Okay, obviously this has been the Summer of Sleepwalker, but that doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to think about Marvel’s most important character.

As of right now, the Rocket Racer and Sleepwalker have not met. What does PDR, a fan of both characters, think about that? PDR thinks that’s fine. Not all characters in a shared universe should meet one another. If every superhero goes to parties with every other superhero, it makes the universe feel small and I don’t like that. My opinion is that there is no great reason that the worlds of Sleepwalker and the Rocket Racer need to cross over.

Okay, but that’s not much of a post. What if PDR was REQUIRED to make a story where the two of them crossed over? The way I see it, we have two options: A retro-style story set in between the comics from the ’90s, or one in the Marvel Universe of today.

For the former, we’d want it to fit into the early days of Sleepwalkers comics, when things were episodic. In that era Sleepy was not well trusted at that point and Bob was taking jobs as a bounty hunter, so lets say someone puts a bounty on the strange green alien guy and Bob goes for it. There would have to be a flying chase scene. Maybe Sleepy could use his warpbeam on Bob’s skateboard, which brings Bob to despair. When he explains to the alien that he needs the board to make money and support his family, Sleepwalker can help Bob and then Bob lets him go. It’s an easy standalone story.

But what would I do in the present? Gotta go with a miniseries. I’d want it to be kind of cyberpunk, since that’s my take on Rocket Racer, but with the supernatural weirdness of a Sleepwalker story. With that in mind, let’s say that a massive tech company is using some kind of otherworldly power generate their “augmented reality” tech, and it acts the way so many comics from the ’90s thought virtual reality could, and alters the physical world. And let’s say they have some equivalent of a data center that is absolutely wrecking some town.

Rocket Racer wants the tech for himself, both for financial reasons and to stick it to the company in question, and so he is doing a heist that involves hacking into some kind of cyberspace scenario. Meanwhile, Rick Sheridan and Sleepwalker have come to town to investigate the weirdness. In the standard tradition, the heroes tangle at first, but then realize they need to come together against the baddies. Let’s reveal that the rich idiot running the company wants to rewrite reality in a manner more suitable to his preferences and now he has a reality distortion field that makes him the big villain of the story.

Throw in a supporting cast of townsfolk who oppose the data center and some weird cybernetic monsters for everybody to fight. I’m sure there’s a way to tie Rick’s love of movies into the cyberspace stuff. Finally, I may not love when this happens, but we could probably pull off a climax where the heroes are fighting the villain in a big special effects landscape, but it kinda makes sense given the cyberspace setting. In the end, probably Bob gets his hands on the tech and wants to use it to better the world, but someone else (maybe the villain’s downtrodden assistant?) snatches it and uses it to erase the otherworldly power-source itself. In the end, Bob isn’t any better off personally, but he and Rick and Sleepwalker get to enjoy the townspeople’s celebrations.

It could work. There are wrinkles to iron out, but it could be made into something. Maybe I don’t think these characters should cross over, but it wouldn’t be unworkable.

This one has a pretty great cold open. A guy is fleeing from the Invaders, winds up at the airport and tries to get the help of a guy who works there. The airport guy doesn’t know what to make of the guy raving about aliens, so he’s relieved when two official-looking types show up and tell him that guy was crazy. They calm him down (using the hypnotism crystals) and have him walk in front of a landing plane to his death.

Anyway, that poor man was a hotel owner and the whole thing was a plan the Invaders did so they could take over the hotel. Not just for the fun of owning a hotel! Oh my, no. They’re doing it as step one in another plan! A famous scientist named Paul Cook is coming to advise the government in matters of missile defence, and he’s staying at the hotel. The Invaders are gonna do a scheme about that!

I’ve mentioned before that these Invaders are NOT pod people. They can take human form, but they can’t just take over the form of an existing person and pretend to be them. I mean, sure, there was that time in Moonshot that they posed as that astronaut, but that was possible because the real version of that guy had been burned up and got plastic surgery, so the fact he looked different could be explained. That’s a coincidence that isn’t going to happen too often. Anyway, Paul Cook is a bit of a recluse who hasn’t been seen in public for years and was in an accident that scarred up his face and also left his niece Maggie, his only living relative, blind. See? It’s a slightly different scenario.

Anyway, the Invaders are spying on Paul (hence the title of the episode) and learning his voice and mannerisms so they can trick Maggie. Then they bump off Cook’s assistants, so that when Maggie assures the government that this imposter is their man, they’d believe her. Probably would have been a good plan for this very specific scenario if David Vincent hadn’t heard about a man who claimed aliens were after him and then got an airplane to the face. David Vincent notices things like that.

Our man Vincent has never been great at subterfuge. He takes a job as a bus driver, less to pose as a bus driver than just to drive it to the hotel. Once he’s there he absolutely introduces himself by name and explains his job as an anti-alien crusader. There is an admittedly hilarious bit where he sneaks in the hotel room door in the second that Maggie has it open, then just awkwardly tries to find evidence while she absolutely knows he’s there. A flaw in Vincent’s plan is that he assumes that Cook is going to be one of those people working with the Invaders, a traitor to humanity. He was not prepared for the impersonation aspect of their plan.

But, if David Vincent is bad at subtlety, he’s good at being an action hero. Once the imposter makes a slip-up that lets Maggie know he’s not really her uncle, Vincent makes short work of them and Maggie explains things to the government as best she can.

Superman doing crimes! Oh no!

It’s a story that has been done in the comics and the shows and probably more. A guy dresses as Superman and does crimes that make people (even the Daily Planet) lose confidence in their hero. In this short’s case we don’t even get a name for the imposter or his boss. Honestly, I barely understand why this guy is bothering with the Superman costume given that half his crimes are smash and grabs or pickpocketing that he could do just as easily without it. Anyway, Lois investigates, Superman stops the baddies, standard stuff.

Things worth mentioning:

• A copy boy appears at the Planet, never given a name, but his high-pitched Jack Mercer voice reminds me of Beanie Martin from the radio show, so I assume it is him.
• The boss bad guy has one of those desks with a button that opens a trap door in front of the desk! That’s cool.
• Clark seems to fall asleep at the opera for real, not as a bit.
• Clark does do a bit with his top hat at the end. I may love a wink at the end, but a top hat bit is an acceptable substitute.
• At one point Clark says “my double’s in for some trouble” which is also fun. It rhymes.

Finally, It’s interesting that the things Superman is compared to in the opening have changed again. I only remembered it happening once, but now he’s “faster than a streak of lightning, more powerful than the pounding surf, and mightier than a roaring hurricane.” It’s a very natural group of things. If that matters, I can’t think of why right now, though this is indeed one of the least science-fictiony of these shorts to date.

This is it! The final four issues of Sleepwalker, numbers 30 through 33.

Last week we ended on a cliffhanger with Rick seemingly dead and Sleepwalker fighting Psyko and Spectra! Holy smokes, what could happen next?

What happens next is an inventory story that takes place back before Rick and Sleepwalker were separated. I don’t know why they decided to interrupt the ongoing narrative to get this story in. This issue is written by Tom Brevoort and Mike Kanterovich, the same writers who gave us the stories in the Holiday Special as well as a backup story that ran in issue 25 but which I don’t think I even remembered to bring up at the time (it was about Rick falling from a plane and passing out and Sleepwalker having to save him in that time). So it sort of feels like this issue’s story was one of several that team wrote at the time and they’re using it up now since they know the book is dying.

One of Rick’s friends is a suspect in a murder, so he and Sleepwalker investigate to help him out. It’s neat to see Rick active in an adventure set before he got stuck in Sleepwalkers body and then stuck in the Mindscape. In those cases he didn’t really have a choice, but in this one he’s actively going places and seeking information. It shows a role he could have had in a book that was more balanced. Sleepwalker faces off against the projected mind of a comatose man who is reliving his trauma by possessing people and recreating his mother’s murder via them. Sleepwalker’s warpbeam can’t affect the out-of-body mind without risking harm to the unwitting hosts. It’s a pretty perfect setup to make Sleepy need to think his way around it. I don’t think it’s a “great” story, but it’s a good story. It’s a perfectly viable story, the best of this batch I’d say. It’s a story that shows me what could have been a Sleepwalker book that was very good for a long time, instead of what we got, which was a weird ’90s Marvel oddity that has a lot I enjoy, but a lot that is a slog as well.

I don’t make the claim that Budiansky was the wrong writer for Sleepwalker. After all, it was his idea and a lot of the early issues were fun, but I do think that he wound up (either by choice or by necessity) chasing a kind of storytelling that was popular in the era and was not the best for the book. The “Mindfield” story began in issue #19 and that led into the Mindspawn invasion, which led directly into the Psyko story which will lead directly into the end of the book. So, 13 of the last 14 issues have all been one connected arc that has relied on villains like the Chain Gang (violent criminals with little personality beyond that), the Mindspawn (violent “alien” invaders with less personality than the Chain Gang), and Psyko (what if a Mindspawn was merged with a violent criminal?). And the mastermind behind it all was Cobweb, Sleepwalker’s arch-nemesis whose goal was only ever to cause madness, which makes him gain power. It’s all so generic. One of the strengths of Sleepwalker was when it got weird. It could have been the weirdest superhero book of its age. But this was all so generic, especially in an era when too many books were also just throwing the violentest criminals it could at their protagonists.

Anyway, I’ve already written off the last three issues I suppose, but I should still describe them. When we finally pick up where we left off, Spectra has captured Sleepwalker and wants him to face punishment for the Mindspawn invasion. Some of the people Sleepwalker helped during that invasion are able to prove he’s not such a bad guy, which calls back to the civilians who stood up for Sleepwalker when the Office of Insufficient Evidence were trying to bring him down, though these civilians are less-specific than those were. Faces in a crowd that Sleepwalker saved as a crowd, not individuals, so it feels less rewarding.

So Spectra teams up with Sleepwalker against Psyko (there’s also one last Spider-Man cameo in which he saves one of Psyko’s victims) and when they defeat him he lets her take Psyko in to the authorities, which I’m sure will make her look like a superhero to the world. Makes one wonder what ol’ Selena Slate is up to since then. But SW is able to get the weapon that Psyko was using which is also contained Rick’s mind. He just needs to find Rick’s body as ASAP as possible, and the only person who Sleepy knows who knows where that body would be Alyssa Conover. And she hates Sleepwalker after she got warpbeamed that time.

Oh, I need to mention: the Mindspawn were never Sleepwalker’s people. They were servants of Cobweb that were made to look like Sleepwalker just to cause problems for Sleepy. There are points in the story when even the Mindspawn seem confused about that, but Cobweb is some kind of Magical Madness Monster, so whatever, it’s fine. Post-invasion attempt, the Mindspawn have instead been possessing people and making them do violence and Sleepwalker has absolutely been warpbeaming every single one of these suckers on sight. Whatever rule he had against warping a living being is over. It’s like he saw that Alyssa was basically fine and thought “Might as well just keep doing that then.”

Anyway, in the last issue Sleepwalker gets an mistrustful Alyssa to take him to Rick’s grave so he can reach into the Mindscape and fight Cobweb to bring Rick back to life. In the end it turns out that Cobweb had Sleepwalker’s missing Imaginator (the device that the lack of which caused him to be trapped in Rick’s mind) and Sleepy just grabs it and wills Cobweb away. Rick is brought back to life, but when he wakes up Sleepwalker disappears. Alyssa tells Rick that Sleepwalker looked weak, even like he might be dying, but Rick is confident that Sleepwalker can manage. We know now that Sleepwalker has made a handful of appearances in the decades since, but the reader back in 1994 was left uncertain of our titular hero’s fate.

It’s obviously a rushed final issue, they probably wanted to keep going, and the book should be happy it got any kind of closure at all. Still, it means a lot of unanswered questions for the supporting cast. Janine never showed up again, which means she was indeed last seen taking his job and apartment. Detective Perez and Dr. Fong and Whitney Cooper and Rick’s inner child Ricky and Rick’s family who never got fleshed out beyond a few pages, they are not here, but it’s kinda fine. I don’t miss them. They had the potential to grow into a great supporting cast, but never quite got there, so focusing on Rick, Sleepwalker, and Alyssa was the right choice with the pages available.

If I have a final verdict here, I think I already let it out when I was talking about issue #30. This could have been a strange and fun book if it had just been a little different. The Mindscape is a fun concept and the book could played more with the way our minds and our dreams and our fictions and magic all intermingle (a book one could, yes, call Sandman done, if not, “right” then done as a superhero book). I enjoyed Sleepwalker’s comic. Even the latter half had stuff I liked. But I think what I LOVE about Sleepwalker is what it put into my mind: the idea for the surreal superhero comic it could have been.