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!

This week I am looking at issues 20 through 24 of Sleepwalker, which make up all but part one of the story “Mindfield”, because I covered part one last week.

One thing I have consistently talked about during this read-through is how much I like it when a comic tells a whole story in itself, so I was prepared for that to end during this six-part tale. But really, “Mindfield” still mostly lets its chapters feel complete. Part one last week was setup and ended with Rick Sheridan and Sleepwalker smooshed together. Part two features the partially-amalgamated duo fighting the Chain Gang and ends with Rick’s half falling asleep and SW trying to correct things, except his mind winds up in Rick’s body and vice versa. Part three is about Rick in Sleepwalker’s body fighting 8-Ball and Hobgoblin and it ends with him having his throat slit. Part four is Rick-as-Sleepwalker being pulled into the Mindscape where he has to deal with all sorts of monsters sicced on him by Cobweb. In part five, he meets a team of apparent Sleepwalkers who oppose Cobweb (a plot twist about them is coming that I remember from my childhood, but which doesn’t come up in these issues). And then part six is the climactic fight back on Earth. Overall, each chapter does give you a complete story for your 1990s dollar-and-change, they just happen to each have a cliffhanger leading you into the next one. Nothing wrong with that.

Apart from Cobweb, who is mostly working as the behind-the-scenes mastermind, the ongoing villains of the piece are the Chain Gang, which is a shame because I find them interesting. They started the story in the mind of Rick’s dog Rambo, but for the rest of the story they are in the mind of his love interest (original recipe) Alyssa Conover. And in there they find a way to mind-control her, so she spends the story trying to kill Rick (who is actually Sleepwalker going about his attempts to keep Rick’s life intact). One of the funniest things to me in this arc is that during the time when Rick is in the Sleepwalker body and can only come out with SW (in Rick’s body) is asleep, Rick finds himself in places that make him think that SW has hooked up with both of the women in his love triangle, but he is in no way jealous of Sleepwalker for it. He’s basically like “Way to go!” I wouldn’t have thought Rick was so mature.

While Alyssa spends most of this story under mind control, Janine doesn’t do a whole lot more. Though she and Rick (as far as she knows) go on their first date, it quickly devolves into a Sleepwalker story, so that relationship may not go much further. I genuinely don’t remember.

In the end, when Rick (as Sleepwalker) sees the Chain Gang (as Alyssa) about to stab Sleepwalker (as Rick), he uses his warpbeams on her. The usage of the warpbeam on a living being is one of the biggest crimes among Sleepwalker (the Sleepwalker)’s people (the Sleepwalkers). I have to say, while there is some body horror as Alyssa is twisted by the warpbeam, that turns out to be temporary and the only apparent lasting effect is that it got the Chain Gang out of her head. Sleepy mentions that he worries it could have done psychological damage and, weird as it is to say, I hope it has, because if she’s just fine after that then Sleepwalker’s vow to never use it on anyone is kind of meaningless.

And then the final fight with the Chain Gang opens a dimensional rift. Sleepwalker could use it to go home, but Rick pulls him back through right before it closes so Sleepy can help clean up the whole supervillain situation. So now Sleepy being trapped on Earth is directly Rick’s fault (though so far Sleepy says he understands the decision), but things have changed because he can now be there while Rick is awake, side-by-side.

I guess the other thing I need to report on is the guest appearance of Hobgoblin in the early issues. It’s a clear attempt to cross over a popular villain for the sales bump. 8-Ball is at the Bar With No Name (cameos: Speed Demon, Beetle, Mr. Hyde, a bartender who appeared in the Bar in a Captain America issue but not THAT bartender who appeared in the Bar in a Captain America issue) and he is bragging about beating Sleepwalker. Hobgoblin comes alone and he and 8-Ball wind up with a bet that whichever of them can kill Sleepwalker first gets the golden trophy and $100,000. During the fight (where, as I said, Hobgoblin slits Rick’s Sleepwalker throat) 8-Ball can tell that this is not the same do-gooder he has bested twice before. 8-Ball calls off the bet and lets Hobgoblin keep his money, because it wasn’t a fair game and that matters to him. Meanwhile, Hobgoblin asks the bleeding to death superhero about it and when he says he’s Rick, Hobgoblin believes him because he says nobody on their deathbed lies (tell that to the genetically-modified actress who played Aunt May that time). Naturally, neither criminal bothers to call help for the guy they just almost murdered.

But perhaps the most important news of all: the Next Issue blurb in issue 24 proudly announces that a foil-wrapped cover is happening next issue! All hail the foil!

This time I’m looking at Sleepwalker issues 16 to 19, with the Sleepwalker Holiday Special thrown in there too.

This batch of stories begins with the conclusion of the “Color Blindness” arc, in which Sleepwalker became addicted to a frequency of light and then hurt Rick by bursting out of his head. Overall, “Color Blindness” doesn’t hold together as a four-part story, it’s more like two two-parters. The first two issues had the addiction and the new supervillain Spectra, and the latter two were about the Thought Police and Reed Richards going into Rick’s mind. Spectra doesn’t show up in the latter half and Sleepwalker is able to kick the addiction with ease just because he feels bad about what happened to Rick. It is worth noting that during the fight with the Thought Police inside his own mind, Rick gets to sort of lucid dream at them, so he gets a more active role in battling supervillains than he usually does.

Issue 17 is a crossover with fellow ’90s hero Darkhawk. Unlike the previous times Sleepy has been visited by other Marvel characters, this story is a direct continuation of something that happened in another book, so one can not get the whole story here. While I refuse to read anything else for context during this, my Summer of Sleepwalker, I have read the Darkhawk issue before (I own a complete run of Darkhawk that I’ve kept even to this day) and honestly, this issue gives enough information to catch up. The baddies here are an iteration of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants with Toad in charge. Their plan involves kidnapping the mutant Portal (an underused character I like) and also Spider-Man is there. It’s not really relevant to Sleepwalker beyond Toad trying to connect with Sleepy by pointing out that he is hated by society, just like the mutants are.

After that we have an Infinity War tie-in. I had assumed I’d read all of this book in my youth, but nothing was familiar here. But maybe that has something to do with how forgettable it was. As a result of whatever is going on in Infinity War, most of the population of Earth are in a trance (including Rick, so once again Sleepy is free to do the crossover). Some psychic good guys (Professor X, Jean Grey, Psylocke, and Moondragon) ask for Sleepwalker’s help. Since he’s a being from the Mindscape they could use him as a sort of amplifier for their mental powers and help all the entranced masses. He agrees to do it, but not until after a fight against evil doppelgangers of a truly arbitrary collection of superheroes (Firestar, Daredevil, and Beast). It may not be much of anything, but the issue is a self-contained story even as it is part of this larger crossover. It’s a single battle in a larger war, it just means very little to Sleepwalker’s own book.

The Holiday Special is two self-contained stories from other creative teams that both feel like they could have come from those old horror comics I keep bringing up. In one, Sleepy tangles with a wish-granting genie that resides not in a lamp but in a credit card (oh, the commentary on our society). In the end, Sleepwalker wins, though the cursed card finds a new victim almost immediately. The second story has Sleepwalker trying to catch some art thieves, but Rick has indigestion and keeps waking up. Without enough time to defeat the crooks, Sleepwalker poses as the ghost of the security guard the criminals killed, swearing he will keep coming back for revenge unless they surrender to the authorities, which they do. Imagine their surprise when it turns out that Sleepwalker had actually got that guard to the hospital and he had not even died. I do believe that this special is the only story in this set that does not contain any characters crossing in from the rest of the Marvel Universe.

Issue 19 is the first of a multi-part story (I had to look ahead to see how long, and it is six issues) called “Mindfield”. This story brings back not one, not two, but six previous villains. Granted, four of those are the Chain Gang. When last we saw them, they were stranded in the Mindscape and there they have been discovered by Sleepwalker’s mysterious arch-nemesis Cobweb. Cobweb’s plan? To send them back to Earth to kill Rick and Sleepwalker. And since the only way they know to do that is by going through the mind of a sleeping physical being, they have to do it that way. The being in question? Rick’s dog. Quite rude, Cobweb.

But before we can get to that, Sleepwalker has to deal with the other returning villain: 8-Ball. Like Sleepwalker himself, 8-Ball is being drawn more muscular now and it doesn’t look good. His cool big 8-Ball helmet doesn’t look as cool or big on a muscular form. It kinda makes 8-Ball look, if you can believe it, goofy. But he’s still up to some classic supervillain stuff here. Riding around on a giant 8-Ball and robbing a pool contest with a golden trophy. And when he’s just knocking civilians at Sleepwalker with his jet-propelled cue I can’t help but love this guy. In no way does he fit the horror-tinged, would-be-cerebral nature of the book, but he’s the platonic ideal of the kind of supervillain he is. Incredibly fun.

Anyway, Sleepwalker insists that Rick should be able to just close his eyes and focus to project Sleepy into the world, instead of having to be asleep. And so, when Rick is attacked by the Chain Gang he tries this technique and ends up melded with Sleepwalker. Like, half Sleepwalker, half Rick. That’s our cliffhanger this week.

What about our supporting cast? Well, Rick is still pining for his ex Alyssa (who is still with rich jerk Whitney), but also he meets Janine, a mysterious new woman for him to have a love triangle about. Detective Perez, the cop I liked from a few weeks back, has made no more appearances, but Sleepwalker actually does consult Dr. Fong the mad scientist when he needs someone to un-hypnotize Portal.

Next week will be entirely made up of the “Mindfield” story, I guess. I hope it’s good.

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.

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.