Sonic the Hedgehog #188 (Jul 2008) Yardley!/Jensen cover: Sonic, who looks like he hit the wall, comes out ready to go Sonic Fighters on somebody as Sally and Amy look on. My guess is he finally read the full script for this two-parter and he wishes to make his views known to Ian Flynn. "Beating The House" Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Matt Herms; Ink: Jim Amash; Color: Josh Ray; Lettering: John E. Workman; Editor/Managing Editor: Mike Pellerito; Editor-in-Chief: Victor Gorelick; Sega Licensing reps: Kristin Parcell, Dyna Lopez, and Cindy Chau. And you may find yourself in a dark and smelly place. And you may find yourself on a planet called Mobius. And you may find yourself captured and in chains. And you may find yourself with a princess named Sally, and a would-be love interest named Amy, and you may ask yourself, well, "How'd I get here?" Points to you if you get the song reference above. If not, just settle back for the one-page bare bones recap of the previous issue which leaves out a whole bunch of stuff. Sgt. Simian enters in the bottom panel of the page to fit Sonic with a "Sarge Says Relax" t-shirt. OK, enough with the 80s pop cult; back to the story (and I use the term loosely). Sally, at the mercy of Nack and his whatever weapon, is doing a remake of the "Not-Quite-Naked Prey" as she tries to outrun the possibility of being shot at. Nack gets off a shot but Sally vaults out of the line of fire and exits down a secret entrance. At the bottom of the slide she finds Amy as the only one holding down the fort. When Nack follows Sally down the chute Amy is there to play a chorus of "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" on Nack's noggin. Sally then tells Nicole, who can't even be bothered to put in a personal appearance despite her being pretty much omnipresent thanks to the local network, to spread the word that Nack needs to be busted again while she and Amy hop the nearest flying saucer to the Casino Night Zone. And yes, it looks as stupid as it sounds. Meanwhile, Sonic is enduring his reunion with Scratch, Grounder and Coconuts who have been pretty darn useless up until now. Sonic adds insult to inanity by reminding them "I stomped you when I was eight." We then get a page of banter between Monkey-Boy (Coconuts) and Sleuth Dawg with Drago playing back-up. SDD wants to get paid and get out of this story, and I don't blame him. Upstairs in the Mammoth Mogul casino, Amy and Sally (who gains entry because she passes the No Shirt-No Shoes-No Service test) run into Geoffrey and Rouge. Geoff confirms what I suspected in last month's issue: that this is a "joint- op" involving himself acting on behalf of Elias and Rouge representing G.U.N. After being brought up to speed, Rouge leads everyone to where Sonic is being held. Don't ask how she knows this, it'll only slow things down. Back at the bar, Sonic is being tortured by having to listen to Bean say things like "Are you and the Princess going to marry and have mutant hedge-squirrel babies?" Note to Bean: Sonia and Manic from the original Mobius: 25 Years Later arc would like to have a word with you after the story. Mercifully, Sally, Amy and Geoff arrive to interrupt Bean, free Sonic, and clean up the joint. In the midst of the fisticuffs, Rouge has a word with Sleuth. With the other villains suitably subdued, Sonic and his crew head up to the main floor and call Mogul out. Fuzzbutt feigns innocence, and when he confronts Sleuth about what's been going on the Dawg states that they Destructix were using the bar as a cover "for our mercenary actions." Sonic and the gang, unfortunately, don't have anything by way of evidence to back up their version of events so they're left to wipe the egg from their faces before leaving. We then overhear Dawg explaining to fellow canid Drago that according to Rouge M. M. would just as soon pay for Sonic's humiliation than for his defeat. Yeah, I'd like to be around when Sleuth presents THAT invoice! On the way back home, Geoff is all "No harm, no foul." Sally then gets word from Bunnie, who on the monitor looks more like Mina, that Nack has escaped. "Today can't get any worse," Sonic says prophetically, and we cut to the last three pages as Scourge, Fiona, and the crew of the Antisonic get ready to invade. Or something. The good news is, the Antisonic is now Scourge, so he can't trade on Sonic's identity and screw around the way he did as Sonic's Evil Twin back in "Sonic's Angels" (S152). The bad news is, Scourge is looking to be the new King of Mobius apparently, but his idea of a crown is a leftover Transformers(tm) logo. HEAD: I was afraid of this: after putting this story into a dive, Ian Flynn couldn't pull out in time the way he did in S186's "Devil's Due" and the resulting crash-and-burn makes this one of the worst stories to appear in this title in quite a while. It was a really bad idea to have this story come right after the two-part "Mogul Rising" arc because it inevitably invites comparison. In the former, Mogul looked to spring himself from prison and power back up, exploiting three of Sonic's friends in the process. With those goals accomplished, going head-to-head with Sonic didn't really interest him so he let it slide. It was a straightforward idea with a neat twist at the end. This story, however, sort of feels like it has the same structure but this time it was done badly. The story had to fight its way through a dense undergrowth of digression and exposition before the alleged action kicked in, and then it fell apart in confusion. Sonic gets captured. Nack hunts down Sally, is clobbered by Amy, but manages to escape anyway without any explanation whatsoever. The classic villains come off as so useless you have to wonder why Ian even bothered to bring them back. But the worst fate was reserved for ... Rouge. Don't ask me to explain what happened to Rouge because I can't come up with a good answer. She was cool and in control when confronted by Julie-Su in S165's "Leak," and played Knuckles with equal skill in S186's "Honor Bound." In this arc, she starts out as arm candy for Geoff, then fades into the background until she talks Sleuth D. D. into changing his tune for no apparent reason. It's as if Ian didn't know quite what to do with her this time around and was making it up as he went, which is not good writing. Even the "Sonic X" TV series got more mileage out of Rouge than this. If Rouge were a performer instead of a fictional character at the mercy of Ian Flynn, I'd accuse her of phoning in her performance. And as for Hershey (who you'll remember ... or maybe not ... is supposed to be married to Geoff), put her picture on a milk carton and get it over with. As for Flynn's "action and more action" credo, what we get here, as we've gotten in this comic so many times before, is movement taking the place of action. Action, after all, has to have a point when you're telling a story, and simply jerking Sonic and the gang (and the readers) around for two issues doesn't count. Sadly, the last three pages of this story, which are completely unrelated to this issue and the previous one, are far more compelling. This tells me that, possibly because of deadline pressures (see EYE section below), Ian needed SOME kind of set-up for the impending "Bold New Mobius" arc while marking time for two issues, and just threw this together. That's what this feels like, anyway. Head Score: 2. EYE: I was ready to give Matt Herms the benefit of the doubt, but when I came to the top of page [19] where Sally is supposed to be talking to Bunnie, I pretty much gave up. Whoever is on that monitor is NOT Bunnie! Which makes me wonder whether both Ian AND Matt had to scramble to get this to the publisher in time. Matt's art is settling into the groove, but nothing in this story really popped off the page. Eye Score: 5. HEART: I've said more than once in reviewing issues of this comic that "Character will get you through times of no story better than story will get you through times of no character." So does this sorry story arc prove me wrong? Not when the characters themselves don't have anything going for them. This is a far cry from such character-driven pieces as "Stargazing" or "The Royal Signet," where we actually get to KNOW the characters. Here, Ian has crammed too many characters into the frames and done nothing to adequately showcase any of them. I've already commented on Rouge's fate; that of the trio of classic villains from "Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog" is no exception. They are simply thrown in to provide the comic relief that got them doomed to oblivion in the first place. And after an initial set-up that was heavy on exposition, even the major players get shorted. As a result, it's awfully hard to care about what happens here so it's no surprise to feel let down by this exercise and to find yourself looking forward to the next story. Heart Score: 2. Sonic-Grams: Brian F.'s letter is used to set up the coming arc involving Fiona. Giovanni L. needs some pronunciation help as well as help locating Knuckles back- issues (no word as to whether THEY will be issues in an 8- volume collection since the series only ran 32 issues or so). He also misses out on what happened to Lien-Da after she threw in with Eggman and Dimitri 2.0 in "Anything" (S184). Then again, Giovanni's letter cites events that took place in S141, which was, what, THREE AND A HALF FRICKIN' YEARS AGO?!? You want to try answering some more recent correspondence there, Mikey? In the same vein, Heather C. sends congrats to Bunnie and Antoine for tying the knot. And that only happened, what, a year ago? Well, maybe this IS Mikey's idea of being more recent. Fan Art: Finally we get something interesting: Kassi F.'s montage of Super Sonic, and a dynamically-posed Knuckles by Kevin M. It's too bad that they're the size of postage stamps.