I have successfully read Sleepwalker issues one through five (written by Bob Budiansky and mostly drawn by Bret Blevins) and will now report my findings.
These issues are largely setup for the book, of course, so I’ll go through the elements of the series and see what I think so far and what I remember from my youth:

Firstly, there’s Rick Sheridan, the human “star” of the book. The deal with the Sleepwalker title is that Rick is not a superhero, he is the human host of an otherworldly being that comes out when he is asleep. It’s not a Captain Marvel/Billy Batson situation, it’s a Captain Marvel/Rick Jones situation. They’re switching places, only one active in the world at a time. That said, Rick is a fairly standard “Peter Parker for a new generation” character like we’d find in the Nova or Darkhawk and so on. He’s a film student (for some reason at Metropolitan University in Brooklyn instead of Marvel’s go-to fictional school, Empire State University) with a girlfriend named Alyssa, both things that are complicated when he has to start dealing with Sleepwalker. But unlike those other Peter Parker-alikes, Rick doesn’t even get to be a superhero. He’s a victim, if anything. The first issue is less superhero origin than it is horror story. He suspects that the creature he sees in his dreams is coming into the real world while he sleeps, so he prevents himself from sleeping and it ruins his life. I do now and did as a child always want more horror elements in my stories, so I can see why this appealed to me.

Now, the real star of the book (he’s got the title after all) is the Sleepwalker, though we don’t get his point of view until the second issue and don’t get his history until the third. He an alien being from mental realms who has been trapped in Rick’s mind by an enemy, and he knows that being in a living being’s mind can be harmful to it, so he comes into the real world while Rick is asleep. Once we get things from Sleepy’s point of view, any sense that he is a horrific being is gone, he’s a noble creature sworn to protect others, but his attempts to understand Earth can be amusing. He does stay in Rick’s dreams long enough to tell his origin once it becomes a problem that Rick doesn’t know what is going on, but after that they have to communicate by leaving notes or phone messages for one another, which I like. Right now a lot of his backstory is just hanging over him waiting to be stories for later, and while I don’t remember it being satisfying to Little PDR, I do think Budiansky has probably put more thought out than anyone did into the comparable mysteries over in Darkhawk’s book. And even to this day, I like Sleepwalker’s look. The green-and-purple colours, usually those of villains, make him seem more mysterious, and his warpbeam power allows for cool visuals. One of the memories I have of reading this as a kid is that as the book progresses, Sleepwalker goes from his lanky, elfin body type (which I like a lot) to a more generically buff “superhero” form (which I don’t like as much). I remembered there being some kind of explanation given in-story about him being on Earth too long or something, which I assumed was a garbage excuse being utilized to make the character look more appropriate for a stereotypical ’90s superhero comic. And yet, going back to these early issues I find that they’re already setting up something about Sleepwalker being stronger when close to the Earth and if he floats up to high his power weakens. I have no idea the point of this so far, but it seems to be setting up those muscles I didn’t like from the beginning.

The last significant non-villain character in our cast is Alyssa Conover, Rick’s girlfriend. So far she exists only so that Rick can have something to lose by the newfound complications in his life (and she has broken up with him with supposed finality by issue five), but hopefully she will go on to better things as the book continues.

But then there are our villains, starting with 8-Ball. If I’ve said that I want the book to lean more into the horror genre than typical superhero fare, 8-Ball is a hard veer back into the superhero side of things and I can’t help but love it. This guy’s costume, as designed by Blevins, is just a great classic supervillain design that seems like it could have fighting Spider-Man in the Silver Age. It’s no wonder that this character (or at least other villains using the identity) have gone on to nearly as many appearances in comics beyond this series as Sleepwalker himself. Just a perfect super-criminal look here. In his issue, Sleepwalker tries to learn about crime and theft and stuff and 8-Ball is happy to help, and even escapes thanks to Rick waking up at just the right time.

When Sleepwalker finally reveals his origins, we learn of Cobweb, who is, to my memory of my original reading, kind of a generic evil monster villain with no motivations beyond an “evil” nature to make him interesting. I will give credit to Budianksy for how he set up Cobweb here, though, in the past tense as it is. We’re told that Cobweb is his big archnemesis and we are temporarily threatened by this mental depiction of Cobweb, but the real Cobweb doesn’t appear yet. The threat has been set up, so we know its there for later.

Issue four’s Bookworm was the Sleepwalker villain I thought about most as a kid. He is a student at the school Rick goes to, he gets his powers from the energies from the Mindscape to conjure figures from books to do his bidding, blending the real world with fiction. It seems like he ought to be a great recurring villain for this book. That’s why it’s so unfortunate that after his first appearance here, he isn’t in the book again (though he has apparently made some recent non-Sleepwalker appearances).

And our final issue of this batch just has an ordinary human crimeboss being called “Crimewave” and his assistant Carmela as the baddies. In this issue Sleepy is meeting Spider-Man for the first time, so I guess it makes sense that they are a Spider-Man-appropriate threat, but something better could have been done, surely. Crimewave is an up-and-coming crime guy trying to break into the NYC crime scene ruled by the Kingpin. Utterly uninteresting so far, though the issue ends on a cliffhanger with him about to kill Spider-Man. Presumably when he does so next issue, I will care about this guy.

It’s kind of impressive that they waited until issue five to do the Spider-Man crossover, given that that is a tradition that pretty much every new superhero goes through, to be given the Spider-Man stamp of approval. The very first issue did actually mention Spider-Man on the news, setting up that he exists, so it would have been easy for him to show up in the fight against 8-Ball, but instead they exercised patience in getting there. In fact, these first five issues do a good job of not overwhelming the reader with any connections to the greater Marvel Universe, which I appreciate. In issue three Rick summons up dream versions of dozens of the big-name superheroes, people he would have heard of as a citizen of Marvel NYC, but the real versions aren’t brought in for crossover yet.

Four of these five issues are complete stories. They have mysteries and subplots that continue, but you can get a self-contained tale out of the issue, which is how I think comics should work. Issue five, though, ends on a cliffhanger. I’m assuming that it will wrap up that plot in the next issue, and hopefully we’ll go back to some self-contained things, though I doubt it will last forever.

The verdict so far: I like Sleepwalker.