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.