Sonic #102 [Dec 2001] Spaz/Ribiero/Ray cover: Sonic shown running away from unsold copies of Special #15. Hey, you wanna talk about bombs...! "Family Dysfunction" Story: Karl Bollers; Art: Ron Lim; Ink: Andrew Pepoy and Pam Eklund; Lettering: Jeff Powell; Color: Stephanie Vozzo; Editor/Art Director: J. F. Gabrie; Managing Editor: Victor Gorelick; Editor-in-Chief: Richard Goldwater. The one-issue digression into Sonic's head is over and the roboticized Mobians are back in Knothole and reunited with their loved ones, whether organic or (for Uncle Chuck greeting his roboticized brother) metallic. Sonic doesn't take credit for the whole operation and admits, if only in his thought balloon, that Sally was the key player. Speaking of Sally, her own reunion with Elias and her parents is as flat as the page of the comic. She hands the Sword over to Elias, but it seems reluctant to part with her. When an Acme(tm) Singing Sword appeared in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" it sounded like Frank Sinatra singing "Witchcraft." I wonder what the Sword of Acorns sounds like: Nicole? Sally herself? High- pitched and whiny? Something far away and ethereal? Whatever its voice, nobody else seems to have heard it. And Sal barely hears her mother berate her for going off to Robotropolis. And in THAT outfit! Just then the crowd parts and General D'Coolette is brought forward, flanked by a member of the Raspberry Berets and by Antoine, whose left sleeve disappears in one panel. Elias is supposed to use the Sword to free the General, but short of his asking "How do you turn this thing on?" it's pretty clear that he doesn't know what he's doing. Rather than embarrass the Royals any further and yielding to popular pressure, Max has Sally take up the Sword and one ZAM later the General is back in his right mind as pere et fils are reunited. "There's nothing quite like a happy ending," Uncle Chuck observes prematurely. After all, this IS only page 5. Robotropolis , meanwhile, has become a Spin Zone as Buttnik appears to have figured out how to take the minds of the citizenry off the recent exodus of roboticized furries. He probably figured out a way to take credit for the exodus as well. And, to tie up a loose thread left dangling since S97's "My Secret Identity," he orders Snively to "activate those sleeper agents." Back at the castle, Geoffrey Sinjin finally realizes how useless he's become to the comic continuity so he and the rest of the squad seek an audience with the Royals. They arrive while the Royal 'Rents are still ragging on Elias for screwing up and on Sally for redeeming the situation. They don't even acknowledge that she's FINALLY changed out of that dancing girl outfit and back into her more revealing open vest and boots. Just as Elias demonstrates his firm grasp of the obvious by admitting that the best man for the job all along has been his kid sister, the sabotaged Heavy begins spewing forth Bombs as if they were gumballs in a bonus level. At the same time, Geoff, Hershey and Stu collapse in pain. Heavy helpfully explains that they were injected with nanites, though he refers to them as "nanobots." "Nanites," according to the Star Trek Encyclopedia, are "submicroscopic robots designed to perform medical functions within the bloodstream of a living organism." Just in case you were wondering. We cut to a well-drawn but not-well-thought-out sequence where Sonic and Uncle Chuck are in Knothole. Sonic pauses, zips off panel, stays off-panel, zips back in, and says that there's trouble. What kind of trouble? We don't know what he tells Uncle Chuck, but he tells Rotor and Tails in the very next panel "Heavy and Bomb have taken the royal family hostage ... can you whip up a gizmo to help stop 'em?" I suppose Sonic could have been more vague about the problem and its solution if he'd really tried; after all, "a gizmo" covers a lot of territory. But we're finally nearing the end of a story, so let's just get this over with. Sonic arrives at the castle just as at least one of the bombs goes off outside shaking up a couple Raspberry Berets. Preferring the direct approach, he spins through the raised drawbridge and finds himself ankle-deep in explosives. Cut back to the Royals. Elias tells dad that he wasn't honest with him because he hadn't wanted to let the old man down. Which is pretty weird considering that Max wasn't even sure Elias was still alive until a couple dozen issues ago. Alicia, meanwhile, is surprised that Sally is calmer in the face of this development than she is. Makes me wonder whether those two have had a chance to catch up on the past at all! Just then Sonic makes an entrance, complete with smart-aleck remark. And isn't THAT a refreshing change of pace! He gets Heavy to admit that Heavy's more or less mass-producing Bombs, but Sonic spin-dashes through the guy in mid-sentence. As for the underfoot ordnance, they're collectively knocked out by a quicky "gizmo:" an "EMP simulator." Swell, but wouldn't an EMP GENERATOR have done a better job? Oh, well, it's only a comic book. Later, Sonic tries to say something meaningful to Sally but she still can't get past the Huge Misunderstanding Scene from S99's "Blow By Blow." Max, meanwhile, listens as Geoff repeats his request that he, Hershey and Stu be put on the disabled list until they get de-nanified. As the thinning of the herd continues. Back in Knothole, Sonic's folks look through a scrapbook of old photos. The embarrassing ones probably wouldn't have gotten past Archie's list of Don'ts, anyway. The situation with the Royals, however, isn't so domestic and cheery: Elias apparently can't handle any more of the Acorn parenting style and has run off. To paraphrase ZigZag from the e-comic "Sabrina Online," that boy needs some self-esteem! HEAD: Now here's something we haven't seen in a long time: Karl Bollers actually wrapping up a lot of loose plot threads without resorting to killing anyone. We've got the roboticized Mobians back in Knothole after they were botnapped in, what was it, S73's "The Truth Is Out There"? That was TWENTY-NINE issues ago! We also find out that a mere TWENTY-SIX issues ago, in "Business As Usual" (S76), Mina was going to rescue her mother; her identity had never been established until now. And we get a resolution of the General D'Coolette plot point established WAAAAY back in S58's "Friendly Rogues and Foul Villains." Have I ever mentioned that I HATE loose continuity? I don't know about anyone else, but I have no problem with this bit of housecleaning on Karl's part. And almost as a bonus, Geoffrey Sinjin is effectively sidelined. Needless to say, this puts a damper on his plan to ... to ... you know, Karl never DID get around to explaining why Geoff got himself made the Power Behind The Throne back in S93's "Crime 'N Punishment." It was a weird little plot point because Geoff did it with no motivation to speak of. At least now Karl doesn't have to worry about explaining it. Even better, we're spared the Geoffrey As Rival For Sally's Affections plot before it even gets out of the hangar. It seems that the Sword works on the same principle that magic wands in J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books do: "The wand chooses the wizard," to quote Mr. Ollivander. "You will never get such good results with another wizard's wand." Despite the fact that the Sword was formed from the goo scraped off the then- 10-year-old Max when he was Sourced, Sally appears to be the intended bearer of the blade. Nice touch, even if the mumbo- jumbo quotient is still high. Most important of all, Sonic is back in form. There's none of the painful introspection and self-doubt that made Sonic act ... well, not like himself. His solution to the confrontation with Heavy: spin-dash through him, the same way he entered the castle. This is called "getting back to basics." And this is as good a point as any to quote the following exchange featuring Karl Bollers from Ken Penders's message board: [Q] What is in store for Sonic in future issues? [Karl] More of a focus on the original Freedom Fighters. I'd like to take this opportunity to congratulate everyone involved with the comic for going down to F.A.O. Schwartz, walking down the board games aisle, and getting a Clue! The fans have been screaming about the declining quality of the book for at least a year now, and Heaven knows I've done my part. But it appears that someone got the message at last. After too many months (some might say "years") of wandering in the wilderness, after enduring pointless plot points and unfocused narratives, after drowning in a sea of useless characters, the creatives are going back to First Principles. The hedgehog may actually start getting traction again! It'll be a wait, though. To allow Karl to come up to speed, the narrative is taking a two-month breather while the book runs an inventory story done up in the classic Marvel Comics manner which most of the target readers wouldn't know anything about because they hadn't been born yet. I can wait; one of the problems with the stories of late had been unrealistically short deadlines, anyway. Despite some lapses in logic, especially the putting together of the EMP generator on such short notice and with no clear idea as to what exactly Sonic needed besides a "gizmo," this story worked if only because the story actually went somewhere. A writer simply can't keep stringing the audience along indefinitely, which seems to be the philosophy at the heart of loose continuity. There has to be SOME payoff, SOME resolution, if only to let the readers catch their breath before the next development. Otherwise, as we've seen too plainly over the past year, the creatives end up thrashing around, trying something, ANYTHING, to pass off mere motion as a substitute for progress as the patience of the fans is sorely tried. But we've finally hit payoff! Whew! Head score: 9. EYE: Ron Lim's artwork, unfortunately, hasn't gotten much better since he replaced Fry. Bunnie, on page 5 panel 2, looks like she only just woke up from partying all night. And when I saw Snively on page 6 panel 4 I asked myself: "Forget about a seat belt, why isn't he in a safety seat?" He's just swimming in the back there, looking two sizes too small. And once again, the incidental hyoomons in the crowd scene are drawn with more conviction. Heck, I won't belabor Ron's art too much. I'm feeling charitable. The cover for S105 has been released, and it shows Hope standing over the fallen form of Sonic. If the story is really going to shift to Robotropolis, maybe Ron will have a chance to play to his strength: drawing hyoomons. The artwork in this issue isn't horrible, though he still needs to work on his furry modeling. And since when did Geoff and Hershey start looking so much alike? Not inspired artwork, but it didn't suck. Eye Score: 7. HEART: I had a feeling that Elias would leave the continuity at some point. I'm saddened that he had to leave like this. When Ken Penders rolled out the character in K20's "Once Upon a Time in Mobotropolis" he wasn't well-defined but he was more poised, more self-assured. This despite having had two separate upbringings: beginning with the Guardians, and then being lateraled over to Colonel and Mrs. Sommersby when he was about 10. He also, if I read Ken's set-up of the character correctly, had an adventurous streak in him. He seemed to enjoy being caught in the flash flood during that story arc. He also showed a certain fortitude by disguising himself as a foot soldier in "Saving Nate Morgan" (S71) in order to take part in the rescue mission. I thought he had serious potential. Too bad it was never utilized. Like so many characters that have surfaced in this comic, he never seemed to find his voice. We knew he was reluctant to take the throne; he made that point time and time again. The trouble was, none of the creatives ever got around to telling us what he DID want, if only it was just to wander the surface of Mobius at will. At least I thought that's where Ken and Karl were going to take the character. But it didn't happen. I'd honestly hoped that, if he did have to go, it would be in the spirit of a song from the musical "Pippin": Rivers belong where they can ramble Eagles belong where they can fly I gotta be where my spirit can run free Gotta find my corner of the sky That would have been a far better, clearer note on which Elias could leave the story. The problem, of course, is that in order to pull that off the writers would have to know the character thoroughly and would have to have presented him to the readers in such a way that the exit would have been in-character. The fact that Elias simply up and runs away because he couldn't get the Sword to work while Sally did tells me that Elias' personality was never really spelled out or even thought out. In short, nobody knew what to do with him. And when that fact became painfully obvious through his being manipulated by Sinjin in the most recent stories, he was let go. This is why IMHO the Sega Data Files, while a start in putting together a Character Bible for the book, are incomplete if the character entries don't spell out how one character relates to the others. Ken, or whomever, does a little better job this month with Julie-Su than he did with Sally last month, but then again Julie-Su was his own creation. So Elias is no longer in the picture. That's a pity. I've no idea where he's gone. If I were him, perhaps I'd find a way to get to the Floating Island and the Royal Compound. It was, after all, the last thing he'd known that could be called "home" before he was reunited with his biological parents. Of course the Sommersbys probably went bye-bye with the rest of the Island's inhabitants, but he wouldn't have discovered that yet. And comic books being comic books, there's always the option of his being reintegrated into the story line. Hope the creatives do a better job of it next time. Despite the angst of the Royals and Sally's continuing reservations about Sonic after the Huge Misunderstanding Scene, the mood of this piece is supposed to be warm and domestic, established by the reunions at the beginning and the Sonic Family Togetherness bit on page [15]. This is the kind of situation where a heavier manga style, particularly a shojo manga or girl's comic style, would have been perfect. There's always an emotional high-point in shojo manga: reconciliations, reunions, farewells, confessions of one's true feelings. They're not always tear-jerkers, but then shojo artists and writers aren't afraid to go there when the occasion calls for it. Karl Bollers has the timing right, but Ron Lim's art spoils the moment. Too bad. Heart Score: 7. "Life's Realities" Story: Ken Penders; Art: Ken Penders and Dawn Best; Ink: Pam Eklund; Lettering: Vickie Williams; Color: Frank Gagliardo; Editor: Justin Gabrie Having failed to alter the time stream in a good way by destroying the White Comet in the last issue, Knuckles tries again. He rigs it so the decision of the council is reversed and Dimitri's original hare-brained proposal is accepted. Knuckles does this by providing a voice-over. But when the theory gives way to practice, it turns out Dimitri isn't a very good driver and the Island crashes instead. Strike two. Knuckles then goes back to the last remaining "focal point." The assignment seems simple enough: foil the murder of Edmund. No sooner does Knuckles do this, though, than he starts going robotic. Strike three. OK, so altering the past is just too tricky. Dimitri then starts doing a song-and-dance about altering the future, and wonders aloud if Knuckles can "undo the effect of the quantum beam in order to restore the inhabitants of the Floating Island." Which is what started this plot line in the first place! But Dimitri seems to have another agenda and sort of slides over the point. Perhaps because it was placed at the end of the story in the last panel, Knuckles doesn't have a chance to react to it, either, proving once again that when you're up to your ass in alligators, it's difficult to remember that your initial objective was to drain the swamp. HEAD: Second verse, same as the first: Knuckles had just demonstrated, in last month's "Reboot," that the difficulty with altering the past is that it can cause unforseen and unwelcome consequences in the present. In this story, Knuckles demonstrates that the difficulty with altering the past is that it can cause unforseen and unwelcome consequences in the present. Then as a change of pace he goes on to demonstrate that the difficulty with altering the past is that it can cause unforseen and unwelcome consequences in the present. OK, Ken, we GET it! Was this trip really necessary? This feels exactly like the two-page vamps that Ken and Mike Kanterovich did for the Sonic books leading up to S34's "Sense of History." To recap: Archie had signed a distribution deal with a major retail outlet partly on the basis that Knuckles stories would start running in the Sonic comic. The retailer, however, expected the Knuckles story to start running with S31. So Kanterovich and Penders had to scramble to produce three two-page teases that added nothing whatsoever to the plot but made good on the pledge to include Knuckles material until the REAL story started in S34. Note to all those of you thinking about working in the comic book industry someday: this is the kind of crap you'll have to put up with every now and then. But this story was necessary in one respect. Ken's contributions will also be going on hiatus for three issues. Part of the reason was so that he could recuperate from his recent surgery. Filling in will be a three-parter by Mike Gallagher wherein the Downunda Freedom Fighters encounter the bunyip, a story threatened to be unleashed by Mike in the course of "Outback Gut Check" (S61). He apparently made good on his threat and sold it to Archie where it languished in "inventory" alongside "Sonic Spin City" and "Naugus Games," both of which were also inventory stories which ran in SSS15. And starting with S106, if the box at the bottom of page [6] is any indication, we'll be treated to the long-awaited "Knuckles : 20 Years Later and 40 Pages Shorter." Yes, Knuckles's impending romp into the future has turned out to be just the premise needed to launch the story idea Ken's been nursing for years. And it can't have come too soon for a good number of fans, especially the ones who continue to pepper Ken with questions as to what color Knuckles's daughter, Lara-Su, is supposed to be. Prepare for a major surge in fan art once that question gets answered. Head Score: 5. EYE: I found it nearly impossible to tell which pages highlighted Ken's art and which were contributed by Dawn. I take that as a good thing. Aside from the seamlessness itself, it means that Dawn is either totally adept at the Penders house style or else she's actually helping to rewrite the agenda. Keeping in mind that this was drawn probably 5 to 6 months ago when Ken was either on the eve of surgery or on the mend, this is no small achievement. Excellent stuff. Eye Score: 9. HEART: Despite the redundancy, Ken's story line suddenly acquired an unwanted relevance in the time between it was produced and now that it's in print. After September 11, 2001, the prospect of someone going back in time to attempt to alter a tragic turn of events transcended the realm of idle speculation. In fact, it struck at the very heart of the comic book concept itself: namely, that comic books are escapist literature. There's a lively debate going on at present as to just how much comic books can and should refer to the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. The majority of fans, as I understand it, would prefer that the comics say little or nothing about the attacks. These are the true escapists. No matter how hyoomon the protagonists and some of the antagonists might be, no matter how blatantly Gotham or Metropolis resemble New York City, they insist that the reality of the attack not cross the line into their reading material. What they forget is that that line has never exactly been defined with rock-solid clarity. Back during the Second World War, Captain America wasn't fighting just any old enemy; he was fighting unambiguous, swastika-armbanded Nazis. In the late Sixties, several superheroes including the Green Lantern developed the kind of social conscience that would have been unthinkable a decade before. As for the Sonic comic, it's closer to being a pure fantasy comic than the muscle-and-spandex books. Yet on two counts, one obvious and one behind the scenes, reality has caught up with the story. Ken Penders, in a bow to the James Bond novels and films that have so influenced his work, early on created the Dark Legion, a rootless, stateless army with a short agenda and an implacable hatred. The DL, like the Bond nemesis organization SPECTRE, wasn't like the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. Which is a good thing from a writer's point of view. Once you anchor a villain to a specific geopolitical reality, you have to deal with the eventuality that geopolitics will one day pass you by. That's why the Bond film "Octopussy" is probably the weakest of the lot. Its plot concerning a mad Soviet commissar looking to trigger a nuclear exchange between NATO and the US has effectively been consigned to the trash can of history along with the Soviet Union itself. The film looks quaint and old- fashioned, like a pair of spats. The Dark Legion, on the other hand, is not state-oriented. If anything, it's ego-centered, the ego in this case belonging to Dimitri. He's the one with the vision; everyone else exists to support that vision and will even kill to do it. Sound familiar? Through no planning on the part of Ken or anybody else, the Dark Legion could now very well stand in for a terrorist army on the order of al Qaeda, the shadowy network in the service of Osama bin Laden. Life, unfortunately, sometimes imitates art. The other overlap is more sober and more moving. Colorist Frank Gagliardo, as it turns out, has a day job. As mentioned on Ken Penders's message board, when Frank isn't coloring comics he's a member of the New Rochelle Fire Department. In that capacity, Frank put in time at Ground Zero after the World Trade Center was hit. The attack has redefined the whole hero-villain dynamic for a lot of people. A villain is someone who sees you, and even themselves, as totally expendable in the achievement of their goal. Yet heroes display a different breed of self-sacrifice from a suicide bomber. As people are rediscovering, a hero can be an ordinary person coping with an extraordinary situation. To me it proves, more than ever, that the fantasy of a god-like spandex- clad super-powered being is just that: a fantasy, an illusion, one that provides less and less comfort with the passing of time. In the face of such an atrocity, the superhero stops inspiring awe and starts inspiring ridicule. In the pilot episode of the live-action version of Ben Edlund's "The Tick," the big blue boob must stop a Soviet-built robot programmed back in 1979 to assassinate President Jimmy Carter. Like the threat, the concept of the superhero itself has seemingly lost the ability to move easily into the 21st century. The world has gotten too big, too complex, and too freakin' evil to support its weight. Like Barney the Dinosaur, it's something to enjoy when you're young and innocent; all too soon, time passes and you come to see it as a weird joke. Sonic and Knuckles, though, are probably better able to withstand such rude shocks because they're NOT hyoomons. There has always been a greater tolerance for anthropomorphs than for superhyoomons. It's easier for them to embody our nobler selves, and it gets easier the more we learn about our own species; remember, "Cops" is as much a weekly documentary about hyoomons as "60 Minutes." And despite their various abilities (flight, speed), Sonic, Tails and Knuckles don't fit the superhero mold. They have no identities to protect, no faces to hide behind masks, no grand causes or abstracts to defend. None of the Freedom Fighters invoke Truth, Justice, and the Mobian way; they have a problem with what Robotnik is doing to their planet and its inhabitants, and at the moment Knuckles is supposed to be trying to get his people back on the Floating Island so he'll have someone of whom to be Guardian. In this respect, they may outlast more established superheroes whose very relevance is being called into question. Heart Score: n/a (Ken's done nothing new this month, after all). Sega Data Files: Knothole and Julie-Su. For all the changes Karl has put Knothole through in the last year, Ken has stuck to the SatAM model of a forested redoubt. There may be a "Royal Compound" but he doesn't go out of his way to depict the gaudy stone castle that was featured in "New Order" (S94). Nor can we find any trace of Knothole High School. There's a "clinic" but no hospital, a centrally-located "lock-up" but no jail. And many of these places are given cute, alliterative names, as if Ken wasn't looking forward to the prospect of typing "hut" half a dozen times. I also have to wonder who designed the housing arrangements. Sonic and Amy Rose are in a cluster by themselves; that might be a dangerous combination now that Amy Rose has been "upsized" according to the Sega model. Sally still has a hut a good piece from the Royal Compound. Tails is rooming not with Sonic, but with the women (Sally, Bunnie, Rosie). We don't know where Sonic's folks are living. And why put the physician in the hut farthest away from the center of Knothole, on the other side of the Great River? I assume this is version 1.0 of Knothole; still, it's more than fanfic writers have had to work with up until now if they were going by the comic continuity. The Julie-Su bio is mostly correct, but Ken doesn't say anything about the "memory chip" plot point mentioned in "Shadows" (SSS11). Let's hope he decided that it was a bad idea and is pretending that it never happened. Off-Panel: Pat Spaziante replaces Dave Manak as the artist, this time around anyway. He draws a confrontation between Sonic and S.D. Gabrie, "S.D." standing for "super-deformed." It's a comical caricature of someone that appears in manga. An SD character has a large head, small body, and cute childlike features. Well, Justin's halfway there, since he's got as much hair as some newborns. Sonic-Grams: Somehow, an account of the 2001 San Diego Comic Con seems even more irrelevant than ever. S103: The blurb calls it a "neat change of pace." What it is is an inventory story about the "Freedom Fighters of the Galaxy," a ripoff/homage of something from the Marvel Comics vault written by Mike Gallagher and illustrated by Jim Valentino. Likewise, the team of Gallagher/Manak begin a 3-parter about the Downunda Freedom Fighters versus the Bunyip. Letters: Fan Mike G. (not the writer Mike G.) is extremely disappointed as to the treatment of SA2 in S98. Hey, that one- issue tease wasn't HALF as disappointing as the first SA adaptation, which went on for six months and ended up as an absolute muddle. Chris Leslie and a group of otaku submit lists of good points, bad points, and questions. I'll restrict my comments to the ten areas that they say need work: 1. WRT designs not being Japanese enough, that's a matter of taste. They seem to think, though, that with the comic being a monthly the artists would have time to get the job done. With both Ken and Karl taking breaks, maybe they'll give the artists a chance to work at something less than blind-panic speed. 2. "Less human characters." The word they're looking for is "fewer," not "less," human characters. Agreed. 3. They don't want Knuckles evolving unless it's SA2- related. I'd as soon get Knuckles back to the way he was. 4. Sally as Queen and Elias joining the Chaotix. Looks like Sally's stock HAS gone up in this month's story; unfortunately, it also afforded Archie a chance not to renew Elias's contract [see above]. 5. They want MORE angst?!? You want teen angst, read X-Men. 6. "The dialogue is hard for Generation X to understand." Hey. I'm an old hippie and I have trouble with it, too! 7. "The imbalance of humor and seriousness." Karl's done a lot to redress that grievance in this issue. Here's hoping he keeps it up. 8. "Fiona, Nic and Nack need to show up more." They could be an interesting trio of villains, more like rogues and less like terrorists. While we're at it, let's make it a foursome and add Rouge. 9. "The latest Floating Island." They don't specify what the problem is; I'd assume they mean the fact that it's uninhabited. 10. "The lack of Knuckles's own book." Very much agreed, though I don't know if Archie will see fit to reinstate the Knuckles title any time soon, especially since Knuckles hasn't stopped evolving/being jerked around yet.