Sonic the Hedgehog #192 (November 2008)
     Yardley!/Jensen cover: Sonic and Scourge prepare to do
battle.  Good design, the content OK if you like that kind of
thing.


     "Metal and Mettle: Part 2"
     Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Tracy Yardley!; Ink: Jim Amash;
Color: Josh and Aimee Ray; Lettering: John E. Workman; Editor:
Mike Pellerito; Editor-in-Chief: Victor Gorelick; Sega reps:
Kristin Parcell, Dyna Lopez and Cindy Chau

     Sonic and Scorge v. Metal Sonic and Metal Scourge.  Or some
combination thereof.  It starts with the Metals kicking the butts
of their counterparts.  Scourge is still trying to win Sonic over
to his way of thinking, but Sonic says "Focus, OK?"
     And we FINALLY get an establishing shot of Eggman watching
the fight!  Took long enough!  Dimitri enters, complaining about
Eggman's priorities: he spends his time throwing together bots to
throw at Sonic but nothing else, which means that the Dark Legion
has to carry the load.  Eggman tries to blow him off but Dimitri
seizes him by the wrist with one of his tentacles to get his
attention.  That's when Eggman asks him "Remember that movie
 Speed'?  Well guess what; you and your people are the bus!" 
Seems Eggman gave the echidnas not only high-tech implants, but
EXPLOSIVE high-tech implants.  So no more lip,  kay?  After this
reality check, Dimitri exits so Eggman can get back to watching
the fight.
     Back at the fight, Scourge is fighting harder, not smarter,
and is almost clobbered by Metal Scourge while putting Fiona in
her place.  Sonic, however, runs interference for Scourge who's
not about to observe the Golden Rule.
     Cut to Miles, Boomer and the crew watching the action and
sizing up the difference in character between Sonic and Scourge. 
Since they know first-hand what a butt Scourge can be, the
possibility of THEM doing a face turn instead of Sonic doing a
heel turn is introduced.
     In the hangar-like quarters of the Dark Legion, Dimitri
tells Lien-Da "Let's take a meeting."  He brings her up to speed
(no pun intended) on the booby trapped implant situation and when
she starts telling him off he finds that putting her in a wrist
lock works better than when he tried it on Eggman.  They can
agree on only one thing: it's not time to call in Knuckles for
help.
     Speaking of help, Sonic tells Scourge to cut his ego trip
short and get his people out here to pile on the bots.  That only
takes up a page of action.  With the Metals out of the picture,
Scourge AGAIN tries to get Sonic to flip; yeah, like THAT was
ever going to happen!  Sonic makes himself scarce, but leaves
behind a shifted dynamic as Fiona continues to hang on Scourge
like a bad coat of paint while the others maybe, just maybe, are
having second thought about their fearless leader.
     Back in New Mobotropolis, Sonic is called on the carpet for
his attitude problem in the issue before last (S190), but it's
clear that neither Elias nor Sally are going to ground him. 
Instead, he's taken to the Science Center where the gang have
taken the strategy of "Turnabout is fair play" to heart and are
getting ready to open a portal to Scourge's home world, which is
spelled "Moebius," about which spelling more later.  So we're
going to get a better look at Scourge's home turf.  As I said
earlier, "Took long enough!"

     HEAD: After three issues where the fight was the central
part of the story, Ian manages to dial it back so something else
by way of a plot can get a word in edgewise.  In this case, it's
about the SS (I happen to think that the initials are in keeping
with the character of the group and that the name "Suppression
Squad" is pretty darned lame) and their second thoughts
concerning Scourge.  It's becoming clearer that their allegiance
to him is tenuous at best, and fear-based.  This is brought home
by Patch's remark that his eyepatch was once "just for show." 
That could've been a throwaway line, but it really helps get the
point across that Scourge is a far cry from the anti-Sonic of
years ago and that he has a serious edge.  Scourge is coming into
focus as a classic bully.
     Bullies, whether of the schoolyard variety or of the
geopolitical type such as Saddam Hussein, get and keep power by
the classic two-step combination of force and fear.  Force gets
them what they want initially, and fear of their using that force
again maintains them.  It's pretty obvious that that's what
happened to the SS, as embodied in Alicia's "we don't want to
cross Scourge" line.  
     But every so often the bully has to resort to force again
when the fear starts to wear off, as it can do over time.  That's
risky for the bully because the force factor may have
deteriorated in the interim.  Which is what happened in the case
of Saddam Hussein: he was sold as being such a tyrant nobody
realized until it was too late and the US was hip-deep in Iraq
that he no longer had the force to back up the fear.  The weapons
of mass destruction simply didn't exist.  Saddam Hussein wouldn't
deal with weapons inspectors not because he was hiding something,
but because he was hiding nothing, which would have revealed him
to be bluffing.  But I digress.
     Ian also brings in the establishing shot of Eggman I was
asking about earlier, and then some.  The bomb-in-the-implants
plot point gets points for a ruthlessness that's pretty rare in
this comic, but unfortunately it loses points for feeling
derivative: it reminded me too much of the "memory neutralizing
chip" that caused Julie-Su to forget her upbringing according to
Ken Penders's "Shadows" in Special #11 (the Girls Rule! issue). 
Still, it cut the legs out from under Dimitri ... OK, bad choice
of words ... and his wanting to double-deal Eggman.  It doesn't
look like Dimitri wants to give up on his agenda, though.
     At the same time that Scourge is finally coming into focus,
Ian also gets a chance to stretch the SS members.  Un until this
installment, they were pretty much defined as Scourge's
underlings who happened to have a physical resemblance to the
core Freedom Fighters.  Even Miles, who actually had some
dialogue last time when Metal Sonic showed up, remained a cipher. 
Now the members are starting to gel and acquire personalities. 
And it's clear that Ian will be building on this in the next
issue when Sonic gets to scope out Scourge's home world, renamed
"Moebius."
     The variant spelling is probably due to the fact that August
Ferdinand M”bius, one of the two German mathematicians who
independently came up with the strip that bears his name (and not
that of his competitor, Johann Benedict Listing), spelled his
name with an umlaut over the "o".  Because English is not
equipped to recognize diacritical markings from other languages,
such as the German umlaut and the Spanish tilde), German words
with the o-umlaut are rendered in English either with the "oe"
diphthong or with a simple "o" without any hint of the use of an
umlaut.  Thus "Moebius" and "Mobius" are both acceptable.  In
this case, they're also useful in differentiating between the two
worlds of Scourge and Sonic, respectively.  But however it's
spelled, I am definitely waiting to see it.  Head Score: 8.
     EYE: Good artwork by Yardley!, of course.  But I swear that,
toward the end of the story, the drawings of Sonic himself were
giving off an Art Mawhinney vibe.  Not that that's a bad thing; I
still think that Mawhinney, who's now working on designing those
claustrophobic Where's Waldo-type books for kids like the one he
did for Sonic back in 1995 (recent ones I've seen feature the
casts of Strawberry Shortcake and WALL.E, and the expanded Disney
fairy line-up) defined the Sonic visual style even more than Mike
Gallagher did.  Eye Score: 9.
     HEART: Again, it's the scenes with the SS that give this arc
a much-needed infusion of Heart after a long fallow period. 
Though the details are still tantalizingly sketchy, the members
of the group have gotten on the bad side of Scourge just enough
to want to avoid doing so again.  As a result, small lights start
coming on behind their eyes and they stop being the mere
villains/fighters they were two issues ago. 
     Ian even manages to sneak a little Heart into the scene in
New Mobitropolis where Elias doesn't chew Sonic out so much as
nibble on him a little bit.  Tracy Yardley! helps set the tone
with Sally's body language; she's so laid back you KNOW that
nothing serious is going to happen to Sonic.  This is the sort of
scene that an interminable fight doesn't allow for; you need a
break in the pacing to change gears this way.  Ian is actually
telling a story now rather than staging a fight.  Heart Score:
10.


     "Father and Son"
     Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Jon Gray; Ink: Jim Amash; Color: Josh
and Aimee Ray; Lettering: Teresa Davidson

     At some point, Scourge the erstwhile King of Moebius reveals
his true nature by breaking into Sonic's house.  Nicole doesn't
have to bother with security this time because Scourge encounters
Jules, who being roboticized doesn't need to sleep ... unless
he's installing a software upgrade.  Jules makes it clear that
Scourge won't be putting the smackdown on Sonic as planned.  He
also deduces that, if Moebius is a mirror Mobius, then the
creatures of that world are just as cowardly as Scourge himself. 
This dropping of the C-word prompts Scourge to launch into some
late-night exposition: seems that Moebius emerged from The Great
Peace into The Great Entropy allowing everything to become
stagnant enough for Scourge to make his move and take over.  Even
more telling, Scourge's father was part of the leadership but now
Scourge casually informs Jules that "My dad simply isn't."  Jules
is not impressed and when Scourge threatens him instead, Jules
literally gets up on his hind legs and lets Scourge know in no
uncertain terms that whether he wins or loses he's in for a hard
time.  Even if he takes Jules down, Sonic's going to take it
personally, so it's lose-lose for Scourge, who may be emerald
green but (as Jules correctly surmised) has a yellow streak down
his back.  Despite his bravado, we're also left with the
impression that Scourge still has some father issues as he slinks
out the way he came in.

     HEAD: What does this installment have in common with most of
the 5-page back stories that have run in the comic this year? 
Practically nothing, and I'm grateful!
     For one thing, this story features honest-to-goodness
dialogue and not just a soliloquy at the beginning with
commentary at the end.  This is more like a one-act play than a
comic book story, with Jules on-stage the whole time as Scourge
enters, interacts, then exits.
     The difference is telling.  In S184's "Anything," Lien-Da
goes into exposition mode and gripes to Eggman about the fate of
the Legion, whereupon they strike a deal and Lien-Da realizes
she's been double-crossed since the Grand Master position she'd
been angling for went to Dimitri instead.  Here, the stakes are
way higher and instead of merely running his mouth Scourge gets
to interact with Jules.
     We also FINALLY get a story where one character is available
to offer a counterpoint for the villain's version of things. 
I've been saying all along that I can't bring myself to trust the
version of events put forward by the likes of Lien-Da and Dr.
Fin; there's too much of a possibility that their speeches are
slanted and self-serving.  And Jules doesn't hesitate to tell it
like it is, calling violence and anarchy by their true names.
     This works perfectly and is what the comic should have been
running all along.  That may be too much to ask of writing for a
comic book, however.  In any event, this story cuts to the front
of the line as candidate for Best Back Story of 2008.  Head
Score: 10.
     EYE: After way too long of an absence, Jon Gray returns. 
His earlier experience with Archie had not been a happy one,
culminating in having his page art for S144's "Love and Loss" sit
out on Archie Comics's doorstep over a three-day weekend getting
rained on, requiring Mike Pellerito to re-do the ending at the
last minute.
     But Jon is back and in as good a form as ever.  He brings
his own brand of manic energy to Scourge, but also proves that he
can milk a situation for all it's worth visually, as in the
sunburst at the bottom of page [4] when Jules gets in Scourge's
face.  Even Bernie's half-asleep look in the final panel, though
not really center-stage, is perfect.  Welcome back.  Eye Score:
10.
     HEART: I haven't used the phrase "Dead behind the eyes" in a
while in these reviews, but if there's one character to whom it
could have been applied over the years, it would have been Jules. 
I was glad to see him and Bernie introduced into the comic, but
as with too many of the characters thrown into the arena (Amadeus
and Rosemary Prower come to mind) the writers have never really
DONE anything with them.  Mercifully, Ian doesn't let this state
of affairs go on any longer, and actually gives Jules a
personality, one strong enough to stand up to Scourge.
     Speaking of Scourge, back in the day it was a simple matter
to whip up an Evil Sonic: dress him up in hoodlum gear
(motorcycle jacket, shades and engineer boots) and have him beat
up on people.  That got old even before 2001 when Shadow the
Hedgehog was introduced and basically redefined the whole Evil
Sonic concept (as far as Sega Marketing was concerned, anyway). 
So Evil Sonic got relaunched as Scourge in 2006.
     Still, more was known about Evil Sonic than about Scourge,
and Ian does something about that as well.  The key to this
story, and the surprise revelation that totally impressed me, was
Scourge's reaction to his confrontation with Jules.  Scourge
tries to put a brave face on it and fails miserably, as he exits
Sonic's house with his eyes brimming up with tears.  I don't know
if they were Ian's idea or Jon's or a collaboration, but all of a
sudden Scourge stops being one-dimensional.  His statement that
Jules is "no different from my old man" is extremely telling;
whatever Scourge did to his father, it would seem he's not
entirely at peace with it.  With that momentary flash of
regret(?), Scourge becomes a character with far more complexity
than when this arc started.  Here's hoping Ian can keep it going. 
Heart Score: 10.


     Fan-Art: Jack M. submits a Scourge drawing with hot rod, and
Harley C. does an impressive Fiona, but the real prize is way too
small to see clearly, especially the name.  To these old eyes,
the copyright notice says the artwork was either by A. G. Davis
or A. O. Davis, via Andrea D.  If they've got a page on
deviantart, I'd love to see it.  It's not only technically
brilliant, it's also funny!  The humor makes use of one of the
conventions of the Sonicverse: Sonic riding on the wing of
Tails's biplane, and one of the occupational hazards of doing
that.

     Speaking of the Sonicverse: it's been reported at the Power
Rings comic site that the Sonic X comic is being dropped and that
Archie will be replacing it with a Sonic Universe comic.  This is
supposed to feature some or all of the various Sonic
continuities, and after all these years of games, animations and
comics, the variations are vast and bewildering.  They don't say
anything about it in this issue, but I will be keeping my ears
open.

     Sonic-Grams: Monica S. likes the comic but wants to see more
Shadow and wonders at length about his relationship with Rouge. 
Patrick D. sends a general fan letter and pretty much tells
Eggman to get up offa that thing and hit the gym.  Or at least
the salad bar.

     S193: Apparently Amy Rose is going along for the ride next
issue as the two hedgehogs, the blue and the pink, invade
Moebius.  I have to wonder whether the Moebian Omega is as
tiresome as the one in Sonic Heroes.  Seriously, I don't know
which is more irritating: Omega's "Eggman's robots must be
eliminated" or Cream's "Look at all those Eggman robots!"
followed by Big's "Wow, you're right!"  Please!