez actually suspects that Sleepwalker has been a good guy, and spouts some “woke” talking points about how the money going to OIE should be instead spent on helping people in need, cop though she may be. I have no idea if she’ll be continuing in the cast beyond this story and don’t want to spoil myself, but I actually do think it’d be interesting to have her join the recurring cast.

This one mixes things up a bit. David Vincent is following a trail of mysterious deaths. He finds the killer easily enough: it’s an Invader going by the name Nick. Nick, it turns out, has a virus that causes a slow death for the Invaders if untreated, but if he comes into contact with a human is freezes them to death. He’s just trying to get to a saucer landing site so he can get fixed up, and he’s willing to kill any human who gets in his way (and even a dog!). Anyway, he is captured by Vincent and there’s a family that gets involved, that stuff is less interesting, but in the end, when Nick makes it to the saucer landing site, they casually shoot him. They absolutely did not care about saving this kid’s life. I mean, the fact that he had some other Invaders trying to kill him for the whole episode could have clued him into that, but I assume he was in denial. I mean, what other choice did he have.

Obviously I am very interested in the alien aspects of the show. I definitely want to know more about the Invaders, and the introduction of this disease is interesting to me. But also, while Nick is captured by Vincent, he makes his case that not all of the Invaders are bad. He points out that there are good humans and bad ones, and his people are like that too. Most of them, he says, are simply following orders. Is there any truth to what Nick says? He’s certainly willing to lie to everyone else he meets, and has no qualms about killing humans (and a dog!), so he could be trying to play Vincent. But is there a “working class” among the Invaders? We know there are sub-groups, like the mutations who have emotions and are disliked. I don’t know if the show will ever give us answers, but I am curious to find out.

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 getting 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.