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.

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!