This time I’m looking at Sleepwalker issues 16 to 19, with the Sleepwalker Holiday Special thrown in there too.

This batch of stories begins with the conclusion of the “Color Blindness” arc, in which Sleepwalker became addicted to a frequency of light and then hurt Rick by bursting out of his head. Overall, “Color Blindness” doesn’t hold together as a four-part story, it’s more like two two-parters. The first two issues had the addiction and the new supervillain Spectra, and the latter two were about the Thought Police and Reed Richards going into Rick’s mind. Spectra doesn’t show up in the latter half and Sleepwalker is able to kick the addiction with ease just because he feels bad about what happened to Rick. It is worth noting that during the fight with the Thought Police inside his own mind, Rick gets to sort of lucid dream at them, so he gets a more active role in battling supervillains than he usually does.

Issue 17 is a crossover with fellow ’90s hero Darkhawk. Unlike the previous times Sleepy has been visited by other Marvel characters, this story is a direct continuation of something that happened in another book, so one can not get the whole story here. While I refuse to read anything else for context during this, my Summer of Sleepwalker, I have read the Darkhawk issue before (I own a complete run of Darkhawk that I’ve kept even to this day) and honestly, this issue gives enough information to catch up. The baddies here are an iteration of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants with Toad in charge. Their plan involves kidnapping the mutant Portal (an underused character I like) and also Spider-Man is there. It’s not really relevant to Sleepwalker beyond Toad trying to connect with Sleepy by pointing out that he is hated by society, just like the mutants are.

After that we have an Infinity War tie-in. I had assumed I’d read all of this book in my youth, but nothing was familiar here. But maybe that has something to do with how forgettable it was. As a result of whatever is going on in Infinity War, most of the population of Earth are in a trance (including Rick, so once again Sleepy is free to do the crossover). Some psychic good guys (Professor X, Jean Grey, Psylocke, and Moondragon) ask for Sleepwalker’s help. Since he’s a being from the Mindscape they could use him as a sort of amplifier for their mental powers and help all the entranced masses. He agrees to do it, but not until after a fight against evil doppelgangers of a truly arbitrary collection of superheroes (Firestar, Daredevil, and Beast). It may not be much of anything, but the issue is a self-contained story even as it is part of this larger crossover. It’s a single battle in a larger war, it just means very little to Sleepwalker’s own book.

The Holiday Special is two self-contained stories from other creative teams that both feel like they could have come from those old horror comics I keep bringing up. In one, Sleepy tangles with a wish-granting genie that resides not in a lamp but in a credit card (oh, the commentary on our society). In the end, Sleepwalker wins, though the cursed card finds a new victim almost immediately. The second story has Sleepwalker trying to catch some art thieves, but Rick has indigestion and keeps waking up. Without enough time to defeat the crooks, Sleepwalker poses as the ghost of the security guard the criminals killed, swearing he will keep coming back for revenge unless they surrender to the authorities, which they do. Imagine their surprise when it turns out that Sleepwalker had actually got that guard to the hospital and he had not even died. I do believe that this special is the only story in this set that does not contain any characters crossing in from the rest of the Marvel Universe.

Issue 19 is the first of a multi-part story (I had to look ahead to see how long, and it is six issues) called “Mindfield”. This story brings back not one, not two, but six previous villains. Granted, four of those are the Chain Gang. When last we saw them, they were stranded in the Mindscape and there they have been discovered by Sleepwalker’s mysterious arch-nemesis Cobweb. Cobweb’s plan? To send them back to Earth to kill Rick and Sleepwalker. And since the only way they know to do that is by going through the mind of a sleeping physical being, they have to do it that way. The being in question? Rick’s dog. Quite rude, Cobweb.

But before we can get to that, Sleepwalker has to deal with the other returning villain: 8-Ball. Like Sleepwalker himself, 8-Ball is being drawn more muscular now and it doesn’t look good. His cool big 8-Ball helmet doesn’t look as cool or big on a muscular form. It kinda makes 8-Ball look, if you can believe it, goofy. But he’s still up to some classic supervillain stuff here. Riding around on a giant 8-Ball and robbing a pool contest with a golden trophy. And when he’s just knocking civilians at Sleepwalker with his jet-propelled cue I can’t help but love this guy. In no way does he fit the horror-tinged, would-be-cerebral nature of the book, but he’s the platonic ideal of the kind of supervillain he is. Incredibly fun.

Anyway, Sleepwalker insists that Rick should be able to just close his eyes and focus to project Sleepy into the world, instead of having to be asleep. And so, when Rick is attacked by the Chain Gang he tries this technique and ends up melded with Sleepwalker. Like, half Sleepwalker, half Rick. That’s our cliffhanger this week.

What about our supporting cast? Well, Rick is still pining for his ex Alyssa (who is still with rich jerk Whitney), but also he meets Janine, a mysterious new woman for him to have a love triangle about. Detective Perez, the cop I liked from a few weeks back, has made no more appearances, but Sleepwalker actually does consult Dr. Fong the mad scientist when he needs someone to un-hypnotize Portal.

Next week will be entirely made up of the “Mindfield” story, I guess. I hope it’s good.

This episode is so star studded that they kill off Peggy Lipton from Twin Peaks in the cold open. She is one of two newlyweds who are accidentally exposed to a crystal that destroys the oxygen in the immediate area, causing them both to suffocate even though they are outdoors. Obviously David Vincent investigates that, discovers the crystal, and knowing that the regular authorities won’t be help enough, he brings it to a news guy called Booth who has both a radio show and a regular news article to use to spread the news about the aliens. Booth is played by none other than everyone’s favourite Burgess Meredith: Burgess Meredith! Booth is impressed by the crystal, but isn’t convinced about the existence of the aliens until he hires a scientist to study it and the aliens kill that scientist. Booth is in. He’s going to help Vincent spread word about the Invaders.

So then the Invaders need a new plan. The leader of this group of Invaders is played by everyone’s favourite Ed Asner: Ed Asner! The Invasner is head of a batch of Invaders who are developing this crystal so they can destroy the oxygen on Earth and make the planet more suitable to the aliens. He knows he can’t let humanity find out about them, so he has to stop Booth’s story. To that end, he brings David Vincent’s family into it.

It turns out that Vincent has a brother, Bob, who has a pregnant wife, Grace. That’s right, it’s Bob and David! The relationship between the brothers has been strained over the last year or so, however long it has been since David has been on his alien-fighting crusade. Bob doesn’t believe in the aliens, so he believes his brother has gone crazy, which changes when the aliens kidnap him and hold him hostage unless David gets Booth to drop the story.

I don’t need to go through all the details, but our heroes struggle with this one. Bob tries to fight his way out of the alien base, proving that action hero-ness runs in the family, but he is not successful. David is willing to discredit himself to save his brother, but Booth asks if Bob’s life is more important than the human race. Booth refuses to back down. It all ends in a climax wherein Invasner, his batch of aliens, and Booth are all killed and all evidence of the alien scheme erased, as usual. And, also as usual, David Vincent walks away leaving just a few new believers behind, except this time, they are his family.

We get some minor details about the aliens’ true forms as well. Oxygen is often considered a necessity for life in our universe, but these guys? They don’t care for oxygen! It actively harms them. It makes me wonder if they aren’t in some way metallic in nature, and they are rusting in a way. It also makes me wonder why they’re bothering to conquer Earth when Mars is right there, with much less oxygen.

And now, a lot of information about Sleepwalker issues 11 through 15.

The lives of Rick and Sleepwalker just continue to be made worse by their situation. It turns out that Sleepy can get high off a special frequency of light and in the four-part story “Color Blindness” (only the first three parts of which are in the batch I just read) he becomes addicted to it, craving it so much that he fights his way into the physical world to get it while Rick was awake, leaving Rick comatose. SW hates what he did, but I’m only 75% of the way through the story about addiction, so I doubt that guilt will be enough to get him over it easily. One other thing we learn about Sleepwalker is that back in the Mindscape there is a female-presenting one of his kind that he calls his beloved, making his separation from his home realm even worse.

As for Rick, he’s been getting a free apartment to live in because he does repairs and chores in the building, but this situation is precarious as best and has been complicated by how much sleep he needs to get (or is forced to get while Sleepy is addicted). It occurred to me that if he’d been smart he would definitely leave notes for Sleepwalker asking him to warpbeam up some repairs around the building. It’d solve a lot of Rick’s problems. When he gets knocked into a coma his ex-girlfriend Alyssa visits and begins to feel more warmly toward him. Maybe it’ll pay off in the long-run (though not in the long-long run since I know that they aren’t still together in the appearances Rick has made in relatively recent comics). And I doubt the landlords are gonna love that he’s now in a coma, doing nothing around the building.

Speaking of Alyssa, she doesn’t get much to do here. She’s been dating a rich jerk named Whitney (who has been around since the Bookworm issue but I’ve always assumed wasn’t going to show up again so I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned him) but now she is fed up with his jerkishness, which will help if she does wind up going back to Rick.

We’ve also been getting to know “Ricky” who is the inner child of Rick Sheridan that embodies his spirit of adventure and such and exists in his mind. He’s been hanging out with Sleepwalker during Rick’s waking hours, mostly for exposition and stuff, but he has begun to take a more active role, helping defend Rick’s mind from invaders.

Joining our supporting cast in the “Color Blindness” story is a scientist introduced in a splash that made him look like a mad scientist out of post-Golden Age horror comics (I’ve brought up that era of horror comics every week and do believe there are intentional callbacks to it). This guy is Charles Warren Fong and I’ve liked him so far, but I worry he may not make it through that last issue of “Color Blindness”. The thing about Fong is that he occasionally goes by “CW” and has a blonde woman as an assistant who winds up betraying him, all of which were also true about the villain Crimewave. That is a very specific set of things to be true about two different characters appearing within the span of a year in the same comic.

Villains? Well, we don’t get any returns of Cobweb, 8-Ball, or the Chain Gang yet. The first issue of this batch concludes the story that Sleepwalker captured by destructive government agents called the Office of Insufficient Evidence, led by Tolliver Smith. While Sleepwalker escapes easily enough when a guest star arrives, Smith continues his quest to bring in our hero. Only a few issues later, when his superiors in Washington tell him he needs to be more covert, he brings in the OIE’s special force, Thought Police. This group is made up of individuals called Wiretap, Cuffs, and Nightstick, just in case you were wondering if OIE remains a parody of police excess.

During the “Color Blindness” story we get another new villain. She is Selena Slate, the lab assistant that betrayed Fong. Naturally, a lab accident grants her power over the magical light they’ve been studying, with different colours doing different things (blue can freeze stuff, red can heat stuff, I think purple makes holograms, that sort of thing) and she has access to that shade to which Sleepy is addicted. She immediately took to calling herself Spectra, Mistress of Light as if she’d been waiting for the chance to do so anyway. Since I’ve left it mid-story, I assume she’d yet to play her part in full.

This batch also has a face-off against Nightmare, a Marvel mainstay villain who needed to show up in this book given his role as the boss of bad dreams. He rolls in with a plot to help Sleepwalker back to the Mindscape, but with the intent to torture Rick once he’s gone, knowing SW would hate that. This would have been his first chance to cause distress to one of Sleepwalker’s people, because they don’t sleep and he’s never been able to give them nightmares. Anyway, Sleepwalker obviously turns down the chance to get home to save his human host and Nightmare seems to say “Oh okay” and then not bother with continuing his plans.

Then there’s the guest stars. It’s Ghost Rider that saves SW from the OIE (after a misunderstanding fight, of course). The thing that got me to start my Summer of Sleepwalker was a discussion I had about Ghost Rider and the other Midnight Sons books. I was a big fan of that line as a child, though I can recognize now that they were largely not very good, so I began to daydream about a supernatural horror-themed Marvel Comics line that could have been better. I included Sleepwalker in my imaginary line. based the memories I had of reading the book as a kid, and had hopes that Ghost Rider’s appearance here would display some kind of chemistry between the characters to prove my instincts correct. It didn’t. There was nothing particularly interesting in this Ghost Rider appearance.

And finally we have Reed Richards, who is recruited by the OIE during Color Blindness because he is “the world’s leading expert in cross-dimensional travel” and they want to get into the Mindscape to get Sleepwalker. Reed clearly doesn’t trust them, so he makes Smith stay behind while he goes in with the Thought Police. It’s the kind of thing I like to see the Fantastic Four used for, being brought in as experts when something weird is going on. I have to assume they will also be against the OIE in the last part of “Color Blindness”. And for the record, Ben Grimm also does get to appear here, in a sort of Greek chorus role on the sidelines staying back at HQ with Smith.

So that’s it for characters and ongoing plots. It’s probably just because “Color Blindness” made up 60% of that run and the ongoing OIE plot was in the other issues, but it does feel like the era of self-contained issues may be at an end, but hopefully we will still have some, because that is where I feel the book is at its strongest. So far, I’d say the stories have remained relatively good, simple superhero tales with a supernatural bet. And there hasn’t been much of the the sort of “mysteries” added just to be mysterious and then never followed up on later that I associate with similar books in the era. So far, I still like Sleepwalker.

Some astronauts die in a mysterious way, so you know that David Vincent is gonna look into that. After a bare minimum of pretending to be a reporter to get into a NASA press conference, he winds up giving his real name and being recognized. But, fortunately for NASA Vincent wasn’t recognized by the Invaders, he was recognized by Gavin Lewis, who is a human who works for NASA. Eventually the two men team up, with Lewis bringing Vincent in as security.

See, the thing is, NASA is right about to make their first trip to the moon and those astronauts that got killed off were replaced by fresh astronauts, and Vincents investigation makes him suspicious that one of them is an Invader. Here’s the thing: the aliens on this show take human form, sure, but they don’t take the form of existing humans. It isn’t a pod person situation where they step into an existing person’s life, right? Well, this time it is. This Invader has taken over the life of a guy: Hardy Smith, who was badly burned in a fire in Saigon, and had his face reconstructed, thus explaining why he looks different. He was an existing guy, with a life, including a wife. It’s the wife who is finally able to confirm this ain’t the real Hardy Smith and gets NASA to call Smith off the moon mission. But the Invader posing as Smith isn’t happy with that, so he hijacks the rocket and it explodes. The moon mission will have to be postponed, but the Invaders’ mission has been foiled.

When I learned we were getting a story about the space race, I was hoping we’d see a lot of footage from real space stuff, like in the Gary Seven episode of Star Trek. There’s a bit, but I would’ve preferred more.

Still, overall a good one. We learn that the Invaders don’t have heartbeats, which is something I don’t know we’ve heard before. The fake Smith had a little machine he could shine on himself (that he can charge with the cord from an electric razor) that makes him have a heartbeat long enough to pass a medical though. Oh, and also there’s a bit where Vincent disarms a gun-weilding Invader and flips him in one smooth motion. He’s getting to be a regular action hero he is.