Sonic the Hedgehog #124 [Aug 2003] Spaz/Ribeiro/Ray cover: Shadow gives Sonic the kung fu salute as we deal with "Sonic Adventure 2.5: Alpha." Plus the text about the Knuckles story is just plain wrong, but hey, this IS the last in the series of "magazine style covers," so let's at least be grateful for that. No frontispiece; you KNOW this is serious. "Sonic Adventure 2.5: Alpha." Story: Karl Bollers; Art: J. Axer and Steven Butler; Ink: Conor Tomas and Jim Amash; Color: Jason Jensen; Lettering: Jeff Powell; Editor: Justin F. Gabrie; Managing Editor: Victor Gorelick; Editor-in-Chief: Richard Goldwater. Shadow wakes up in space. He was last seen falling toward ... whatever planet Station Square is on ... and sees one spacecraft approach as another one is leaving. Before he can wonder why somebody doesn't put a stop light at this intersection, he has a flashback to the events of Sonic Adventure 2: his creation by Prof. Gerald, his friendship with Maria and her subsequent murder by GUNners, his encounters with Robotnik and Sonic, and his destruction of the Eclipse Cannon/Biolizard. That's where the game story line ended. Here, we learn that Shadow was rescued and pickled (my term for putting beings in embryonic suspension to heal them or something) by "the Bem." These insect-like E.T.s are the ones who pulled the old switcheroo on Sonic, Tails, Robotnik and Snively in "Robotnik's Return" (S118). They decant Shadow, then throw him off the ship saying "Why don't you fight those guys in that ship over there? See ya; wouldn't wanna be ya!" and then crank up the warp drive. Shadow launches himself at the incoming ship, gets zapped for his trouble, and resumes his freefall. I can just picture him thinking: "Aw, crap...." Meanwhile, it's morning on Mobius as Sonic awakens. Tails wants to do the adventure thing but has to settle for breakfast with Sonic's family while Sonic takes off for some palace business. When Bernie wished her son luck, Uncle Chuck says: "He doesn't need luck." Actually, on the page past the pizza ad it looks like Sonic is in the process of getting lucky with Sally. If the comic is THIS open about their relationship you know these two kids are in for a hellacious time. Back in Station Square, President Square is chatting with Robotnik on the latter's Web site. By the way, there really IS a www.robotnik.com; it's a Canadian purveyor of "discount components and systems." Nice to know the Doc has found honest work outside of the comic. Here, though, the Doc proposes an alliance between Station Square and "Megaopolis." That was the monument to bad continuity in Benny Lee's "Operation: Off-Switch" (S116) when Robotnik was in Weeble mode and where he was last seen sucking on a dynamite stogie, but since then Robotnik has had to settle for a Fortress of Solitude-type arrangement. It's news to me that the place was rebuilt, let alone re-inhabited. In any event President Square nixes the deal, whereupon Robotnik reveals that he's somehow got control of the Prez's limo as if it were an RC toy. You'd think if Buttnik had THAT much power he'd just take over Station Square without getting prior approval, but we've got space aliens for that. The situation for President Square is grim, but Rouge is all over it like guano on the floor of the Bat Cave. She airlifts the Prez to safety through the sunroof of the limo, but before she can rescue the chauffeur the fake sky starts going to pieces. Back at the castle, Sonic, Sally and her parents are discussing the foregone conclusion of Sonic becoming Sally's consort so they consorta fool around legally (sorry). Just then an explosion rocks the palace. Sonic and the gang investigate and discover that at the bottom of an impact crater is Shadow. In an homage to the late and marginally-lamented Knuckles, no sooner does Shadow come to than he punches out Sonic. Just like old times. Sally steps in before there can be a Round Two. Everyone then heads back to the palace where Robotnik is on the horn complaining that Megaopolis is under attack by space aliens. Before anyone can ask, "What is this, 'Independence Day'?", Rouge blows in a message on call-annoying (aka call-waiting) reporting a similar state of affairs in Station Square. At this point the space aliens decide to clear all the phone lines and direct dial every brain on the planet. Ladies and gentlemen, meet ... the Xorda, funky pink and purple brainazoids with one jaundiced eye and many tentacles. It's official: it's pronounced "Ecch!-orda." Just so they feel at home in this comic, they give it up with their back story: "Thrice millennia past" (that's 3,000 years ago for the less-pretentious among us) an Ecch!-ordian landed on planet Earth and got the usual reception from hyoomons who'd spent their time watching ID4 instead of E.T. The Ecch!- ordians retaliated by setting off jean-bombs which destroyed all the Gap and Old Navy stores ... I'm sorry, they set off "gene- bombs" which were supposed to "extinguish all life." And then the brainazoids never thought to have someone from Quality Control scope out the planet to make sure the job was done. Anyway, the Ecch!-ordians realized that it wouldn't help their reputation if it ever got out that they'd done a half-assed job of destroying all life on one lousy planet, so they're back to try again. Robotnik gets back on the line with Max, who decides to cut the Fat Man down to size by cutting the conversation short. And it's another "Aw, crap...." moment. Max justifies his decision by saying that Robotnik can afford to sweat off a few pounds. Sonic, however, is hung up on the fact that the Ecch!-ordians referred to the planet as "Earth" or "Urf" or something. But then who should blow in a call to the throne room but the Brotherhood. Last I'd heard, they'd given Sally the big kiss-off in K29's "My Special Friend" when Spectre told Sally that "not only aren't we going to help you fight Robo-Robotnik, we also can't/won't help out with the then-still-pickled Queen Alicia, and don't let the doorknob hit your tail on your way out." They're just as helpful this time around; their call can be summarized as: "We've got the same problem as you do, and by the way don't expect Knuckles to help because he's gone the way of his old comic book title." Sally then decides to do her Hermione Granger impersonation ("When in doubt, go to the library"), and Sonic wonders out loud why it took the Ecch!-ordians 3,000 years to realize that they screwed up. And a little child shall explain it to them as Hope shows up and provides the Nate Morgan Memorial Exposition hunk. According to her, the Mobians who were out in space and who returned in S91's "Crash!" encountered an Ecch!-ordian ship at some point or other in their travels. How the brainazoids were able to connect the ships to the planet they were supposed to have neutered and why it's taken them THIS long to actually do something about it is never stated. Must have had to go through a lot of paperwork to organize the mission. Keep in mind that Hope is the daughter of Colin Kintobor; this explains the resemblance Shadow sees between her and his object of worship, Maria. But before he can go into full-blown psychotic flashback mode, Sally returns with the news that Mobius IS this place the Ecch!-ordians called "Earth." Oh, yeah, I want to hear the explanation for THIS one! HEAD: "The story that was TOO BIG for a single issue!!" it says on the cover. And Karl certainly worked hard to justify that claim; there's a LOT happening here: Shadow's brief encounter with the Ecch!-ordians [hey, I think it's funny and I'm sticking with it!], panic in Station Square, Sonic and Sally getting as hot as Archie Comics will allow, Shadow's arrival and his punching out Sonic, etc. And go back and count how many of these dramatic moments happen in the last panel of a page. Coincidence? I think not. Karl Bollers has subsequently gotten on Ken's message board to make it clear that no, Shadow did NOT fall to Mobius from space but rather he teleported himself down to the surface. Hey, it's not like Knuckles hadn't already done the freefall bit in a beautiful-looking splash page [marred by a letterer's goof] in K8's "The Gauntlet." But I guess since the Columbia shuttle bust-up this sort of thing is about as politically correct as showing babies playing with guns. So we're supposed to know without so much as a teeny-tiny word balloon of Shadow saying "Chaos ... control!" in the last panel on page [5] that that's how he landed on Mobius, at the bottom of a crater, looking like he'd just gone three rounds with the planet Jupiter. Made it easy for ME to jump to conclusions, anyway. That one word balloon really would have helped matters. And if Shadow had materialized in the throne room, it not only would have made for an even more dramatic entrance but would have saved a page of the characters running out to the crash site and then going back to the castle. OK, I KNOW this is an action story. I know that action is a part of virtually any story in this comic, barring such exceptions as Romy Chacon's "The Royal Signet" (S120), which to date pretty much has a lock on Best Back Story for 2003 for reasons other than its lack of action. And Karl was certainly able to do a terrific balancing act in the "Hearts Held Hostage" arc, moving between action and character as the force driving the story. But to borrow a line from Roger Ebert's review of "Rugrats Go Wild," this story has SO MUCH happening in it that it sometimes appears to have been written for an audience with attention-deficit disorder. Boring, this isn't. I don't want you to misunderstand me. But we get so much on our plates [TWO sets of space aliens?] that it starts to get a little absurd after a while. King Max is fielding calls from Station Square, Robotnik, and even from the Brotherhood with whom Knothole isn't even on speaking terms! Hope finally gets some face time in the comic to say yeah, her peeps ran into the Ecch!-ordians while they were jazzin' around in space, where the brainazoids don't appear to be any better at destroying things than they were on Earth thrice millennia past; otherwise, she wouldn't be here giving us the news. Sally is out of the room for, what, maybe a couple minutes before returning with the news that they've missed the last three thousand Earth Day celebrations! And we're just finding all this out now? This is one of those stories that I could take seriously while I was reading it but, on reflection, ends up looking kind of silly. Not that I don't want to read "Sonic Adventure 2.5 Omega" to see how Karl pulls this all together. I'm especially interested in seeing where the Mobius-is-Earth plot point is going, and how cute furry animals with brains the size of walnuts could become upright anthromorphs in 3,000 years' time. I DON'T think evolution can work that fast, 'kay? Head Score: 8. EYE: The division of artistic labor in this story made far more sense than in S50's "The Big Goodbye." Axer does the location artwork in outer space while Steve Butler handles the down-home-on-Mobius chores. It all looks good, and I know that a speech balloon would have marred the balance of Axer's last panel on page [5], but sometimes sacrifices have to be made for the sake of the story. Eye Score: 9. HEART: Like I said, seeing Sonic and Sally all over each other is not a feel-good in this story. Considering all the garbage that comes down on them here, with who knows what waiting in the wings, Butler might just as well have drawn the two of them with targets painted on their foreheads and gotten it over with. Like last issue's "The Last Robian," this is all wind-up, with the pitch coming in the next issue. Heart Score: N/A. "Afterlife: Part Four" Story: Ken Penders; Art: Art Mawhinney; Ink: Ken Penders, Color: Jason Jensen; Lettering: Vickie Williams; Editor: Justin Gabrie. Knuckles asks Aurora why the flashback festival and doesn't get a straight answer. We then get some more flashback before Aurora tells him that he has to "advance into the Chaos Force and take [his] place in the cosmos." Whatever THAT means. When Knuckles gripes that he's getting short-changed in the life experiences department, Aurora channels mega Sonic fan Tyro, aka Alessandro Sanasi, and tells him that he gets what everybody else does: he gets a lifetime. Or words to that effect. So, after a final bit of detailing at the body shop that turns Knuckles back to a rad red, and after Aurora quotes Q's last word from the series finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation, we get ... the ol' Ken Penders Screwjob Ending! HEAD: At first this story reminded me of one of my favorite passages from Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff," where the test pilot fraternity at Edwards Air Force Base who have lost the limelight to the Mercury astronauts assess the fact that Gus Grissom managed to let his capsule sink into the Atlantic before it could be recovered, that Gus had, in the delicate verbiage of the military, "screwed the pooch": "And then the brethren sat back and waited for the Mercury astronaut to *get his*, the way any one of them would have *gotten his*, had a comparable [screw-up] occurred at Edwards. "And ... nothing happened." "And ... nothing happened" pretty much sums up almost all of this story. Knuckles died, is translated to glory only to be talked to death by Aurora who does the This Is Your Life thing with Knuckles. OK, well, maybe that's a good thing. In C. S. Lewis's 1945 fantasy, "The Great Divorce," a bunch of souls in Hell take a day excursion by bus to the fringe of Heaven. Most of them have a pretty miserable time of it. Lewis, who writes himself into the story conversing with his inspiration, the Scottish writer George MacDonald, is cautioned that it's all a dream: "And if ye come to tell of what ye have seen, make plain that it was but a dream. See ye make it very plain. Give no poor fool the pretext to think ye are claiming knowledge of what no mortal knows...." "God forbid, Sir," said I, trying to look very wise. "He *has* forbidden it. That's what I'm telling ye." So maybe it's just as well that Ken's depiction of the Afterlife is, well, kind of nothing. It's no more than an excuse to summarize Knuckles's cancelled comic book series and his whole existence in the Sonic continuity up to this point. Until we get to the last page. Don't dismiss the "You Only Live Twice" line as just another gratuitous James Bond reference, in this case to one of the more watchable films in the series for me because a) it still has Sean Connery in the lead role, and b) it's set in Japan so it's great MySTing fodder with numerous opportunities for Godzilla jokes, Sailor Moon jokes, Power Rangers jokes and so forth. Aurora tells Athair that "Not everyone is worthy of a second chance" and there you have it: Ken Penders has just hit the Cosmic Reset Button. Knuckles will now go on hiatus for a while. Maybe he'll be back by S130 and "Mobius: 25 Years Later." Maybe not; after all, it was supposed to be "Knuckles: 20 Years Later;" methinks maybe Justin Gabrie didst put ye editorial smackdown on the original concept. But is Knuckles totally gone? Probably not. He is, after all, one of the franchise characters. Sega wouldn't throw him to the wolves; he has too much of a track record. But color him tweaked. It's extremely possible that next time we see him he'll be more in line with the original Sega concept: living alone on Angel Island, last of his kind, you know, the whole red ronin thing like in the games. And the ending was typical Ken Penders. I'd hoped that Ken would have stuck to straight-ahead storytelling and forsaken the preoccupation with keeping secrets and psyching out the reader. Yeah, right, and e. e. cummings would start using capital letters! But on the last page we learn that Aurora basically lied to Knuckles, or was at least less than candid with him. Not goddess-like behavior if you ask me. Heaven is where we're supposed to see our lives and the whole of Creation with a clarity we can't achieve because of the limits of mortality. Knuckles can't even catch THAT much of a break! Hey, at least we didn't get a Knuckles-isn't-Knuckles ending. Head Score: 6. EYE: The flashbacks are inked in black rather than the periwinkle blue that's used for the Knuckles-Aurora scenes. The latter look not so much ethereal as somehow less real than the rest. I like Aurora's pose from the second panel on the first page; it looks like something from either an Annunciation or an Ascension. Eye Score: 9. HEART: True story: the day after I get S124 in the mail, I'm driving to work thinking about my as-yet-unwritten review of the issue. And what should come on the Classic Rock station I'm listening to but Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit In The Sky" (1970). This is a classic example of a one-hit wonder. Known for its throaty gargley bass line, mystico-religious lyrics and uninspired lead guitar work (it's far from the level of Clapton or Hendrix but you can air guitar to it), the song has never really gone away, surfacing as background music in a number of commercials as well as the soundtrack for "Apollo 13" among other films. Having come of age back then, I admit to liking the song. And that day, listening to it and easing toward the parking lot closest to the university library I found myself asking: "Why couldn't `Afterlife' be more like this?" Which is to say, even if Ken couldn't pull off a convincing description of echidna Heaven (or echidna Limbo, looking back at it), why couldn't we get a FEEL for the place? This was one of those mark time story arcs where we get a lot of flashback but no insight into what Knuckles is going through. Sure he has lines of dialogue but they feel programmed, canned, forced. When Knuckles asks "Don't I get to grow up? Go steady with Julie-Su? Any of that jazz?!!" and even when he sheds his greenery at the very end and says "What a dummy I am!!" it just feels too cold, too distant. It's all so heartless we don't get a sense that Knuckles's heart might be broken. Anger, regret, sorrow ... there's not a solid emotional moment in any of this. Maybe next life. Heart Score: 3. This Justin: Gabrie flogs S125. No letters, no Off-Panel, no fan art. "Cover by Patrick SPAZinate"? I think J. Fred just came up with a new verb: "We can put the next issue to bed as soon as we Spazinate the front cover."