Get ready for a thumpin', it's

THE 2006 SONIC THE HEDGEHOG COMIC BEST-WORST LIST

     The year 2006 started off with some unanticipated regime
change when Archie Comics dispensed with the services of
longtime writer and occasional artist Ken Penders, who had
seemed to win the turf war between himself and Karl Bollers in
2004.  The writing responsibilities were then placed squarely
on the shoulders of longtime fan Ian Flynn, who had spent
years auditioning for a chance to write for the comic.  This
was his year to prove himself, and also the year for Yardley
Smith! (with the "!" borrowed from Scott Shaw!) who did the
majority of the book's artwork.  Together they put the comic
through their version of Day 2 on "Extreme Makeover: Home
Edition" where they knock the old house down and start
building a new one.  Well, maybe that's too extreme an
example: a few minor characters about whom few fans, if any,
cared were dispensed with but by year's end it was clear that
the comic was changing for the better.  And the worse.


BEST COVER STORY: "Comings and Goings" (S170)

In many of the stories Ian Flynn wrote in 2006 the emphasis
was on characters who died (Sir Connery, CrocBot, Tommy
Turtle) or were otherwise shoved off-panel (Hope, A.D.A.M.,
Mecha).  The news here was that after something like a year of
benign neglect, King Max was resuscitated after falling ill as
a result of his exposure to the "Line of Succession" arc. 
That would have been enough for a single story, but Tails was
also reunited with his parents, last seen in S129's "Welcome
To The Wheelworld."  Whether or not this is only a set-up for
further tragedy, this at least makes the comic more family-
friendly than it has been in a long time.


WORST COVER STORY: "System Reboot"

Ken Penders goes out on an appropriate note with this last
installment of a series involving Sonic, Shadow, Hope knocked
unconscious, one hundred Metal Sonics, and the usual heaping
helping of bad dialogue: "Astounding!" Robotnik says on the
one page on which he appears, "Such disregard for life, limb,
and property!  What supreme irony that I, who made all others
tremble, should now be reduced to their level ... dependent
upon that blasted hedgehog to save the day...."  Uncle Chuck
should get the last word here: "I should never have gone along
with this ... this insanity!"  Amen, Uncle Chuck, amen.


BEST BACK STORY: "Courage and Honor" (S168)

One of the most neglected plot points in the comic since its
introduction in S46's "Countdown to Armageddon" has been the
Antoine-Bunnie romance.  We've never seen them dating or even
seen Bunnie meet Antoine's father.  That last point is
rectified in this story, but unfortunately the two of them
meet when Antoine's pere is on his deathbed.  We get a death
without a cheat, and a chance for Ian to try his hand at a
story where Heart rules.  This story rules, too, and
demonstrates that Ian is able to do Heart as well as action.


WORST BACK STORY: "Hedgehog Day" (S167); Honorable Mention:
"Insidious" (S159)

Ken Penders's "Insidious" might well have been an attempt to
bring order out of the chaos of "More Than Meets The Eye"
(S154) when Tommy Turtle got infested with nanites and
suddenly gained the ability to morph his shell.  It was a plot
point that, unlike Tommy himself, never took off.  So we get 6
pages of Robotnik's running commentary while the nanites start
migrating like head lice from Tommy to Bunnie and Nicole.  But
by this point the Archie powers-that-be had run out of
patience with Ken's storytelling style and he was dismissed. 
Nothing really noteworthy here: the usual clunky dialogue and
Ken's reliance on narration instead of storytelling.  This
piece stands as a testimony to why Ken Penders is no longer
writing for the comic.

But ultimately, Worst Back Story honors go to Mike Gallagher's
"Hedgehog Day."  Not only because it's so derivative, being
obviously inspired by/ripped off from the 1993 Bill Murray
film "Groundhog Day," but because it's also repetitive.  Sonic
smashing himself up is only funny once, but nobody told Mike
Gallagher that, so he does it again, and again, having Sonic
inflict even more collateral damage each time.  It's like
someone telling a bad joke that doesn't go over, so he decides
to tell the same joke louder and louder.  The result is the
same in both cases: a major headache.


BEST STORY ARC: "Birthday Bash" (S160-161)

Ian Flynn debuted with this two-parter which ended up being
more promising than most.  He keeps the narrative going
despite the number of characters flitting in and out of the
story, he never falls into the trap of making too much of the
presence of Fiona (who appears to be in for some major
development), and even within the action sequences he handles
the continuity with a sense of humor that unfortunately he
forgot he had in his subsequent story arcs "The Darkest Storm"
and "Order From Chaos."  Putting the "comic" back in this
comic book was no small accomplishment.  A good beginning.


WORST STORY ARC: "Sonic Rush" (S160-161)

Tania del Rio, coming off her success with "Stargazing"
(S151), has the unenviable task of writing a two-parter
basically flogging a Sega Sonic game released in November
2005, "Sonic Rush."  Ian Flynn did the same thing with "Sonic
Riders" which appeared in S163-164.  Despite having only one
new character to write for, as opposed to the three Babylon
Rogues from "Riders," Tania del Rio serves up a plateful of
lumpy back story from the game about Blaze the Cat's having to
protect the Sol Emeralds without ever really bringing the
character to life and endowing her with a personality that
would make the readers want to see her return, which was the
magic she worked on Neo-Nicole in "Stargazing."  Also, I have
to admit that I pretty much gave up on Blaze and the story
when, in part one, she seems unaware of the presence of three
SWATbots standing and conversing like 5 yards behind her. 
Even if they were transmitting to one another on a closed
circuit or something, it ruined the whole thing for me.  But
considering that Tania's assignment was "Sell the game (and
not necessarily the character)," I'm not surprised.


BEST COVER ART: Pat Spaziante, S162-164

Back in the day, when Knuckles had his own comic, Spaz and Ken
Penders collaborated on triptych covers: one large picture
split up into three separate ones, which can be seen when the
covers of three consecutive issues are joined together.  Spaz
returns to this device for the covers of the issues with "The
Darkest Storm" arc.  Despite the fact that they're composites
of smaller drawing rather than one large one, the drawings are
well-executed and help tie the meandering story itself
together.  The cover art torch seems to have passed to Tracy
Yardley!, but if this was indeed Spaz's fare-thee-well, I
couldn't have thought of a better one.


WORST COVER ART: Tracy Yardley!, Jim Amash, Jason Jensen, S170

To borrow a line from Jonathan Gray, this one isn't even
TRYING to make sense!  The proportions are all wrong for
characters trying to occupy the same space (Sonic's
upstretched thumb appears to be as big as Tails), the
expression on Tails's face is seriously wrong (the look he
gives the hologram of his parents make me think they creep him
out), and Sally and a handful of Chaos Emeralds appear to have
been thrown in as filler.  And aside from the hologram of
Sonic's parents, there's no real tie-in whatsoever to the
story inside the comic.  This is just a mess.


BEST STORY ART: Trace Yardley!, "Tempus Aeternus" (S167)

Tracy Yardley! may have been aiming for action and high drama
in the artwork for the Darkest Storm arc, but it just didn't
move me to the extent that the artwork for the second half of
the "Mobius 25 Years Later" remix did.  The expressions and
gestures are perfect, there is a wealth of detail that's
amazing (the Maria statue dominating the throne room, the
business with Shadow's cape falling to the floor during the
Sonic-Shadow brawl), and the hesitancy and even awkwardness of
Sonic and Sally re-weaving their relationship at the end is a
winner.


WORST STORY ART: Gary Bedell, "Courage and Honor" (S168)

Once more, a non-furry artist gets thrown into the deep end of
the comic and drowns.  Gary Bedell, notwithstanding his work
on the "Skylords" comic, is not a furry artist and it's
painfully evident from his work on "Courage and Honor."  He
tries, and the compositions show what he's capable of doing,
but in the end he has no grasp on the character modeling. 
What should have been a bravura performance for the story with
the most Heart of the year is a cringing embarrassment.


BEST NEW CHARACTER: None.  

Most of the characters to appear in the comic in 2006 were
retreads, and while the Babylon Rogues showed the most
potential they were clearly one-shot characters hustled onto
the page to plug a Sonic game and then hustled off again.


WORST NEW CHARACTER: CrocTobot (S160-161)

A number of characters didn't hang around long enough to make
an impression on the fans, such as Blaze and the Babylon
Rogues.  But Sonic himself made this choice easy when he
declared CrocTobot to be the "lamest - badnik - ever!"  And
who am I to argue?  The look of him makes no sense, with a
second head below his torso, and even though it required
Sonic, Shadow and the newly-minted Scourge to finish him off
he never made it to the end of the two-parter.  Good-bye,
CrocTobot, you will be missed ... NOT!!


BEST DIALOGUE:

FIONA: "Bean?  Go sit with Bark."
BEAN: "Aww..."
"Birthday Bash: Part 1" (S160)

I don't know why; this exchange just cracks me up, and it's a
fine example of Flynn's sense of humor in action.


WORST DIALOGUE:

"System Reconfiguration," (S158), page [1]

No way am I going to transcribe Ken's lengthy and leaden
exposition that launched this story, but just how much of it
was necessary?  Exposition is always deadly because, if it's
dropped in the middle of a story, it can bring everything to a
screeching halt (see the "Good/Bad/Unknown" arc for an example
of this whenever Isaac activates his voice circuit).  Ken hit
the readers with it right out of the box, which is only a
little better but at the length he took it to it was still
deadly.


BEST NEW IDEA: Fans Rule!

It's easy to lose sight of just what it means for Ian Flynn to
be named as writer for the Sonic comic.  Throughout the years
I've been reviewing the comic and bemoaning the state of the
writing I've heard the same mantra of excuses endlessly
repeated: the comic only hires established comic writers
because ALL comics only hire established comic writers and if
you want to break in you have to be ready to write for any
comic and not just Sonic.

Ian did more than get the assignment after a reported 4 years
of trying to break into writing for Sonic.  He did it at the
expense of the Old Boy Network which is as much a fact of life
in the comics as anywhere else.  It remains to be seen how he
adapts to the corporate strictures of working for Archie
(where the strictures can be VERY strict indeed), and we need
to remember that a number of fan artists (Jon Gray, Dawn Best,
J. Axer) have subsequently dropped out and/or moved on.  But
for the first time in a long time the comic is poised to break
out of its rut and become something the fans WANT to read, not
something they feel compelled to read because it's about
Sonic.  And that can't be bad.


WORST NEW IDEA: The Black-and-Blue Blur

OK, moving from Conflict to Resolution is one of the oldest of
storytelling devices, and one that could have saved a number
of stories in this comic were it not for the writers'
addiction to Loose Continuity or their skills (or lack
thereof) in writing.  This was the trajectory that should have
been followed in "Endgame," and we all know what happened to
THAT idea.

But Ian Flynn needs to learn that Conflict does not always
have to mean a punch in the mouth, and "action and more
action" doesn't have to translate into "fighting and more
fighting."  And 2006 was a particularly grim one for Sonic. 
Over the course of that one year Sonic got smashed in the head
with a piece of the Great Oak Slide by Bark, punched out by
Scourge, beat up by the Babylon Rogues, punched out a second
time by Scourge, became a derelict has-been (well, that
happened to his alt.self in "Mobius: 25 Years Later" 2.0 but
never mind), mixed it up with A.D.A.M.-as-Tommy, and finally
(with Mike Gallagher getting in on the fun) fought off Pseudo-
Sonic.  Sure he was able to do good stuff like reunite Tails
with his 'rents, and there were stretches where his main
purpose was to provide reaction shots, but Sonic Getting Into
A Fistfight is something that got pretty old pretty fast for
me.  Maybe when Ian settles down to do some actual
storytelling he'll give Sonic a break and stop using him as a
punching bag.