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.

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.