Sleepwalker #1

History

Bob Budiansky's notes confirm he first sketched the concept of an ugly-but-heroic alien as a deliberate inversion of the Superman archetype, inspired by a Marvel editorial meeting chaired by Jim Shooter that debated how the real world would treat a genuinely alien-looking super-being. He originally planned to call the character 'Alien,' but shelved the idea after Ridley Scott's 1979 film claimed that name; he then revisited and refined the concept around 1989, tying the character's powers explicitly to dreams. The series was greenlit under editor-in-chief Tom DeFalco as part of a broader early-'90s wave of new Marvel ongoings, and an internal press release apparently positioned it in the same creative space as Neil Gaiman's Sandman — though whether DeFalco personally used the now-famous 'Sandman done right' phrasing has never been definitively confirmed. Bret Blevins handled both pencils and cover art for the debut issue, and Budiansky himself colored it, with lettering by Tom Orzechowski — an unusually creator-focused production for a mainstream Marvel launch of the period.

Trivia · 8 facts

• First appearance of Sleepwalker (the character and the extraterrestrial species known as the Sleepwalkers), establishing their role as guardians of the Mindscape — a dimension bordering the subconscious minds of all living beings.
• First appearance of Rick Sheridan, the Brooklyn college student whose sleeping mind serves as Sleepwalker's only gateway to the physical world, and of Alyssa Conover, Rick's girlfriend and key supporting character throughout the series.
• First appearance of the Imaginator, a badge-like Mindscape device that Rick tears from Sleepwalker in their initial dream confrontation, inadvertently bonding the two together and setting the series' central dynamic.
• Written by Bob Budiansky and illustrated by Bret Blevins (pencils, inks, and cover); Budiansky also colored the issue, and lettering was by Tom Orzechowski.
• The debut story is titled 'To Sleep Perchance to Scream!' — a nod to Hamlet — and was published with both a direct-edition and a newsstand variant in June 1991 (on-sale date April 9, 1991).
• The series ran for 33 issues (June 1991–February 1994) plus one Holiday Special; Budiansky wrote all but two issues, making Sleepwalker one of the longest single-author runs on a new Marvel character launched in the 1990s.
• The debut story was later collected in Marvel Firsts: The 1990s (2016) and the Marvel Firsts: The 1990s Omnibus (2015), giving the issue its first major mainstream reprint exposure.
• Sleepwalker was part of a cohort of new Marvel ongoing titles launched in early 1991 — alongside Darkhawk and others — as the publisher sought to expand its line with original concepts rather than spin-offs of established franchises.

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Variants (1)