Sonic #126 [Oct 2003] Spaz/Ribeiro/Ray cover: after last issue's claustrophobic cast picture, we find Sonic beside himself in the vastness of space in a very strong, dramatic layout. It almost doesn't need the screaming teaser titles which clutter up the cover more than anything else. J. Axer frontispiece: Sonic and his peeps, the coloring of the latter being nicely forlorn. I don't know who wrote the text on this page but "far and distant" is a redundancy; the two adjectives are synonyms. "Far distant" would have worked better, with "far" becoming an adverb to modify the adjective "distant." Don't make me come out to Mamaroneck and start giving English lessons. "Tossed In Space: Red Chaos" [11 pages] Story: Benny Lee; Art: Steve Butler; Ink: Jim Amash; Color: Jason Jensen; Lettering: Jeff Powell; Editor: Justin Gabrie; Managing Editor: Victor Gorelick; Editor-in-Chief: Richard Goldwater. Sonic is still sleeping it off from clocking the Quantum Dial in the last ish. While he snoozes he gets beamed aboard a six-legged bug vehicle. Sonic finally wakes up, sees that instead of buying the harp farm he appears to have bought an ant farm, and makes himself scarce while he goes into exposition mode for a panel for the benefit of the newbies. His six-armed, two legged captors, however, have other bugs to zap. Sonic finds the exit and starts to leave (like he knows where he's going) before suffering a bout of conscience. Though Sonic has no idea who's fighting whom, he decides to go after the flying insectoids; maybe he'd seen "A Bug's Life," or else he's just the kind of guy who pulls for the underbug. After dealing with the flying intruders, the other bugs establish a mind link with their new hero Sonic and escort him to their city for another helping of exposition. Seems he's landed on the planet Thoraxia, and his hosts the Blodex, despite being able to build the land ship that Sonic got beamed onto, don't do flight. This makes them easy targets for the Bzzzz (with 4 z's). They offer to put Sonic up until the following day when "a D'Novulan trading vessel" can transport the wayward hedgehog to the nearest wretched hive of scum and villainy. Well, isn't that convenient! During the tour of the city, Sonic spies a statue of Aypex, an ancient Blodex champion who happens to be holding aloft six red Chaos Emeralds, one in each hand. These, he's told, were key to keeping the Bzzzz at bay for 1,000 years and his host intimates that he should stay on as defender of the Blodex. Sonic is more concerned about reuniting with his peeps. Before Sonic can turn in for the night, however, the city gets Bzzzzed with the bug-ugly queen leading the attack. For the record, the queen's stinger emits something like the acid saliva borrowed from the Alien from the motion picture series of the same name; in typical Archie Comics style, this plot point is brought up once and never heard from again. Sonic then absorbs the energy from the six red Chaos Emeralds. The good news is, Super Sonic makes short work of the Bzzzz, who are also never heard from again. The bad news is, Sonic watched the whole thing. Seems the red emeralds behave something like red Kryptonite. Or something. Fan Art break: Mohd Faizal from Malaysia gives us a surfing Sonic and friends, T. J. Thomas does an elementary Sonic, Mary Lane's boxy foxy Tails looks kinds cute, Vincent Burger's Sonic looks like he's morphing into Espio, and David Badgerow's Bunnie seems to be asking "Do these robotic legs make mah butt look big?" "Tossed In Space : Hog and Superhog" [5 pages] Story: Karl Bollers; Ink: Josh and Aimee Ray. Everybody else is in place. A pumped Super Sonic begins trashing the city, and Sonic has to do some cleaning up after him. Out in an unincorporated area of Thoraxia, Sonic confronts Super Sonic, who quotes Wilhelm Nietzsche by way of Lord Voldemort: there is no good or evil, only power. To demonstrate just how much power, Super Sonic tries playing bocce ball with a couple of Thoraxia's moons but Sonic discourages him. Super Sonic then proves himself to be a character of great power and absolutely no imagination; his idea of revenge is to punch and kick Sonic. But before he can deliver the coup de grace, it's Time Over for Super Sonic and for the story. Well, isn't that convenient! HEAD: Benny Lee does well to keep the Blodex from communicating with Sonic until after Sonic weighs in concerning the Blodex-Bzzzz feud. They then turn out to be pretty good hosts. There's no real slack in this story and despite a couple of eyebrow-raising coincidences such as the trading vessel's imminent arrival nothing strains credulity. Karl Bollers only has 5 pages to work with and he ends up defaulting to a fight story. Like so many allegedly omnipotent characters in this comic (Mammoth Mogul, Naugus, even Aurora) Super Sonic ends up being decidedly impotent, giving Sonic a rather pedestrian beating instead of utilizing all this power he's supposed to have. And to top it all off, the ending is so abrupt that ... well, words fail me. The story as a whole is well-paced and well thought out; too bad it trips over its own shoe laces at the finish line. Head Score: "Red Chaos": 8, "Hog and Superhog": 5. EYE: I've never been an automatic fan of the bugs who have shown up in this comic. I managed to live with the fire ants in the Knuckles continuity, but Fly Fly Freddie was so thoroughly misbegotten I'm glad he was only a one-shot character. Mercifully, Steve Butler does well by the Blodex. OK, so in violation of the laws of Earth entomology these insects do not have bodies divided into the three classic head-thorax-abdomen segments, and the total of 8 limbs for the Blodex would make them arachnids rather than classic insects, but this IS happening in a "far and distant galaxy" so Steve gets some slack from me on this one. Because despite the limitations on expressiveness inherent in the character design, Steve manages to pull off the neat feat of giving some of the Blodex a measure of personality. My favorite moment, in fact, is a throw-away drawing on page [6] panel 5 where Sonic is on his tour of the Blodex capital and an adult gestures as if to shield a young Blodex from Sonic. You can almost hear the adult saying "Stay back; you don't know where it's been." Another favorite was Sonic putting on the brakes at the bottom of page [4] in a very dynamic pose. Eye Score: 10. HEART: The eleven-page length of "Red Chaos" gives Benny Lee more of a chance to keep Sonic from becoming dead behind the eyes. Facing two battling insectoid groups in combat and with the option of staying out available to him, Sonic backtracks and does the hero thing. And twice he reminds the audience that he hadn't forgotten the friends he left behind on Mobius. The closest Karl comes to that sort of thing in "Hog and Superhog" is when Sonic whisks two Blodex to safety before they're squished. Then the story devolves into that garden- variety fight. Once more, I can only say that if Karl had more than five pages to play with, perhaps the story and especially its resolution would have been much more satisfying. "Hearts Held Hostage" proved that Karl is perfectly capable of great story-telling, but unless you're working primarily on a character study such as "The Royal Signet," there's simply not much one can do with five pages. As the next story will amply demonstrate. Heart Score: "Red Chaos": 8, "Hog and Superhog": 5. "Better Read Than Dead" Story: Mike Gallagher; Art: Dave Manak; Ink: Jim Amash; Color: Jason Jensen; Lettering: Vickie Williams; Editor and Superego: Justin Gabrie. Another five pager; this won't take long. In the middle of Justin Gabrie's exulting that the "Off-Panel" feature has been expanded to take up more space than a couple commemorative postage stamps, things start falling apart and Sonic is reduced to a blue pencil ghost. J. Fred then confronts a Grim Reaperesque figure, Deadline, who devolves this story back to its synopsis. Seems DL is really just another frustrated story contributor whose lame-o ideas were (rightly) rejected. Justin vanquishes this "menace" by invoking the names of the people who've done the REAL work in battling deadline in this comic: the creatives, none of whom get any face time in this story. HEAD: "[My writing] SHOULD be good, if I'm being paid to do it. What I'm not being paid to do is to be self-indulgent." Stephen King, "On Writing." Justin invited the readers to write in and to let him know if they wanted to see more Off-Panels in this format. My short answer is: Not if they're anything like THIS one. Having critiqued this comic for a tidy few years, I've seen some of what happens when they try to beat Deadline at the expense of quality control: spelling errors, factual errors, the kind of continuity glitches, deus ex machina conclusions and shallow characterizations that are only encouraged by loose continuity. I thought for a moment that maybe, as stated in the Freditorial in this issue, this sort of thing could be more efficiently controlled by the use of electronic media to create the comic ... and then I remembered "far and distant galaxy" bang at the beginning of this book. I don't know if Justin wrote that copy, but I'd have thought that he would have caught it and RE- written it. He didn't. So don't pull a muscle patting yourself on the back, Freddo. There's more to beating Deadline than throwing creative talent at it. In this story Mike Gallagher had J. Fred win out by raining names down on Deadline in a scene that reminded me of his "Some Enchantra Evening: Part 2" (Special #10) where at one point Enchantra rattled off the names of TEN Sonic villains in the biggest example of useless padding until the XFL. While it was nice of Justin to call the roll, not all of the artists and writers whose names were dropped succeeded in their objective: Jim Fry (whose work I always liked) was let go for not meeting deadline, and one writer simply walked away and said "Hey, it's YOUR problem" after the writing assignments for 1998 had been handed out. I'm not trying to be mean here, because I can totally relate to Justin. He's responsible for shepherding this comic through the publishing process, and I edit a periodical index. What's more, given my experience as a published writer I've seen the process at work from the other end. It makes me realize that Mike Gallagher wrote the wrong story here. I happen to think that the REAL story behind the chaos of putting this comic book together is probably more interesting to the readers than the pulp pantomime that Mike Gallagher penned for our benefit. To again quote Stephen King: "People love to read about work. God knows why, but they do." And c'mon, don't you think the pre-ado boy audience isn't just a little curious as to how comic books REALLY come together? Speaking from the other side of the desk, I've had to live with editorial dealing when it comes to the books I've written. I happen to have an editor, Gerald Wheeler, who's terrific at what he does. In my second book he was able to provide valuable information on the process of turning flax into linen that I'd missed in my own research, yet he still gave me the freedom to trim back some of his copy if I felt it was getting in the way of my story. Speaking of relations between editors and writers, I think it would be very interesting for the readers to learn what "editorial edicts" Justin has laid down for this comic, involving characters and situations the writers might just as soon have left alone had Editorial not insisted on getting into the act. Gallagher left the impression of an editor relying on the talents of the creatives to beat Deadline, but I wouldn't mind getting a second opinion from the writers and artists themselves as to just how free their hands are to do their jobs. There's just so much about the process of putting this comic together that Mike didn't even hint at. For instance, there are other hands in the process and they may not have beating deadline uppermost in their minds. Both Sega and Archie were perfectly happy to miss the deadline on rolling out the Princess Sally miniseries when the original story line was vetoed, and Kanterovich, Penders and Mawhinney had to literally go back to the word processor and the drawing board. Sega has insisted on comic tie-ins for their Sonic games, and then in the case of the first Adventure game they hamstrung the creatives by not even telling them the back story, whether out of paranoia or being more drunk with power than Super Sonic was in "Hog and Superhog." And even when Deadlines are met, not everything goes right. There was the Death Egg #2 oversaturation fiasco, the transposition of two pages toward the end of S125, and a distribution system that's become a perennial scapegoat when the topic of lagging comic sales comes up. It really would be interesting to learn how this book is actually put together, but this story reduces the process to the brain-dead simplicity of ... well, of a comic book. Head Score: 3. EYE: Dave Manak reverts back to the old school style he worked in when this comic was in its infancy. Only not quite. Back in the day, when Barry Grossman was doing the coloring, the art was as subtle as a coloring book with solids predominant. But the book has gone through some changes. Frank Gagliardo brought a more skilled use of shading and gradation of color that raised the bar for artwork and moved it out of the realm of candy-colored panels. Jason Jensen has done an admirable job of following in Frank's footsteps, and whatever atmosphere this story has is due to Jensen's dusty pink and burnt umber backgrounds. Eye Score: 7. HEART: In the beginning, "Off-Panel" was actually heartless, a chance for Editorial to indulge in self-referential water cooler humor at the expense of the creatives. This story is really no different in spirit from those earlier strips, which died just about the time Scott Fulop's tenure as editor ran its course. When it returned in S92, there was the hopeful sign of actually incorporating the story characters into the feature, even if they continued to be the butt of editorial jokes. With "Better Read Than Dead" the feature returns to its poisonous roots with a vengeance. This is a Justin Gabrie ego trip plastered across five pages, as if he thinks he's the star not only of the story but of the comic. I don't know what Justin's actual involvement in developing this story was, but the fact that he green lighted it points to a clear case of inflamation of the ego. Reality Check, Fred: we buy the comic because of Sonic, not because you edit it. Heart Score: 1. This Justin: Mr. Gabrie gabs about technology. Sonic-Grams: extended to two text-packed pages. Cloud_strife41 is told that the Sonic-Mina faction is in the minority but that majorities can be overriden when Editorial feels like it; NeoRavencroft is told that "Mobius: 25 Years Later" will kick off with S131; Jarvis White says a lot of things I've been feeling about the comic all along but gets the equivalent of "No comment" on the subject of the team of Cream and Cheese (Mmmmmm, cream cheese ...); Phil Stupakewitz rags on the comic for reducing S123's "The Last Robian" to five mostly-narrated pages in a clear squandering of dramatic and emotional potential, while the person answering the mail focuses instead on "Afterlife: Part 3" in the editorial equivalent of putting one's fingers in one's ears and humming loudly; and Joseph Schmidt is told that what was supposed to be "Knuckles: 20 Years Later" is now "Mobius: 25 Years Later," that they haven't figured out yet how a dead Knuckles can sire a daughter by Julie-Su but they're working on it (though I think the second coming of Knuckles in the last issue may have something to do with the answer), and that we should take a guess as to why Zonic hasn't taken Robo-Robotnik into custody. I could do better than guess at it, and that guess would NOT be submitted in crayon on torn cardboard with no return address if I thought Archie accepted fan story submissions, which last thing I heard they don't. And while the rules for submitting manuscripts dictate otherwise, I know of one short story that was published by the New Yorker magazine despite the fact that the MS consisted of 500 manila envelopes with the story hand-written using black crayon: "The Catbird Seat" by James Thurber, who wrote it that way because of his deteriorating eyesight. It was a good story, but one of the New Yorker secretaries said that the MS was one of the saddest things she's ever seen.