Sonic the Hedgehog #167 (Dec 2006) Sanford Greene cover: OH NOES! IT'S TEH ATTACK OF TEH CHIBIS!! Seriously, Sonic, Sally and Tails look pretty good in Greene's bird's-eye-view cover (BEV in industry shorthand), but then you get to Lara-Su, Julie-Su and Knuckles. Their heads are so big, their eyes are so prominent, and their bodies are so foreshortened that they're classically super- deformed. Which is more a bit of unintentional humor than anything else. "Mobius 25 Years Later: Part 2: Tempus Aeternus" Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Tracy Yardley; Ink: Jim Amash; Color: Jason Jensen; Lettering: John E. Workman; Editor: Mike Pellerito; Managing Editor: Victor Gorelick; Editor-in-Chief: Richard Goldwater After a hard day scheming against her enemies, Lien-Da comes home, pours herself a stiff one, and talks about herself to Dimitri, who being a disembodied head can't walk out of the room on her, or keep his distance from her as Rutan is doing on the staircase. But since she's talking about Sonic and his friends ... We cut to them in one of Shadow's "dark site" prisons. By the time we get to the bottom of the page as Knuckles arrives on the scene, we understand why Sonic and Tails, at least, are taking this whole thing so calmly: the fix is in and Knux plays his Get Out Of Jail Free Card on everyone's behalf. The plan calls for Tails to hack his way into the security system, Knuckles to get Sally out of the way of the plot, and Sonic to deal with Shadow. As for Lara-Su, she's been assigned ambulance duty and has to schlep Rotor to sick bay. Sonic's entrance line as he reaches the throne room ("Who ordered the extra-large butt-whooping, heavy on the poetic justice?") is a little overdone, but one shudders to think what Ken Penders would have written in a situation like this. Mercifully, Ian himself makes note of this in the ensuing banter. Sally asks her rescuers "You KNOW about the other timeline?" Man it SO does not work this way in other time travel stories. We then get a page of Shadow pounding on Sonic before he's interrupted by ... Lara-Su who, unlike Sonic, can match Shadow volt-for-volt of Chaos energy. The two of them exchange blows and snatches of Tikal's dialogue from the first Sonic Adventure game for no real reason before Lara-Su gets the upper glove. Besides, hitting a girl wearing glasses is SO wrong! That pretty much leaves the two-page reunion where Knux retrieves his daughter and Sonic and Sally sort of refashion the bond between them. HEAD: ANOTHER fistfight, in what is fast becoming an Ian Flynn trademark. Looking back at the past half-dozen issues or so, I haven't seen this many punches thrown since the Stanley Cup playoffs! And as often as not, Sonic come off the worse for it (c.f. his initial encounter with the Babylon Rogues in S163's "Sonic Riders: Part 1"). You begin to wonder whether Ian even LIKES Sonic, since he contrives to have the Blue Blur beaten up on such a regular basis. You'd also think that as swift as Sonic is, he'd know how to duck a punch. I know I've lost my share of rings in all the times I've played the games, but I know how bad my reflexes are. I expect a bit more from Sonic. Most of all, I'm afraid that if Ian keeps this up he's going to run Sonic Gets Beat Up By The Villain Du Jour into the ground. Over at superdickery.com, there are categories reflecting certain recurring themes in other comic books: Wonder Woman getting tied up with her own rope, Capt. America rescuing Bucky from some tight spot or other, stories featuring monkeys, etc. I really don't want to see Sonic enter those ranks. It falls to Lien-Da to provide the thankless exposition in the beginning. I would rather have seen the space devoted to a key relationship that gets zero coverage but which is at the heart of this story: that between Shadow and Sally. I'll admit, when I first heard the outline of this story the one thought in my mind was "How in the name of Aurora did THOSE two get together?!?" It's hard enough picturing a lone wolf like Shadow married to ANYONE, but Sally? Instead, aside from one line in the middle, Sally's relegated to the final two pages of the story and is saddled with the lamest explanation possible: "As fantastic as it sounds .. It feels right. I knew something was wrong for all these years, but was never sure what." Like I said, you NEVER hear anything like that in "Code Lyoko" or the Back To The Future movies. Ian does get major props, though, for pitting Shadow against Lara-Su in the climactic battle, despite what seemed like a too-easy win for the Guardian's daughter (which I'll ascribe to the fact that this is an 11-pager). Lara-Su didn't really get that juicy a role the first time around: she locked herself in the bathroom, danced at her cotillion, then was virtually forgotten until the arc was on the verge of wrapping up. It's taken a while, but she finally appeared in a story that did her justice. Head Score: 8. EYE: There's nothing to fault in Tracy Yardley's artwork, especially in the dungeon scenes which call for an added bit of atmosphere. Tracy also sounds the right artistic note in the story's final sequence. Tails still looks like a kid, but let that pass. Eye Score: 10. HEART: For all the problems of this story mentioned above, I have to confess that Ian completely won me over with the story's last sequence. No, I don't buy the "I knew all along something was wrong with the time line" plot point. Not that I have anything against intuition per se, but when EVERYBODY picks up on it, it feels like a cop-out. That said, he handles the final scene between Sonic and Sally very well. Having been handed a deus ex machina ending, they don't just cash their paychecks and fall forward into the story. What you have are two believable characters in an awkward situation, and they act in an appropriate manner for once: tentative, a little unsure, wanting to move forward but not throwing themselves into it. For once in the entire history of M25YL you have Sonic and Sally actually ACTING their age, and as someone who's lived in that neighborhood I ought to know. Congratulations, Ian. Heart Score: 10. "Hedgehog Day" Story: [Romy] Chacon; Art: Dave Manak; Ink: Andrew Pepoy; Color: Josh Ray, Lettering: Vickie Williams Sonic manages to drag himself out of bed to the tune of Mina covering the Shirelles's 1962 hit "Soldier Boy" and realizing, with a spit-take, that he's blowing off a celebration in his honor. Dashing out of the house and trying to avoid some of the local paparazzi, he slams into a tree and is laid up. And repeat, only this time he slams into a hay wagon. And repeat, only this time the press of the press causes his house to collapse in on him. And ... they were able to get 11 pages out of THIS!? HEAD: It was legendary comedian Lenny Bruce who was supposed to have said that satire = tragedy + time. The editorial wizards at Archie Comics have evidently decided that enough time had elapsed since 1997 for this story to run. What happened in 1997? Among other things, the death of Princess Diana as she was escaping from pursuing paparazzi, as Sonic is shown doing repeatedly here. The thinking must have been something along these lines: "Look, we've got an inventory story, and we're going to run it! Yes, it's in questionable taste for anyone who remembers how Princess Di got killed, but hey, we've got a core audience of rugrats we're publishing for. They won't remember what happened 9 years ago. They probably don't even remember what they had for lunch at school yesterday, they're so brain-dead from their music and video games." That would appear to me to be the reasoning behind running the story: that the pre-ado boys who are the target audience for the comic were either unborn, in utero, or in diapers when Diana died and so wouldn't get the queasy feeling of watching Sonic go through the same situation (only without getting killed). Speaking of getting killed, the title alludes to the 1993 motion picture "Groundhog Day," an ode to reincarnation wherein weather reporter Phil Connors (Bill Murray) goes to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, to cover the annual consultation of Punxsutawney Phil the groundhog as to whether Spring will be early this year. Phil (the man, not the groundhog) finds himself instead in a corner of the Twilight Zone, in what's referred to in Treknobabble as a "temporal causality loop" (see the ST:TNG ep "Cause and Effect"). He realizes this, and gets himself killed in a number of ways, but wakes up to relive the same day over and over, waking up to the same tune, "I've Got You, Babe" by Sonny and Cher. Gradually, his cynicism wears down and once he gets over himself and becomes a better human being the cycle breaks. The film was the obvious inspiration for this story, right down to the repeated page art and dialogue that set up Sonic for disaster over and over. It's a mildly amusing idea, but that doesn't mean it was a GOOD idea, especially when paired with Sonic's continuing to get banged up. This moves the story, for me anyway, from the realm of Lame Idea into that of Lame Idea Meets Bad Taste. Again, this is probably due to the fact that I'm old enough to REMEMBER that someone died, and died horribly, while being hounded by the press at high speeds (I also happen to be married to a hardcore Royals groupie, so nothing about the event and its sequelae escaped notice). Overall, a poor excuse for slapstick. Head Score: 3. EYE: I guess Dave Manak is the ONLY Sonic artist who can do a tongue-in-cheek Sonic story anymore. Aided and abetted by Josh Ray's un-nuanced coloring, this is artwork that could have run in the comic 12 years ago, except that the modeling is more up-to-date. The repeated page art may have been easy to do (but not by much, I'm thinking). Eye Score: 5. HEART: This is what I refer to as old time rock 'n' roll, which is my name for the kind of cartoon violence that was a staple in animated shorts until it became Politically Incorrect. Sonic suffers the kind of abuse that usually gets cured in the course of a fade to black in a Looney Tunes cartoon or a Tom and Jerry short (here, a turn of the page does the job). But there's another force at work here. At the end of M25YL 2.0 which also showed Sonic getting rock 'n' rolled, we have Sonic reunited with Sally and reweaving their relationship. Here, Sonic is primarily the butt of the same joke told over and over. It's as if the decade's worth of character development he's seen in the history of this book has been for nothing. He's treated here like a buffoon, a joke, a PARODY of the Sonic who has appeared on these pages. Maybe I've gone over the edge and I'm taking this too seriously, but this role no longer fits Sonic, or at least the Sonic we've been used to for some time. This should serve as a reminder why some inventory stories should "accidentally" wind up in the shredder. Heart Score: 1.