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.
