Sonic the Hedgehog #150 (Aug 2005) Extreme close-up of Sonic. Or ... is it? "Hero to Zero In No Time At All" Story: Ken Penders; Art: Art Mawhinney; Ink: Jim Amash; Color: John and Aimee Ray; Lettering: John E. Workman; Editor: Mike Pellerito; Managing Editor: Victor Gorelick; Editor-in- Chief: Richard Goldwater. We go from Goldwater to cold water as Sonic makes short work of a SWATbot by dumping him in a fountain in the center of Knothole. Don't ask how the SWATbot got there. Besides, that's going to be the least of our worries. Sonic's performance gets mixed reviews from some of the locals voting pretty much along gender lines: Mina, Amy Rose and Ash in the role of Simon Cowell. We then watch as Sonic puts the moves on Mina. Cut to Station Square, outside a restaurant named Michael's. Either that's an attempt to suck up to the editor, Mike Pellerito, or the owner's last name is Corleone because someone who looks like a Don Vito Corleone wannabe is sitting at a table conversing with Nack the Weasel. Nack intends to rip off Chaos Emeralds from Angel Island. This conversation reaches the sizable ears of Rouge the Bat seated nearby trying to hide her ample charms behind a newspaper. Rouge takes her leave, flies out of the hollowed-out volcano in which Station Square is located, and just happens to see Angel Island floating overhead. What are the odds, huh? We then cut back to Sonic continuing to put the moved on Mina. She, however, bails when she remembers she's hanging with Ash now. As she runs off, Amy Rose reappears and becomes the focus of Sonic's amorous attentions. "Several hours later," we're told, Tails is looking for Sonic and finds him in a compromising position, this time with Bunnie. Sonic disses Tails and the kid storms off-panel, Sonic appears eager to begin another round of tongue-wrestling with Bunnie... And "hours later" we find the two waking up together in the moonlight. Bunnie splits, and after SEVEN PAGES Ken finally gets around to explaining what's going on here. Buckle up. Seems that back on the home world of the Antisonic, the Antiantoine had come up with a hand-held device to transport the Boss hog to Mobius Prime. Like his own Prime counterpart, however, the Antiantoine is stupid enough to telegraph his punch to his intended rival. After the Antisonic clocks him, he then kidnaps Antoine Prime and brings him back to the Antimobius (for want of a better name). The Antisonic then banishes the Antiantoine to Mobius Prime where, surprise, the Antiantoine adapts quite well and manages to get in good with King Max. Seeing how things are working out, the Antisonic decides to play it the same way. He teleports himself to Mobius Prime, knocks Sonic out with one sucker punch, and starts acting like Sonic, only hornier. This is the back story. Got that? Since Angel Island has been under renovation since the Return To Angel Island arc (S138-141), Rouge decides she needs a tour guide. And she happens to single out Locke as a likely candidate. Back in Knothole, the Antisonic almost gets wasted by a land mine, which might have put a permanent end to his romantic romping depending on which direction the shrapnel flew. The worst that happens is Sally chews him out. Back on Angel Island, Rouge's playing up to Locke goes one step too far and Archimedes (remember him?) BAMFs her to Knothole. So she goes to Plan B: get someone to keep Locke busy while she helps herself to the Chaos Emeralds. At the same time, the Antisonic appears to be getting ready to put the moves on HER. HEAD: If this sounds jumbled and unfocused, you're right. This isn't so much storytelling as it is an alternate explanation of what's going on in this book. What's going on is apparently a decision that the comic is going to rely on the quick-and-dirty Evil Twin plot device to explain the uncharacteristic behavior of Antoine in the Home arc and of Sonic in this story. Which is OK, if you like dishonest storytelling. Ken Penders is no stranger to the Substitute Person plot. In S23's "When Hedgehogs Collide" the Knothole Freedom Fighters (except for Bunnie) are bedeviled by the antisocial antics of their counterparts. Between "Battle Royal" and "Endgame," we were treated to uncharacteristic behavior by King Max, who was actually a Max-bot. Ken had wanted to bestow the same fate on Sally post-Endgame but was wisely dissuaded from doing so. And there was the unspeakable Tails Isn't Tails plot point, which we're seeing resurrected in the following story in this issue. So we have Duplicitous Doubles figuring as a Ken Penders storytelling trademark, along with Keeping Secrets and an Inability To Be Honest With Someone Else, which is not quite the same thing but close. Either Ken has very much internalized the ethos of his beloved Ian Fleming James Bond novels, or else Ken is a man with issues. I should talk, I suppose; I identify with the line from an ep of "Law & Order: SVU": "He didn't have issues, he had a subscription." But enough about me. This is almost all set-up, so the narrative thread is pretty slender. Whether this story works depends on whether you think the Evil Twin plot device is legitimate storytelling and whether you enjoy seeing a pseudo- pSonic on the make. I don't and I didn't, so it didn't. Head Score: 3. EYE: Art Mawhinney does the artwork for both stories in this issue in his usual assured style. This is his first attempt, I believe, at drawing Rouge, and in what surely must have been a result of an order from On High he draws Rouge without her heart-shaped bustier and with a much more modest top. Which is unusual because her fan service finery is very much on display during her appearances on the "Sonic X" TV series, and it doesn't seem to have hurt the show's rating (rating as in Y7, not rating as in Nielsen). After prolonged exposure to Steve Butler's work I can see where Butler can bring more of an edge to the proceedings. But after handling the artistic chores on "Good, Bad, and Unknown," Steve deserves a break. Mawhinney's style makes a decent counterpoint to the Antisonic's indecent proposals. And he makes Rouge look more cuddly than sexy. Eye Score: 9. HEART: I'm sorry, but even after everybody was let in on the joke thanks to various message board postings, and I read the story for myself forearmed with the knowledge that the randy hedgehog wasn't Sonic at all but his Evil Twin, I found reading this thing to be both distasteful and a little sad. I found it distasteful because no matter how ultimately chaste the Antisonic's fooling around turns out to be, it reminds me that I've read worse in various fanfics I've encountered over the years. That Archie would put up with the faux Sonic on the make also tells me that they want to unknot the Home arc problems without resorting to honest storytelling. Ever since Home, we readers and fans have been wondering just WHAT HAPPENED to Antoine to turn the lovable bumbler into a callous bad boy. But Surprise!, it's not Antoine at all, just an Evil Twin! And that's what makes me sad. Because the true Sonic and Antoine (and Aurora only knows who else!) are no longer at the center of this story, my level of caring about what's happening fell so low it buried the needle. Plus it turns out that the Rouge subplot was simply a way to get her to cross the Antisonic's path on the eve of the next installment. So why should I give a damn about any of it? Wake me when the real Sonic regains consciousness. Heart Score: 1. "The Chosen One: Part 2" Story: Romy Chacon; Art: Art Mawhinney; Ink: Andrew Pepoy; Color: Jason Jensen; Lettering: Jeff Powell. We start with a two-page recap of last month's installment: Mammoth Mogul Destroyer of Worlds, Zonic the Zone Cop, and a room full of Tailses from various alternative worlds. After a brief difference of opinion between Darth Maul Tails and Neo Tails, Sonic and Zonic realize that all these Tailses don't have a clue as to why they're here or how to go about doing whatever they're supposed to do. Tails Prime isn't too crazy about the situation, either, and rather than take part in this family reunion he decides to take on MM one-on-one. Mammoth Mogul isn't too happy to see Tails and tries zapping him, but Sonic makes the save. He then convinces Tails that what they need is an exit strategy. The plan: lure MM to the room where TailsCon is being held. Unfortunately, the maneuver that Sonic and his counterparts used on a giant Borg Robotnik in S19 doesn't work this time around. Sonic tries to clear some of the wounded from the battlefield and gets zapped by MM. Tails, thinking that Sonic is dead, absorbs the remaining Tailses with the help of Athair and the result isn't pretty: Tails turns into a musclebound monstrosity called Titan Tails who looks like something from Dan Slott's "Zone Wars: Giant Robotno." Revving up his tails, he sucks the Chaos energy out of MM, and then in a blinding flash, we realize that someone has hit the Cosmic Reset Button and Tails and Sonic are back to playing tag as they were when the story opened, with the two of them oblivious to this whole story. Meanwhile, Athair and Merlin Prower congratulate Tails for not letting all that power go to his head. As for Mammoth Mogul, he's trapped inside a Chaos Emerald. HEAD: After reading this comic for ten years, it looks like I've managed to figure out where THIS story was going, at any rate. And yes, the Great Harmony Maneuver was handled in such a way that the continuity was ultimately unaffected. Which is good news and bad news because with all the alternate worlds back in place it helps explain why the Antisonic and Antiantoine are still cluttering up the continuity in "Hero 2 Zero." Head Score: 8. EYE: The one blot on Mawhinney's artwork is titanic, namely Titan Tails. With those bulging biceps and thunder thighs, he looks absurd. If I were Art, I'd resort to the Nuremberg Defense: he was just following orders. Eye Score: 8. HEART: As satisfying as the conclusion of the story was, what with Mammoth Mogul being sidelined indefinitely, the fact that he was confronted by Titan Tails missed an important emotional point. One of the posters on Ken's message board under the name "Dirk Amoeba" put it best: "Why did it have to be big and muscular? It would have been cooler if it were normal size but insanely powerful." There are basically two approaches that could have been taken. The one chosen was a Battle of the Titans; the other, a David and Goliath match-up. The former is the more obvious, but the latter is more satisfying. This is especially true given the comic's alleged core constituency of tweens, those kids caught in the twilight zone between childhood and adolescence. Empowerment fantasies, the kind peddled by comic books since their inception, are the staff of life for this crowd. And while a Big Ugly Head To Big Ugly Head match-up is what we ended up with, there was just something ... OFF about it. That big THING up there wasn't Tails! I'm with Dirk on this one: to have a diminutive Tails, maybe with blanked-out shining eyes, doing a number on Mammoth Mogul; THAT'S entertainment! Beyond that, note it's when Tails believes that Sonic was killed by MM that his Chosen One powers kick in. They're triggered not so much by anger, as in the case of the Hulk, but by what happened to his best bud, which is a situation more complex than mere anger. And at the end of it all, he throws the ability away. Having drawn the power from Mammoth Mogul, he does not use it to become another Mammoth Mogul, which was the dilemma with the One Ring in Tolkien. If you try to use it to fight Sauron, you end up BECOMING Sauron. Not a feel-good ending. Tails, with the wisdom of the unsophisticated, just wants things to be back the way they were; hence the Cosmic Reset. Now why couldn't "Hero 2 Zero" have shown THIS level of emotional involvement? Probably because its premise was duplicitous from the get-go: the key character isn't even who we thought it was going in. Here, Tails starts out and ends up as Tails. This is what makes dealing with Romy Chacon stories so maddening: despite lapses in skill symbolized by "The Original Freedom Fighters" and "Circuit Me," a small gem of a story like this one surfaces in the book from time to time. It's too bad that Archie apparently got into the habit of buying anything and everything the writers throw at them without distinction. Heart Score: 9. Notice there are no fan art, letters, editorials, blurbs, etc. That's probably because of the DC marketing deal which cut two pages available for stories or anything else. Looks like this time around Mike has decided simply to cut out the "anything else." But what's lost by doing this is a way for the fans to communicate with the comic and go on record about it, even if half the letters ask questions Mike doesn't feel like answering and the other half say "Sonic's da bomb!" or words to that effect. Whatever Mike's ultimate solution, I hope it allows for SOME fan feedback. Otherwise, there may well be a new crop of Sonic-oriented blogs popping up.