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.

This one starts with a guy named John Carter who has been seeing flying saucers around his town. In spite of his name, he’s no champion of alien fighting, he’s just seen as the town kook. But David Vincent is willing to look into his claims and it pays off, with them locating one of the Invaders’ flying saucers, getting aboard to capture it, and trying to hold onto it when the Invaders come back. It’s a siege situation!

John Carter is a motorbike-driving guy with four cats (mentioned, but sadly not depicted) who has been trying to prove that aliens exist. This guy could have his own spinoff! He tries to help Vincent by going into town (the saucer is out at the Vasquez Rocks location) to get the Sheriff and an expert of some kind who will finally be able to see this undeniable proof of the invasion. Some other characters show up, a couple who are on the run from the law. They stay with Vincent at the scene of siege.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but I like seeing Vincent suffer a big loss now and then. He’s had some major victories in the last few episodes, so we were due for it: this time he loses badly. Of course, there’s no real ongoing continuity to the show, so whether he wins or loses in any given episode will not make a difference to his status quo at the next one, but I do feel like many of the episodic shows I watched growing up would have had the hero winning every week and making it look easy. David Vincent struggles for his victories.

Here, not only does he lose the flying saucer to the Invaders, but three of his allies are killed off before they can even arrive to help. I pointed out last time how when the Invaders vaporize a whole car to kill their target, they run the risk that the target could escape and be mistakenly assumed dead. Well, this time they prove that when the targets actually are in there, it’s a quick and effective method of destruction. John Carter and the local sheriff and another guy are wiped off the mortal coil in an instant. So much for that spinoff show.

Worth noting: near the beginning the Invaders try to disprove the flying saucer photos that Carter has taken by showing up with a kid who has been throwing a frisbee around. Who is this kid? Is it an Invader or is it a real kid who has been taken in by the Invaders to be used at times like this. Neither scenario is good for humanity, but the former would be the first time we’ve seen a child Invader. Either scenario is creepy.

Also worth noting: the guy in the fugitive couple has experience with engineering or something and is very impressed by the flying saucer. He thinks it may not even have fuel, and may operate on some kind of magnetic principle. That’s kinda neat.

They talked me into it. I now have a Patreon.

It feels like a strange thing for me to do, since I don’t think I have the audience to merit such a thing. And what’s more, I am absolutely terrible at marketing myself in any way. But still, I have been running this website for over two decades at a financial loss. I pay for this site to be here and certainly do not often make money off of it. I’m not really bothered by that, though. Having the website is what I’m paying for.

I’ve never been a good moneymaker. Even the stuff I sell on Etsy or Itchy I will generally just give to anyone who wants them if they ask. But those places provide a place for people to pay me if they feel like it, and that’s what Patreon could do for this site.

I don’t think I can put exclusive content over there, though. I love this website too much. I want everything I create to be available here. So the likely scenario right now is that I will post a monthly newsletter over there where I update the Internet on what things I’ve created or been working on. Of course, I will also post those here, so next time Patreon comes up on the Book of PDR it should be one of those.