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 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.

Sleepwalker issues 25 through 29 are not labelled as a single story the way the “Mindfield” issues were, but they are every bit as much an ongoing story as that arc was. In fact, they come directly out of “Mindfield” so they’re kinda still that story. We’re definitely in the era where self-contained issues are a thing of the past.

Things looked good for Rick Sheridan at the end of last week, but they immediately go about as badly for possible. He was no longer connected to Sleepwalker so surely he could get his life back on track, right? Well, one of his love interests, Janine, turns out to be the granddaughter of his landlords and they tell him that because he’s been so unreliable he is losing his job as superintendent to her, as well as the free apartment that comes with it. His ex-girlfriend Alyssa seems willing to rekindle at least their friendship, but having been subjected to Sleepwalker’s warpbeam (via Rick, though she doesn’t know that) she has gone from a staunch supporter of Sleepwalker to wanting him brought to justice. And then Sleepwalker shows up and says that he will die if he can’t go back into Rick’s mind to feed on mental energies. And then the Mindspawn (whom we are meant to believe are Sleepwalker’s people, but also not) show up to use Rick’s mind as their portal into the world and Sleepwalker proves his loyalty to them by seemingly killing him. It’s pretty clear that Sleepwalker has simply stored Rick’s mind in a sci-fi weapon, but he loses that and Rick is “dead” for the rest of this batch of stories. He even gets a funeral and Alyssa swearing to avenge him.

Thus, Sleepwalker gets to deal with the dozens (maybe hundreds) Mindspawn as they rampage through Brooklyn. He does this by posing as one of them, even challenging their leader so he can become their leader. This doesn’t make him look good in the eyes of most of the populace, so the finally-returning head of NYPD’s Sleepwalker task force Detective Perez does the only reasonable thing: she calls in the Avengers to deal with the Mindspawn invasion.

I assume that this lineup of Avengers is not one of the most popular ones: Black Widow, Hercules, Black Knight, Crystal, and the Vision and seeming very of the era. But I have no strong interest in the Avengers as a group at the best of times, so this grouping works perfectly acceptably for me as the kind of big name powerful superheroes you call in to deal with something like this. And they’re the only guest stars from the greater Marvel Universe in this batch of issues too. The stories may have gone fully serialized, but at least they don’t rely too much on guests.

During the invasion, Sleepwalker does help some innocent civilians, but it isn’t enough to turn the tides of public opinion when Alyssa tell the Avengers and cops and national guard about what he did to Rick, so most people do in fact now think Sleepwalker is evil. He goes on the run.

That was the first three issues of the week, the big Mindspawn Invasion. It was annoying because they all look so much like our titular character that sometimes I can’t tell when I’m looking at our guy or not. The next two deal with the fallout. Sleepwalker saves a poor man in an alley like he’s Spawn or something and the man, named Pike, gives Sleepy a place to stay in his improvised shack under an overpass.

The government, meanwhile, managed to capture exactly one of the Mindspawn (the leader that Sleepwalker overthrew) and in the fancy secret prison hospital where they are studying him, they also have a serial killer. That serial killer escapes his own confinement and tries to kill the captive Mindspawn which naturally results in the Mindspawn and the killer merging into a new being that decides to go by the name Psyko! If you were told to design a stereotypical ’90s comic villain with the caveat “no cyborgs” you’d not take long to come up with Psyko. He’s a massively muscled monster man who revels in violence and he’s “crazy” so he says “funny” things such as when Sleepwalker punches him and he says “You like me! You must really, really like me!” He also has the power to make innocent people “go crazy” and he has the weapon that contains Rick’s mind, so obviously Sleepwalker needs to get in there and fight the guy.

During the ensuing fight the people of New York are still not quite sure what side Sleepwalker is on, so then we get another returning character: Spectra, the Mistress of Light who was the villain during the first half of the story where Sleepwalker got addicted. It turns out that she hasn’t stayed on the life of crime and now intends to do good by bringing down Sleepwalker. And that’s the cliffhanger this batch ends on.

As I’ve pretty much said, this is all coming directly out of the “Mindfield” story and each issue flows directly into the next never leaving me with a satisfying conclusion. It doesn’t feel like a complete meal. I like seeing Perez and Spectra return. I can say I’d be highly amused if we never see Janine again and that story just ended abruptly with Rick getting kicked out of his apartment and then “dying”.

What is important to note is that there are only four issues left of this book, so next week will be the end of the Summer of Sleepwalker!

This week I am looking at issues 20 through 24 of Sleepwalker, which make up all but part one of the story “Mindfield”, because I covered part one last week.

One thing I have consistently talked about during this read-through is how much I like it when a comic tells a whole story in itself, so I was prepared for that to end during this six-part tale. But really, “Mindfield” still mostly lets its chapters feel complete. Part one last week was setup and ended with Rick Sheridan and Sleepwalker smooshed together. Part two features the partially-amalgamated duo fighting the Chain Gang and ends with Rick’s half falling asleep and SW trying to correct things, except his mind winds up in Rick’s body and vice versa. Part three is about Rick in Sleepwalker’s body fighting 8-Ball and Hobgoblin and it ends with him having his throat slit. Part four is Rick-as-Sleepwalker being pulled into the Mindscape where he has to deal with all sorts of monsters sicced on him by Cobweb. In part five, he meets a team of apparent Sleepwalkers who oppose Cobweb (a plot twist about them is coming that I remember from my childhood, but which doesn’t come up in these issues). And then part six is the climactic fight back on Earth. Overall, each chapter does give you a complete story for your 1990s dollar-and-change, they just happen to each have a cliffhanger leading you into the next one. Nothing wrong with that.

Apart from Cobweb, who is mostly working as the behind-the-scenes mastermind, the ongoing villains of the piece are the Chain Gang, which is a shame because I find them interesting. They started the story in the mind of Rick’s dog Rambo, but for the rest of the story they are in the mind of his love interest (original recipe) Alyssa Conover. And in there they find a way to mind-control her, so she spends the story trying to kill Rick (who is actually Sleepwalker going about his attempts to keep Rick’s life intact). One of the funniest things to me in this arc is that during the time when Rick is in the Sleepwalker body and can only come out with SW (in Rick’s body) is asleep, Rick finds himself in places that make him think that SW has hooked up with both of the women in his love triangle, but he is in no way jealous of Sleepwalker for it. He’s basically like “Way to go!” I wouldn’t have thought Rick was so mature.

While Alyssa spends most of this story under mind control, Janine doesn’t do a whole lot more. Though she and Rick (as far as she knows) go on their first date, it quickly devolves into a Sleepwalker story, so that relationship may not go much further. I genuinely don’t remember.

In the end, when Rick (as Sleepwalker) sees the Chain Gang (as Alyssa) about to stab Sleepwalker (as Rick), he uses his warpbeams on her. The usage of the warpbeam on a living being is one of the biggest crimes among Sleepwalker (the Sleepwalker)’s people (the Sleepwalkers). I have to say, while there is some body horror as Alyssa is twisted by the warpbeam, that turns out to be temporary and the only apparent lasting effect is that it got the Chain Gang out of her head. Sleepy mentions that he worries it could have done psychological damage and, weird as it is to say, I hope it has, because if she’s just fine after that then Sleepwalker’s vow to never use it on anyone is kind of meaningless.

And then the final fight with the Chain Gang opens a dimensional rift. Sleepwalker could use it to go home, but Rick pulls him back through right before it closes so Sleepy can help clean up the whole supervillain situation. So now Sleepy being trapped on Earth is directly Rick’s fault (though so far Sleepy says he understands the decision), but things have changed because he can now be there while Rick is awake, side-by-side.

I guess the other thing I need to report on is the guest appearance of Hobgoblin in the early issues. It’s a clear attempt to cross over a popular villain for the sales bump. 8-Ball is at the Bar With No Name (cameos: Speed Demon, Beetle, Mr. Hyde, a bartender who appeared in the Bar in a Captain America issue but not THAT bartender who appeared in the Bar in a Captain America issue) and he is bragging about beating Sleepwalker. Hobgoblin comes alone and he and 8-Ball wind up with a bet that whichever of them can kill Sleepwalker first gets the golden trophy and $100,000. During the fight (where, as I said, Hobgoblin slits Rick’s Sleepwalker throat) 8-Ball can tell that this is not the same do-gooder he has bested twice before. 8-Ball calls off the bet and lets Hobgoblin keep his money, because it wasn’t a fair game and that matters to him. Meanwhile, Hobgoblin asks the bleeding to death superhero about it and when he says he’s Rick, Hobgoblin believes him because he says nobody on their deathbed lies (tell that to the genetically-modified actress who played Aunt May that time). Naturally, neither criminal bothers to call help for the guy they just almost murdered.

But perhaps the most important news of all: the Next Issue blurb in issue 24 proudly announces that a foil-wrapped cover is happening next issue! All hail the foil!

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.