Sonic the Hedgehog #211 (May 2010)
     Yardley!/Jensen cover: I like to call this layout the
Wrestling Card layout.  You have Sonic vs. the Iron Queen as the
Main Event, then Monkey Khan vs. Snively, followed by Amy Rose
vs. Jun Kun.  Or maybe it's Khan and Amy Rose as a tag team
against Junk while Snively stays in the background and saves his
own skin.  Anyway, it's Sally vs. Lien-Da on the undercard.


     "Home Invasion: Part 2 :Security Measures"
     Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Steven Butler; Ink: Terry Austin;
Color: Matt Herms; Lettering: John Workman; Assistant Editor:
Paul Kaminski; Editor: Mike Pellerito; Editor-in-Chief: Victor
Gorelick; Sega Licensing reps: Cindy Chau and Jerry Chu

     We pick up where we left off, with our quartet of heroes
crashing the party in the Coliseum.  Ian gives Queenie a cue for
her stupid laugh, because she won't have much to laugh about by
the time this comic is over.  Anyway the Queen summons Nicole to
trash the heroes, which only sets up the first "Psyche!" moment
where Nicole reveals that she's no longer under contract to the
Irons.  She also gets off a great line: "My friends have helped
me grow into something more than my original programming,
something you cannot and will not control."  But never let it be
said that the Queen isn't up for trying; she fashions some kind
of Scorpion-bot (note the tail stinger) to go after Nicole, who
looks so intimidated ... NOT!
     Meanwhile, Amy Rose and Junk have resumed their grudge
match.  "I am the glorious Iron King!" Junk announces, getting
into the spirit of things with the old professional wrestler
attitude.  Amy cuts to the chase: "Stop being such a big baby and
admit you're beat!"  The two hammerheads are still pretty evenly
matched, until Sonic spin-dashes into Junk and lays him out flat.
     For his own part, Snively tries to make himself scarce until
he runs/crawls into the boots of Sally, who thinks he's burned
through all of his Get Out Of Jail Free cards and has earned
himself a good talking-to.  Sweating like Councilor Hamlin,
Snively tries intimidating her with the prospect that the Irons
have back-ups back home.  That's when Sal tags in Khan who
announces that the Yagyu bats are no longer under the control of
the Irons, and the same goes for the other three Clans.  The lead
Yagyu on the scene, sporting an old school Fu Manchu moustache,
tells the troops that they're bugging out.  Lien-Da protests,
only to be told "Tough guano, babe, we're outta here!"
     Lien-Da sizes up the situation tactically: Nicole and the
Queen are going one-on-one, and Junk is outnumbered.  Her
illogical logical conclusion is to declare "I'm in charge!" 
That's enough to get the Queen's attention; she breaks off her
fight with Nicole and attempts to order the Legionnaires around,
which brings us to our second "Psyche!" moment.  Lien-Da informs
her that she never got around to strictly obeying her command to
outfit the Legion with new hardware, and that she's controlling
the Legion via the chip she modified and then implanted in
herself.  Which was probably not the smartest thing to say
because the Queen then retaliates by detonating the explosive in
Lien-Da's cyberdreads.  We don't see the results of her
handiwork, but Lien-Da's probably having a flashback to
"Birthright: Part 1" (S205) when the weapon she used to
assassinate Luger blew up in her face.  If she's still conscious,
that is.  The Legionnaires turn to Snively for orders, but he
chokes big time.  So they "gather up the Grand-Master," or what's
left of her, and retreat.
     Back to the match.  Our heroes throw themselves into the
fight against Junk but are unable to take him down.  This looks
like a job for ... a deus ex machina!  And Espio decloaks with
one courtesy of the newly-liberated Clans: "the Mystical Fan of
Fen Xing."  Khan deploys the fan and blows Junk away, literally.
     For his part, Snively races to the Detention Center and
springs Uncle Screwball, who fortunately for him isn't in the
mood to hold Snively's treason against him.  Not yet, anyway.
     The Mobians give Regina the news that she's not the Queen of
much of anything at this point and she should come along quietly. 
"Justice is more important than revenge," Khan says, and besides
revenge isn't approved by the Comic Code Authority.  Playing her
last card, Regina does the Maleficent bit from Disney's "Sleeping
Beauty" and morphs into a mecha-dragon (a Chinese fireball, by
the look of it).  The Mobians respond with (say it with me) "the
real power of TEAMWORK," as they said in Sonic Heroes.  Tails,
Khan and Amy Rose all soften her up, while Sonic uses the same
finishing move on her that he used on the Egg Golem in Sonic
Adventure 2: bounce up the beast and deliver a shot to the head.
     Regina is taken into custody, which is followed by the
obligatory hugfest.  Eggman resists Snively's suggestion that
they try to spring Regina, feeling certain that now that he's
back on the street he'll triumph over Sonic.  With his track
record, I wouldn't bet cash money on it.

     HEAD: Oh yeah, this is why we read comics and why we put up
with one-dimensional villains, weak dialogue and preposterous
plotting: getting to watch the heroes get their due.
     Part of the fun here, of course, is knowing what the
villains don't know: that they've been undermined at home and on
the scene, and timing is everything when it comes to the reveals. 
Nicole is the first to disappoint R. F. and to let her know that
the game is over.  Then Khan drops a bomb by announcing that
there is no longer a home front from which she can draw support,
which inspires the mass defection of the Yagyu.  This gets topped
by Lien-Da's bit of treachery, to which Regina reacts by turning
the Grand Master's dreads into a Tex Avery-style stick of
dynamite.  Her last act of desperation involves turning herself
into a techno-dragon, but let's face it, when you've had to deal
with as many Egg-Critters as Eggman has thrown at them it's not
like this is anything new.  And the furries put one in the Win
column.
     In the last paragraph I used the word "fun," something this
comic hasn't been a lot of sometimes.  Well, the Mobians have the
upper hand here, and Regina just has no hand left to speak of.
It's all about how it unfold, and in this case it does so very
well.
     I'm surprised, though, that Regina's defense was as sloppy
as it was.  Given how effectively she was able to whip-saw Khan
around in S204, it's a wonder she didn't try that trick again. 
But I guess she wasn't thinking straight after all the bad news
she received.  I know Nicole built up her resistance to
technomagic, as she herself proclaims, but what's Khan's
explanation?
     Junk lives up to my nickname for him, by proving to be
seriously beatable with the proper deus ex machina.  I'm only
halfway through the Sonic Universe arc that deals with the Iron
Kingdom and its political disintegration so I can't speak
definitively about how it was worked into the story.
     The fate of Lien-Da is one of those yes/no deals.  Yes, she
got what was coming to her; no, they can't show you the details
and will leave that to your warped little imaginations.  Me, I'm
still wondering when someone will come across dry-docked Dimitri.
     So, yeah, despite the unsurprising escape of Snively and
Eggman, we've got an unambiguous happy ending for once.  But the
kids shouldn't party too hardy, even with a loser like Eggman on
the loose.  Shouldn't stop the readers from feeling good about
it, though.  Head Score: 9.
     EYE: While Butler doesn't engage in some of the layout
tricks that Yardley! has been sharpening, he makes good use of
vertical space at the end of the Regina/dragon fight sequence. 
The most interesting touch here is that once Regina is defeated,
we only get to see the back of her head.  Psychologically, it's
as if Butler is denying us the chance to feel sorry for her; he
literally doesn't want to put a face on failure.  Eye Score: 10.
     HEART: This story is all about the final fight, and the
potential Sal-Khan match-up takes a back seat here.  We're too
busy rooting for the furries to worry about that, anyway.
     In a sense, this story is little more than a set-up for the
next one.  The main point of this year-long digression is over
and the time is approaching for Khan and Sal to part ways, which
it was pretty much established that they would in Sonic Universe
#14.  But this is still a feel-good ending for the comic.  Heart
Score: 8.

     Fan Art: Jonathan brings in the cast (Sonic, Tails, Sally,
Snively and Regina), Michael gives us Amy Rose, and Hudson
reprises Sonic and the former Queen.
     Fan Funnies: OK, two questions about Nikki's comic: How did
Nack get so ripped (he looks like he stepped out of one of those
P90X infomercials), and what are they doing shooting paint balls
at each other with absolutely no protective gear?  As we were
reminded in one Daria ep, "Those paint ball thingies hurt!"

     Off-Panel: "And now..." "Hey, Sonic.  Watch me pull a rabbit
out of my hat." "Again?"  "Nothing up my sleeve.  Presto!"  More
like pressed ham, Tex-Mex style.

     Sonic-Grams: Among the info-bits passed on by Editorial to
Talon is a non-answer about the whereabouts of Mammoth Mogul, an
update for a relative noob who only got into the book two years
ago, very perfunctory information about Councilor Hamlin and
Merlin Prower, and Editorial misses an important detail in the
biography of Locke: that his death was self-sacrificial in
nature.  They spare us the news that the Acorn Council and
Elias's place on it were due to one of the most half-assed
revolutions I've ever seen.
     They it's Ally's turn: she's told that in "Mobius 25 Years
Later" Sonic's kids were pre-teen, which is news to me; I thought
that they were a teen and a tween. Editorial also puts up the
lamest possibly defense for Khan/Sally.  Honestly, look at the ad
on the facing page, where they're still pimping the Archie-Betty-
Veronica triangle that's existed for the past ... sixty years
come next year.  Talk about a fear of commitment!  The stupid
question about Tommy Turtle gets a stupid answer.  And the most
straight-forward reply has to do with the prospect of Sally ever
appearing in a Sega Sonic game: "it's unlikely she will be in the
new games anytime soon."  Especially considering that Sega has
decided to go back to their roots and make Sonic the ONLY
playable in Sonic 4.  Too bad; the SatAM Knothole characters
could have fit into the Sonic Heroes format quite nicely, with
Bunnie getting a chance to shine in Power formation.  But with
Editorial wanting to stir the romance pot by bringing Khan into
this arc, maybe Sega would be interested in bringing out a Sonic
dating sim.