Sonic the Hedgehog #229 (November 2011)

Pat Spaziante cover: Super Sonic. That’s all; just Super Sonic.

“Genesis Part 4: Reset”

Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Tracy Yardley!; Ink: Tracy Austin; Color: Matt Herms; Lettering: John E. Workman; Editor: Paul Kaminski; Editor-in-Chief: Victor Gorelick; Final Boss Voice Actor: Mike Pellerito; Sega Licensing reps: Cindy Chau and Judy Gilbertson

And for the first time in this story arc, we DON’T shlep back to the Green Hill Zone at the beginning of the story. Where we are instead is the Metropolis Zone where Tails is flying the not-so-friendly skies while chatting with Sonic who’s up to his eyebrows in badniks. That sort of thing never slowed Sonic down before, though the story itself hits a speed bump when it tries to milk a laugh out of a transporter device. Reminds me of the one stage from Sonic CD where he passes through a device that temporarily reduces him to a chibi. That could have been fun, but I don’t think this month’s story had enough slack to make it work.

We then go from slack to slick as we rejoin Sally, Rotor and Antoine in the Oil Ocean Zone. On the run from some buzzbombers, Sally commits a major Freudian slip: “Something tells me he [Sonic} should be here with me. US! Be here with us!” If he were there, it would be to prove the old “Misery loves company” rule as the trio runs the game gantlet. “What are they even FOR?” Rotor asks of one device. To make your gaming experience miserable, THAT’S what they’re for!

Sally’s having misery of her own as she falls off the platform, though Rotor makes the save. As Sally dangles over… something or other, she suffers an Endgame flashback to when Snively in a bad Sonic suit cut the rope she was using to climb down the side of Robotnik’s headquarters. Yeah, I know it sounds lame, but that’s the way they wrote it up. Then she fast-forwards to the post-wake-up-kiss (note the coffin-like stasis chamber in the background), Sonic’s absence during the Tossed in Space arc (S126-130), their most recent date in S122, and her confronting the BLAMmer in S225. Antoine, meanwhile, is getting blammed around himself until the machinery takes one hit too many and flies apart, releasing the cute little animals inside (in this case a penguin and some seal pups). Sally then asks the Happy Feet wanna-be where the main valves are. Luckily, she asks the penguin who helped design the factory or something because instead of chirping “What do I look like, an engineer!?” it tells her what she wants to know. What are the odds?

Sonic, meanwhile, demonstrates that he’s aware of Archimedean functionality while Ian works like crazy to avoid using the word “screw” in an Archie comic story. Lighten up, dude, the CCA age is over! Still, this situation is nothing Sonic can’t get out of, or in all probability hasn’t gotten out of before.

And for his troubles, he encounters Eggman while having a did-I-just-say-that-out-loud deja-vu concerning Eggie’s use of the R-word. Eggster realizes what that means and figures it’s time to send in the clones.

Sally and the gang, meanwhile, have just cut off the oil supply to the region. Hope the air conditioning is running on a separate circuit. Once Eggman realizes that there’s an oil embargo happening, he makes his escape, with Sonic calling Tails to tell him he needs a lift. And since the villain has escaped to the Flying Battery, “lift” is the operative word. Except that it ISN’T the Eggster’s final destination. Instead, he only went to the Battery so he could hop a space shuttle to the Death Egg. That means Sonic hitches a ride on the outside of the shuttle through an oxygen-free environment. “Not one of my brighter moments,” he says. No argument.

From this perspective, Sonic can get a gander of what’s happening to Mobius while Eggman helpfully fills in the gaps with exposition, which causes Sonic to have another helping of deja-vu. After telling Sonic and us that he’ll be using his roboticizer to “stabilize” things, in the same way that a guillotine will keep you from ever having another bad hair day, he goes into mecha mode while mercilessly taunting Sonic. And for a while it appears as if he may have the upper spiked hand. But he then mentions in mid-gloat that the ship is running on Chaos Emerald power; the rather psychedelic light show from a broken cable should have been a tip-off. Sonic then pulls the ultimate Do NOT Try This At Home maneuver and, instead of being fried, he goes Super instead. “Sometimes you make this too easy.” No argument.

Sonic proceeds to mop the floor with the mecha, the subsequent release of Eggman bombs notwithstanding. And of course now is a good time for Snively to check in and says that according to the Weather Channel they can expect a serious apocalypse with intermittent planetary destruction. That leaves Sonic with one option: grab some cable and make with the Chaos Control!

That pretty much does something to calm things down as Sally and the gang can observe. What the “something” is will have to wait while the last page does the same sort of white out that happened in S225 and we watch Sonic and Sally sort of hopefully connect with each other. Everybody: “D’awwwww.”

HEAD: Unfortunately, Archie insists on screwing with the Sonic-Sally relationship. So despite all the work, Sally is going to end up roboticized.

What? Archie Comic broke the news about Sally when they announced the contents of S232 in the preview media. Not that that tells us everything, of course. For instance, they never mentioned whether Sally has free will, the way Sonic’s Uncle Chuck did in season 2 of SatAM Sonic. That would affect the dynamic of their relationship, but then again Archie hasn’t done much by way of writing about Sonic’s ‘rents, either; remember, theirs is a mixed marriage (one bot, one not). Besides, the inhabitants of the whole planet were roboticized at one point, only to have it all undone by space aliens in Karl Bollers’s infamous “The Last Robian.” At least now Jules has some company.

This installment finally brings the story to where it belongs. Instead of being about Sonic escaping the traps, it’s about Sonic escaping the traps. Most of the story up to this point felt like a stroll down Memory Lane for old school gamers, with more attention being paid to the geography than to the characters. Starting with the previous issue and really pouring it on in this one, the flashbacks to previous stories add an emotional element that makes this story way more than just an exercise in nostalgia. Better late than never to get one’s priorities straight.

There has to be a confrontation between Sonic and Boss Robotnik; it wouldn’t be a Sonic story without one. In this case, it starts on Mobius and progresses onto the Death Egg 2.0. I thought the deus ex machina that wins the fight, the Chaos Energy Cable Channel, was a stroke of genius. Rotor and Antoine see their share of action as well.

It’s a pity that the way this story worked involved not telling much of a story until you get close to the end. In that respect, it’s reminiscent of the ST:TNG episode “Cause and Effect.” We come into the ep with the Enterprise crew having a Groundhog Day experience of getting repeatedly run over by another starship. As with the Genesis arc, SOMEONE has to be able to step just far enough outside their abiding reality to break the cycle. That someone was Data in the Star Trek episode and both Sonic and Sally in this arc. Which is what being the hero is all about. Head Score: 8.

EYE: While there are some pretty impressive panels here (Sally’s déjà vu, the final two pages), equally impressive is the layout. Every page, it seems, has a slightly edgy layout that ignores the convention of merely arranging boxes on a page like a city street grid, but doing so without making it look like a punk ‘zine from the Nineties. It helps communicate the instability of the cosmos as it’s on the verge of flying apart. Nice touch. Eye Score: 10.

HEART: Big-time Heart in this installment. From Sally’s Freudian slip to her flashbacks to the psychic connection between her and Sonic during the final fadeout, this is no longer just a recap of the games. And it’s also why Sega will let Archie continue to come back to the SatAM well in the writing of this comic.

What, after all, has been the Heart experience with the Sonic games? Amy Rose, I’m sorry to say, has never been treated seriously as a romantic interest for the Blue Blur. She’s been acting like an overgrown kid. She may have been upgraded as of the first Sonic Adventure game, but thanks to Sega she’s still seriously immature.

And what’s been Sega’s idea of a romantic element in the games overall? In Sonic Adventure, the closest thing was an echidna babe for Knuckles, and she turned out to be a ghost from the past, Tikal. In Sonic Adventure 2, there was another ghost girl, Maria, as the object of Shadow’s preoccupation. In the 2006 Sonic the Hedgehog game, we were treated to Sonic kissing Princess Elise; seriously, who needed to see THAT? There was the genie babe in Sonic and the Secret Rings, and Merlina in Sonic and the Black Knight, and… Good grief, Sega even managed to cobble together a decent romantic interest between Silver and Blaze, but when it comes to Sonic himself they’re hopeless. I’ve said all along that I’m not wedded to the SatAM continuity if Sega and/or Archie could just come up with something better. Face it, they’ve had 20 years to do better and they can’t!

So obviously the Sonic/Sally pairing is here to stay, like Clark Kent and Lois Lane. It may not go anywhere very quickly, and it may be a rocky road at times (and I’d call Sally being roboticized a major speed bump), but there it is.

Ian has recognized this, and does well by it. As with the “non-canonical” marriage of Sonic and Sally in “Mobius: 30 Years Later,” the two of them work well together. And here, in spite of the uncertainty of life in the Sonicverse, that relationship strikes just the right notes. Heart Score: 10.

Sonic Spin: In addition to the usual breathless hype, we’re favored with news of ANOTHER Sonic periodical, Sonic Super Specials. As the Resident Old Fart of the Sonic fandom, I can remember when the Super Specials were 48-page issues of the comic that came out irregularly. Sometimes they integrated seamlessly into the comic continuity, sometimes not so good, and sometimes they brought shame and disgrace to the comic (c.f. the original “Naugus Games” of SSS15). This time around, the title will be a fanzine, with “articles, fan letters, comic features, [and] behind-the-scene exclusives.” If the Sonic comics are the steak, then this is going to be the foil-wrapped baked potato.

Fan Art: Tobias gives us a portrait of Sally, Adia has Sonic chilling in the Green Hill Zone, and Mel Mel does a major cast presentation that I wish I could see in better detail. I can see clearly enough, though, that Sonic and Sally are together front row center.

Fan Funnies: Archie should definitely keep Jason and Geneva in mind. The artwork is cute and the joke is funny, a combo platter that’s not often served up by this comic.

Off-Panel: And it’s great to see Jonathan Gray, our old friend WB, pushing the pencil again. Best part of the strip: the modification of the usual Eggman logo.

Sonic-Grams: Adedeji wants to see the comic characters in the games, which is what I’ve been saying for years; Bunnie, Dulcy and Sally would have made a great girls team in Sonic Heroes. Ian gets props for not making Amy Rose “as crazy as she was portrayed in Sonic X.” We also find out that Honey the Cat might make a cameo appearance, which would probably translate into working her into a crowd scene with no dialogue. A question about a Sally arc in SU gets a non-answer rather than “Give us 4 months to get the birds cleared out of the studio first.” She also asks about Thrash, the attitude-enhanced Tasmanian devil, and wonders about Rouge’s back story. I like the way she thinks! Abigail says that the local comic store in Nova Scotia has stopped stocking Sonic in favor of Spongebob Squarepants and Justin Bieber (How can you tell the difference? Heyo!) and she’s told to take it up with the store manager. The nice thing about being a superannuated adult is just being able to subscribe, though I don’t have the kind of international currency issues Abigail has in the Great White North so talking to the manager is probably the best way to do this.