This episode is so star studded that they kill off Peggy Lipton from Twin Peaks in the cold open. She is one of two newlyweds who are accidentally exposed to a crystal that destroys the oxygen in the immediate area, causing them both to suffocate even though they are outdoors. Obviously David Vincent investigates that, discovers the crystal, and knowing that the regular authorities won’t be help enough, he brings it to a news guy called Booth who has both a radio show and a regular news article to use to spread the news about the aliens. Booth is played by none other than everyone’s favourite Burgess Meredith: Burgess Meredith! Booth is impressed by the crystal, but isn’t convinced about the existence of the aliens until he hires a scientist to study it and the aliens kill that scientist. Booth is in. He’s going to help Vincent spread word about the Invaders.

So then the Invaders need a new plan. The leader of this group of Invaders is played by everyone’s favourite Ed Asner: Ed Asner! The Invasner is head of a batch of Invaders who are developing this crystal so they can destroy the oxygen on Earth and make the planet more suitable to the aliens. He knows he can’t let humanity find out about them, so he has to stop Booth’s story. To that end, he brings David Vincent’s family into it.

It turns out that Vincent has a brother, Bob, who has a pregnant wife, Grace. That’s right, it’s Bob and David! The relationship between the brothers has been strained over the last year or so, however long it has been since David has been on his alien-fighting crusade. Bob doesn’t believe in the aliens, so he believes his brother has gone crazy, which changes when the aliens kidnap him and hold him hostage unless David gets Booth to drop the story.

I don’t need to go through all the details, but our heroes struggle with this one. Bob tries to fight his way out of the alien base, proving that action hero-ness runs in the family, but he is not successful. David is willing to discredit himself to save his brother, but Booth asks if Bob’s life is more important than the human race. Booth refuses to back down. It all ends in a climax wherein Invasner, his batch of aliens, and Booth are all killed and all evidence of the alien scheme erased, as usual. And, also as usual, David Vincent walks away leaving just a few new believers behind, except this time, they are his family.

We get some minor details about the aliens’ true forms as well. Oxygen is often considered a necessity for life in our universe, but these guys? They don’t care for oxygen! It actively harms them. It makes me wonder if they aren’t in some way metallic in nature, and they are rusting in a way. It also makes me wonder why they’re bothering to conquer Earth when Mars is right there, with much less oxygen.

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.