Sonic the Hedgehog #143 [Feb 2005]

     Spaz Sonic overlaying Butler/Amash/Ray artwork of the
Original Freedom Fighters confronting Old School Robotnik.  I'm a
little uncertain how I feel about the tag team artwork.  It makes
sense in the context of the story-within-a-story structure of
this arc, but Spaziante's solo work has always been satisfactory
(with occasional exceptions, such as the claustrophobic cover of
S125).  This is about the only occasion where I can see it
working, so I don't expect it to be a regular thing with the
comic.

     Axer/Ray frontispiece: J. Axer manages to give the OFF more
personality in his drawing that the faux-Romy did in the entire
first installment of this story.  

     "The Original Freedom Fighters: Part 2"
     Story: Romy Chacon; Art: Art Mawhinney; Ink: Jim Amash;
Color: Josh and Aimee Ray; Lettering: Jeff Powell; Editor: Mike
Pellerito; Managing Editor: Victor Gorelick; Editor-in-Chief:
Richard Goldwater.

     After a one-page recap of last issue's story by the
Vanishing Narrator, a recap which slides right by the OFF back
story, Sonic and Hope take time out to watch the Lake of Rings
spit up a power ring.  "I never get tired of seeing that happen,"
Sonic says.  He must be the only one because I can't remember the
last time power rings played a memorable part in any story since
"Naugus Games."  While Nameless Extra Dog takes the power ring to
Rotor to do who knows what with it, Sonic resumes the story.
     After a panel of repartee between the five-year-old Sally
and Colonel Stripe, Sir Peckers interrupts with a message.  Rosie
and Julayla excuse themselves, but neither Stripe nor Peckers
seem to notice that a child is still in the same small room with
them.  They also appear to have forgotten the Little Pitchers
Have Big Ears Rule, and thus let it be known that they have a
line on King Max's whereabouts.
     This is followed by almost a page of visual exposition as to
how the OFF broke into Robotnik's HQ.  "It was as good a plan as
plans go," Sonic narrates, "but like any good plan," it was
interrupted by an ad for Sly 2: Band of Thieves.  Which reminds
me, we haven't seen any Mobian raccoons, have we?
     Anyway, once the OFF is inside, Robotnik makes his
appearance with (no surprise) Scales pulling the curtain for his
big entrance.  Scales's motivation is pure pulp villainy: "Dr.
Robotnik gave me ... power and control.  Besides, I'm a snake. 
It's totally within my nature," he adds, for the benefit of
anyone too dense to have figured it out already.  Robotnik also
reverts to type, informing the OFF that they are in a "room-sized
roboticizer."  After honoring the No Honor Among Thieves Clause
in his contract by tossing Scales in with the others, he FWASHes
them all and roboticizes them.  Satisfied that the process
worked, Robotnik then flushed the OFF into the Void, aka the Zone
of Silence back when the comic couldn't make up its mind which
name to use.  
     So how does Sonic know all this if he himself wasn't there? 
Turns out that a roboticized Uncle Chuck was, and he related all
this to Sonic at some point.
     There was no way to have known this during the back story,
though.  While we see Knothole going through the Absence And
Presumption Of Death ritual, we segue into a one-panel depiction
of the Freedom Fighters-The Next Generation coming together.
     That puts an end to the back story so Hope doesn't have any
more reason to hang around Sonic. She goes home, writes up her
report, delivers it in class, and we learn that the Vanishing
Narrator has reappeared in the person of ... her teacher, Mrs.
Stripe, presumably the Colonel's "widow."  Class dismissed.

     HEAD: Once the back story was nailed down in last issue's
installment, this one worked better than it could have.  I still
think that the Vanishing Narrator was a useless digression which
spoiled the narrative line.  It really didn't add much to the
story in the beginning and Hope's curtain line, "Have a good
weekend, Mrs. Stripe," could have stood on its own without faux-
Romy beating us over the head with the point in a text box.
     The account of the OFF breaking in, being roboticized, then
being Void-ed was backed up by having Uncle Chuck as a witness.   
So, amazingly, we have an actually canonical SatAM plot point
here.  I call this amazing because there's a palpable fault line
in the fandom between those who accept the continuing influence
of the SatAM continuity and those who want nothing more to do
with it and would just as soon see it die a horrible death.  As a
result, the Sonic fandom has this sort of Red State/Blue State
thing happening which is kind of sad.
     My fidelity to the SatAM continuity rests on one simple
fact, aside from my having been introduced to the Sonic fandom
through the SatAM series: it WORKS!  It featured well-defined
characters in understandable situations that can still form the
basis for any number of stories.
     What has Archie brought to the table to change that?  A
handful of new characters, only a few of which have managed to
stand up off the page and be memorable (Mina) while the rest have
either sunk into well-deserved obscurity (Nate Morgan) or else
have become objects of near-universal fan loathing (Tommy
Turtle).  Archie also tried monkeying with some of the situations
with less-than-satisfactory results.  
     The lameness of King Max is a prime example (insert your own
joke here).  Having been wounded by a blow to his armored head in
"Family Matters" (S88), it was revealed that as a result he was
paralyzed from the waist down.  This was an implausible but
promising digression, but what became of it?  Did it give King
Max a chance to grow as a character and come to grips with the
rashness of personality that brought this upon himself?  No.  Did
it allow Queen Alicia's better qualities to come to the fore in
her husband's incapacity and make her more of a character in her
own right?  No.  Did it give the writers a chance to explore the
tension between power (the King's office) and powerlessness (his
disability)?  No.  Did it allow Sally to deepen and mature by the
role reversal of having a child take care of a parent?  No.  Now
I'm not saying that any of these points should have formed the
basis of a story in a comic book aimed at pre-ado boys, but on
the other hand Max's condition seemed to have no real effect on
the continuity as a whole, either.
     Instead of taking ANY of this into account, Karl Bollers
said "Never mind" and in the "Home" story arc simply undid the
King's paralysis.  This bag full of gold coins was poured into
the hands of the writers and editors who let it dribble through
their fingers.  Instead they gave us space aliens and Terminator
and Matrix rip-offs.
     We also get cliches such as Scales.  Let's review: "A cliche
takes the place of creativity.  Cliches are used by lazy and
untalented artists to finish off a work, rather than finding
fresh uses for the conventions that inform the work at its best." 
(Patrick Drazen, "Anime Explosion," p18).  Scales is cliche from
end to end.  His motivation is a cliche ("Dr. Robotnik gave me
... power and control.  Besides, I'm a snake.  It's totally
within my nature"), his betrayal by Robotnik is a cliche ("We had
a deal!"), and the fact that Long, Bones, and Peckers (make of
those names what you will!) were given virtually no personality
whatsoever to get in the way of the story is SO cliche!
     THAT'S why I still have an affection for the SatAM
continuity.  I've said more than once that I'd be prepared to
abandon it if the writers were to come up with something better,
and the cold truth is that in the more than ten years that the
comic has been in existence they've failed to do so.  SatAM
continues to be the skeleton that keeps this comic upright; take
that away and it turns into a shapeless blob that the writers
can't seem to control.
     So where does that leave the OFF?  Flushed down the Cosmic
Toilet into the Void.  Their being Void-ed after having been
roboticized seems redundant, but it explains why these five whole
cloth characters haven't put in an appearance in the comic. 
Something had to be done to explain their absence either as
roboticized Mobians or as orgo Mobians as restored by Seneca-9009
in "The Last Robian"/"Welcome to the Wheelworld." However, the
current state of affairs  leaves open the possibility that
Editorial or one of the writers may somehow seek to bring them
back.  
     And that's the kind of hare-brained thinking that's gotten
this book into trouble in the past, and I don't mean the distant
past.  After all, Tommy Turtle had a perfectly convincing death
scene in "The Tortoise and the Hedgehog," but someone HAD to go
and unto it to bring this useless nonentity of a character back
into the continuity.  And as the career arc of Nate Morgan has
demonstrated, unless you've got a VERY strong and well-defined
character to work with, polluting the continuity with new
characters doesn't help at all.
     The only character even more ill-served in this arc than the
OFF is, sadly, Hope.  Her main role here seems to be to look cute
while listening to Sonic's account of the OFF.  Her own character
doesn't stand up off the page in this arc, and the story's
supposed to be about her, sort of.  This was the lesson the
writers were supposed to have learned from the Sonic and Tails
Around The World Tour: that mere plot can't take the place of
character interaction and relationships.  One or two characters
can't carry the narrative weight of the comic alone; they need to
interact and relate with other characters.  Hope doesn't get a
chance to do that here.  Maybe when Shadow (a strong and well-
defined character if there ever was one) is folded into the
continuity she'll have someone decent to play with.  Head Score:
5.
     EYE: Again, there's a sense of schizophrenia about the
artwork.  The back story is all fine lines and darkness and
appears to have been shrunk down in size, while the Hope/Sonic
segments that bookend this story are bright and clean with ink
outlines more appropriate to a coloring book than to a comic
book.  Was this an older inventory story repackaged in a more
contemporary one, or did Art Mawhinney consciously alter his
style between the back story and the bookends?  I honestly don't
know, but I'd sure like to.  My only quibble with the artwork is
the figure of Tails toward the end of the back story.  There's
supposed to be something like a six year age gap between Tails
and Sonic, so if (according to the SatAM ep "Blast To The Past")
Sonic was 10 years old when he began hassling Robotnik, Tails
would only have been four.  That's how I've written Tails in my
own Sonic Kids stories, "Capture The Flag" and "First Honor." 
Here, Art makes Tails look too old; either that or the kid's gone
through one heck of a growth spurt.  Eye Score: 9.
     HEART: In the midst of a story where you'd think Heart has
to take a back seat, there are some genuine moments.  My favorite
is Mawhinney's cut from a teary-eyed young Sonic to the panel
showing only his speed lines.  It says a lot in a very
understated way.  It actually works better than the panel with
Sally, Rosie and Julayla above it.  It suggests what Sonic is
feeling rather than making it obvious, and is more effective as a
result.  That's the high heart point in this story, however. 
Heart Score: 6.

     "Mobius 25 Years Later: Father's Day"
     Story: Ken Penders; Art: Ken Penders; Ink: [presumably] Ken
Penders; Color: Jason Jensen; Lettering: Ken Penders.

     Lara-Su comes down to breakfast, where Julie-Su and Sally
are already gathered.  As for Knuckles, he's not with Sonic or
with the Old Farts of Science; instead, he's headed for Flashback
Country.  
     We first find Knuckles accompanying Archimedes to the site
from which Angel Island arose from Mobius.  Despite some
premature BAMFing ... he should lay off the bean burritos ...
Archimedes brings up Knuckles's decision that the Guardian line
should end with himself, which is the first I've heard of it. 
Apparently his own experience of being groomed to be Guardian had
been so rotten that Knuckles doesn't want to put anyone else
through it.  And after affirming Knuckles's decision, Archimedes
does one last BAMF and disappears.  
     No sooner does Knuckles arrive home than Lara-Le informs him
that Locke is in the hospital.  At the hospital, Knuckles, Lara-
Le and Wynmacher are told by "Dr. Shockra" that he needs to
perform exploratory surgery to find out what's wrong with Locke. 
Long procedure short, it's discovered that Locke has pancreatic
cancer and that, as is the case with humans, the prognosis is not
good.
     Locke senses that he has "little time and much to say," so
he starts saying it.  He apologizes to Lara-Le for being a jerk
(in so many words), and reaffirms that Knuckles is somehow "meant
to break the cycle" of the hereditary office of Guardian.
     Knuckles then fast-forwards to his old man's demise and we
get to the heart of the matter: Knuckles isn't ending the
Guardian office so much as deciding to give Lara-Su the option of
choosing whether or not to assume the office herself ... which
given her whining about it in the last story strikes me as a no-
brainer.

     HEART: The Heart factor is at the core of this story, so
much so that the Head and Eye factors play only a minor role. 
One only has to read the tail end of this story, Ken's dedication
of it to the memory of his own father who died at a young age
himself, to realize that.
     Ken took the liberty of giving the background of how this
story came to be written, and it deserves to be shared with the
class:

====

When I first started writing the script for KNUCKLES: 20 YEARS
LATER, the scene with Knuckles at Locke's gravesite [sic]
occurred midway through while Knuckles was working out another
problem. When Justin asked me to do M:25YL, I decided to divorce
that sub-plot from the main story and develop it for a short
stand-alone segment that was going to be part of a series of
filling in the gaps of the 'tween years. Dawn Best was going to
be drawing this at my request. However, the plan changed ... and
I was asked to handle the art as well on this one. It was during
the rewriting of this story that it became more personal, as well
as something of an eye-opener to me how much of myself I not only
have put into this story but in the overall series.

What was even a bigger surprise was how much my attitude shifted
in writing the stories that came after, which I think resulted in
some of the best writing I've ever done on the series.... It
remains to be seen if the readers agree with that assessment.

========

     It can be hard for a writer to open up and commit truth. 
When I once wrote a short story, I felt I had to write under a
pseudonym because I was discussing growing up in an alcoholic
household, something I was not used to admitting (I submitted
that story to a writing contest sponsored by a magazine and it
won first prize).  This parallels the advice of Stephen King in
"On Writing": "What are you going to write about? ... Anything at
all ... AS LONG AS YOU TELL THE TRUTH" (p158, emphasis original).
     If you've read a few of my reviews of Ken's work over the
years you'll know that I don't think that telling the truth is
one of the hallmarks of the Ken Penders style.  In fact, the
withholding of truths and the keeping of secrets is more
characteristic of his work.  Perhaps this is a legacy of his love
of Ian Fleming's 007 novels.  And it's gotten in the way of Ken's
exploring his characters' feelings more than once.  After all, in
"Those Were The Days", a story ostensibly about Julie-Su getting
used to the fact that Knuckles is dead, we end up with a
flashback featuring an exploding gyrocopter.
     It's all feelings here, however, because this is one of
those stories where a "superhero" runs up against a situation
where his powers are absolutely useless.  Knuckles can no more
diagnose his father's illness than cure it, never mind his
inability to keep his mother from falling apart.  Just as Peter
Parker discovers that his flippant attitude may have played a
role in his Uncle Ben's murder, all Knuckles can do here is
react.
     I've never been a huge fan of Locke or appreciated the
Brotherhood as a group.  It seemed too insular, too elitist, and
Locke embodied the worst traits of being a Guardian.  Here he
realizes, belatedly, that he'd gotten it wrong, that his
preoccupation with overseeing Knuckles's career as a Guardian
kept him from what mattered: Knuckles himself and Lara-Le.  "I
was the one ... who walked away from what should have been," he
tells Lara-Le, "and I've paid for that mistake many times since." 
Which is as close to an apology as he gets here.
     As for Knuckles, he tells him: "I'll never forgive myself
for placing the mantle of Guardian on you so young.  I should
have given you a choice....  Your destiny ... I thought that
mattered above all else ... But I know now that was wrong.  What
truly does matter ... is that you're my son ... and that I love
you."
     This is about as far from the Archie house style as you can
get.  It resembles not Ken's beloved James Bond stories, but the
climax of Chaim Potok's "The Chosen," where the elderly Rabbi
Saunders asks his son (though all the while speaking to his son's
best friend) to forgive him for raising him the way he did.
     This, in turn, turns the story on its head for me.  I, and
probably a good number of readers, thought they could see where
this story arc was going.  I'm glad to see that Ken's changed
directions on me the way he has.
     Is this story perfect?  I hate to say it, but no.  There are
gaffes in the telling of the story, but they're minor.  "Her and
Wyn" should have been "She and Wyn"; the rule of thumb I learned
in high school English is, when dealing with a compound subject,
drop the "and ..." part and see if it works.  "Her has been
talking..." is definitely wrong.  Likewise, Locke couldn't have
been diagnosed with a "carcinogenic pancreas" since a carcinogen
is what triggers cancer; simply saying he had "pancreatic cancer"
would have been more accurate.
     And while I'm well aware that Ken had stepped onto territory
too personal to permit entry by others, I almost wish that Ken
had gone with the original plan and let Dawn Best do the artwork. 
There's still a distance between Ken's writing and artwork, a
kind of disconnect perhaps due to the limited number of pages
available.  We're told, for instance, that "[Lara-Le] was a mess
... crying one minute, angry the next," but we don't see it in
Ken's artwork.  We're told that only after Locke's funeral did
Knuckles allow himself to break down and have a good cry, "and I
couldn't stop for well over an hour.  It was like everything I
had came pouring out of me."  Again, however, we don't get to see
it.  But with the limited number of pages available to Ken for
treating something that was best left to an entire chapter of a
graphic novel, it's just as well.
     Don't look for any rating here. This story is what's known
as "critic-proof."  Its power rests in circumstances beyond the
narrative itself.  That can be a problem when subject and form
collide.  How, for instance, can one criticize Mel Gibson's
"Passion of the Christ" without seeming to some true believers to
be anti-Christian?  So I can only end this review by stating the
obvious: this is Ken Penders's most personal and most heart-felt
story ever to appear in the Sonic comic.  May it not be the last
story to be so inspired.  It's not that I have a taste for
deathfic, but this comic will thrive and survive SO LONG AS IT
TELLS THE TRUTH.  No rating.

     Fan Art: A whopping SEVEN examples on display, which
involves a certain amount of shrinkage.  Alex Olson draws Sonic
battling Perfect Metal Sonic from "Sonic Heroes," which is a kind
of Godzilla/mechazoid/scorpion creature or other; Kit Reagan
gives us Sally as even more of a stick chick than usual; Mark Teo
in the UK draws a wonderfully kawaii study of Tails contemplating
a butterfly; Michael Hanlon does a standing Tails; Jacob Tench
draws Sonic (I believe), as does Matt Lippiello; and Melissa
Ramirez does a four-way study of Sonic, Tails, Knuckles and
Shadow crammed into the same small box.

     Sonic-Grams: that, after all, is what the letters section is
called despite the fact that the name appears on the next page
over.  Matt Bentley is told that Archie has "a cool story planned
with [Scratch, Grounder, Coconuts] and all those 'old skool'
Badniks!"  I don't think I went to the same "skool" as Mike did. 
He also hints to Tim Moore that next issue's "Love and Loss" will
deal with the moribund Bunnie/Antoine relationship.  Garrett Lang
states the obvious by pointing out that "some of your [post-S125]
stories have been getting kind of cheesy," and Mike states that
Cream the Rabbit will be appearing "soon."  I can only hope she's
isn't anything like the way she's depicted in Sonic X or Sonic
Heroes, where her role is pretty much reduced to saying things
like "Look at all the evil robots!"
     Editorial: Mike spreads the news that despite the financial
realities that killed the Sonic Specials and Miniseries, there
will be a Sonic X miniseries in the summer of 2005.  Proving once
again the words of Clifford Irving: "Corporate profit justifies
any form of lunacy."  Plus a heads-up on the Sonic "games" to be
found in McDonald Happy Meals(tm).  
     This page also credits Axer and Jensen with the frontispiece
art, whereas the drawing itself is signed "Axer and Ray." Must be
one of those transition things.  Also a blurb for S144.
     Off-Panel: some nameless bug or other, who has more than the
six arms/legs common to insects, hassles Mike about insect
representation in the book.  Considering how the book has handled
serpents, the "bug" should be grateful.  As for me, if I want to
be amused by a bug I can rent "Antz" and "A Bug's Life."