Sonic the Hedgehog #233 (March 2012)

Ben Bates cover: A mind-addling swirl with Sonic and Antoine on one side of the scales of injustice and Geoffrey on the other, with Naugus looming large in the background. This might have worked fine, except that someone thought that it wasn’t enough. As a result, we also have the panel of judges, King Max, and the ghosts of Hershey and Kodos. The end result looks like an editorial cartoon on acid. Less definitely would have been more here.

“The Trial of Geoffrey St. John”

Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Steven Butler; Ink: Terry Austin; Color: Matt Herms; Lettering: John E. Workman; Assistant Editor: Vincent Lovallo (debut); Editor: Paul Kaminski; Editor-in-Chief: Victor Gorelick; Court Reporter: Mike Pellerito; Sega Licensing reps: Anthony Gaccione and Cindy Chau

Sonic and Tails are in the mountains outside New Mobitropolis checking out the ruins of the “Babylon Rising” story arc and possibly assessing whether they could be fixed up into a ski resort. A two-bird patrol shows up and is more concerned about “the Armada’s shame” than getting off any weapons fire. If you ask me, the Armada’s shame is hiring goofs like these who would make Imperial Storm Troopers look like Special Ops snipers.

But having taken up three pages with this, including a page of vanilla flashback to the events of “One Step Forward” and “Two Steps Back” (S225 and S230 respectively), we cut to the main course: the titular trial. It’s People v. St. John, the less-than-honorable King Naugus presiding, Antoine as prosecutor and Geoff acting as his own lawyer. After Geoff pleads Not Guilty, Antoine begins grilling him. I’ll spare you as much of the trial transcript as possible and hit the highlights:

It seems that during the Great War while he was still a young rookie, Geoff came across “an Ixis artifact” which looks like a green jewel of some kind. Naugus uses this to worm his way into Geoff’s payche and recruit him to his side. I guess he never read Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets where Mr. Weasley offers the sage advice: “Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.”

Geoff uses Antoine’s dad’s training manuals to hone his skills after War Minister Julian reinvents himself as Robotnik while also taking training in the Dark Arts from Naugus via the artifact. There’s been no mention of how he acquired his magical skill set, rudimentary though it may be. So we’ve cleared that up.

Geoff gets himself hired by the Secret Service and lands a co-starring role in the Princess Sally miniseries of years gone by. Geoff also mentions, without documentation or witnesses, that “Max had already sworn the crown to Naugus.” Whatever you say, dude.

After some further strolling down memory lane, including some bad rapping of Prince Elias, Antoine hits a nerve by implying that Geoff’s marriage to Hershey was as much of a scam as pretty much everything else about him since he came across the artifact. In his defense, he mentions that he found her when he was at a low ebb, sounding like he adapted every episode of “Behind The Music.” “She was my partner -- in life as well as in the field. We were married at gunpoint and somehow it felt … right.”

As for her fate, something happened to her in “Soumerca,” which Editorial helpfully explains is the “Mobius’ South America.” Now is that the Soumerca with the rain forests or the Soumerca with the mountains? Man, that’s like back in the bad old days when you said “Africa” and all you thought of were jungles and cannibals. Actually it sounds more like an entry from the Jeff Foxworthy Redneck Dictionary: “Ah got me th’ CoCola franchise fer Venzwela; tha’s in Soumerca.” Anyway, he testifies that she died while staying with the Felidae; cause of death unknown, body never recovered. I said a while ago that Archie owed the readers a damn good explanation of what happened to her; guess what, they STILL do.

But let’s cut to the chase. Geoff claims that he’s innocent of treason because Naugus is the rightful king based on what he heard a talking jewel say to him. The panel of judges chooses to define treason as “pretending to serve the active authority while working against it.” As such, they have no problem convicting him.

And that’s the cue for Naugus to drop the other boot. Using his prerogative as monarch, he issues a Get Out Of Jail Free Card to Geoff. It’s good to be the king.

And we’re now down to one more page, so we see Eggman doing some further customizing of Mecha-Sally, including equipping her with a Power Ring which he thinks will act as a firewall to prevent her regaining her free will as well as having enough juice to smack Sonic’s quills off. Not a good day for the home team.

HEAD: In Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House, he states that contemporary music has become so abstract that the only way a university music department can host such a concert is to bookend it with “cozy and familiar” pieces by composers such as Scott Joplin and James P. Johnson. These pieces represent “a piece of candy at the beginning and a piece of candy at the end.”

Whether Ian Flynn has read Tom Wolfe or not, his “Trial” follows the same exact structure. This is, after all, a 16-pager, with 12 of those pages devoted to characters talking at each other in a courtroom. That’s pretty deadly stuff for a core audience that had been promised “Action and More Action.” So after the “Previously” page we get two pages of Sonic and Tails in a lop-sided battle with a couple of birdbrains, and one page at the end of Eggman being evil. Action! Suspense! Candy.

To give credit where it’s due, the trial format itself is a good way to inject a crazy load of exposition into the story line while merely slowing the pace to a crawl rather than bringing it to a screeching halt. But it still doesn’t quite work.

The biggest problem is the same one on display in the “Inside Job” arc (SU29-32): credibility issues. In “Inside Job” we have to put up with an unsavory character in the person of Scourge, whose assessment of his lot in life is necessarily self-serving. Likewise, Geoffrey tells his side of the story, which of course isn’t the whole story. For one thing, Ian has side-stepped any Mobian courtroom ritual where the defendant promises to tell the truth. I don’t know why Geoff couldn’t be admonished that he’s is standing in the presence of Aurora or the Walkers or some other authority figure or even threatened with further punishment for committing simple perjury. Maybe Editorial figured that would have been asking for trouble.

Likewise, Antoine never gets a chance to cross-examine Geoff to challenge him on the veracity of any of his statements, some of which beg to be challenged. The problem begins right out of the box with his tale about the “artifact.” First off, I’ve seen this movie before: the first Care Bears movie, to be exact. In it a speaking book with classical runic script sweet-talks the boy Nicholas who becomes the foil for whatever evil spirit the book embodies.

Then, too, as the judicial panel points out toward the end, Mobius already had a legitimate government in place. But Geoff would rather listen to a piece of talking costume jewelry. This reminds me of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” where Dennis the anarchist tells King Arthur “Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.” I suppose if Geoff had told anybody that Naugus was the True King of Mobius because an enchanted piece of bling had told him so, all he would have gotten for his trouble would have been a lot of funny looks and a one-way ticket to the closed ward. Yet Ian can’t even let himself have a little fun with the absurdity inherent in the material.

And it is unforgivable that Geoff pretty much skates over the question of Hershey’s ultimate fate. She “died;” nothing about cause, no body to deal with. Instant cold case. Yet another example of why I hate loose continuity.

But if the trial itself is a joke in spots, it’s left to Naugus himself to provide the punchline and to demonstrate that the Royal Fix is in. Geoff’s conviction was never going to happen. That ought to cause Naugus to drop some points in his approval rating.

Honestly, after a certain point I more or less tuned out the details of Geoff’s testimony. It covered too much territory and too many continents. Smart move, as it turned out. The entire trial was rendered meaningless by Naugus’s pardon. It’s still a useful collection of (one-sided) information about the continuity, but looking back on it this story didn’t advance the continuity at all. This was an exercise in marking time. And I’m sorry but “Soumerca”? Give me a break! Head Score: 4.

EYE: Steven Butler gets as much of a chance to flash back as to document the trial. And he does some nice facial progressions, especially as Geoff comes close to losing it after Antoine pushes the Hershey button. Eye Score: 9.

HEART: If there’s any kind of emotional core here, it’s the Hershey interlude. I really wanted it to work, too, but I guess it was doomed from the start.

I’ve already discussed the fact that this is all Geoff’s side of the story with no second opinions. That’s fair; SOMEONE gets to speak for Hershey in her absence, even if Geoff’s dialogue is more than a little heavy-handed.

Yet Ian misses a chance to inject SOME real feeling into the situation other than Geoff snarling and gnashing his teeth at Antoine. It could have been done without making too much of a demand on the core audience. It would only have taken more of a flashback to Geoff learning that something had happened, a flashback he wouldn’t necessarily have shared with the court. I’m not talking TV-grade gore from the NCIS or CSI franchises, just something beyond Geoff’s talking at us.

Speaking of Geoff, Naugus’s playing on his emotions through the artifact does have an authentic feeling to it. That at least gives Geoff plausible motivation to do what he did. It just doesn’t carry forward into the telling of Hershey’s fate. And I really wish it had, because there’s a certain absence of closure about the way it was handled. I don’t know whether Ian plans to bring back Hershey or not; this IS a comic book, after all, and the medium is notorious for pulling these kinds of tricks. Heart Score: 5.

“From The Shadows”

Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Evan Stanley; Ink: Terry Austin; Color: Evan Stanley; Lettering: John E. Workman

We start with two pages of the Acorns in crisis. The “loss” of Sally is overshadowing everything. Max, who doesn’t sound nearly as incoherent as someone truly distracted by grief and dementia (trust me on this one), doesn’t want to be run out of Knothole, and his wife Alicia seconds the emotion. Elias, whom Meg is calling “Eli,” wants to move the family to safety, “safety” being a relative term since Naugus is still calling the shots. Who you gonna call?

Exactly. Harvey Who, to be specific, former director of the Secret Service, now living in retirement. Elias pays him an after-dark visit, but Harv is initially more interested in throwing a lot of recrimination and back story at Elias. Eli, however, isn’t going to take exposition for an answer. Short story shorter, Double-H tells Elias to continue with the plans to relocate the family, if only to get them out of the way of the plot machinery. Meanwhile, he’ll be putting together a Knothole Freedom Fighters Tribute Band; auditions to be announced.

HEAD: Elias’s mishpoche should be glad they’re in transit. If you look back at coups throughout history, you’ll notice that after the autocrat in question is overthrown and killed (Louis XVI, Czar Nicholas II Romanoff, Saddam Hussein, Moammar Khadaffi), the remaining family members are also murdered for fears of a reawakened dynasty in the future, because the family members were complicit in the crimes of the previous regime, or because at that point in the revolution bloodshed has become a rush. But even if the CCA is a dead issue, Archie Comics would hesitate to endorse familicide even in a comic book. So the Acorns are left to shuffle out of the continuity for the time being.

One of the good points about loose continuity is that it can provide writers with a pool of one-shot characters who were used more as a joke than as a serious part of an old continuity. That’s the story behind Harvey Who, whose name is a dead giveaway that (as established in the Sonic Spin section to come) he made his first and only other appearance during the Gallagher-Manak days when the comic was still trying to cobble together a synthesis of the two Sonic animated series from the early 1990s: the superior SatAM and the less-so Adventures of Sonic The Hedgehog. The very looseness that allows these older characters to be reborn also allows that they can be modified as the new story line dictates. Thus Harv is able to berate Elias and then congratulate him on having grown a pair in the meantime.

This story also tells us a little about Meg’s back story, but not much. She mentions that her first husband had died, unnamed and of unknown cause. This is still a crumb or two more than when she started in this comic. In S121’s “The Prince and The Revolution,” Geoff and Hershey come upon Elias who has apparently settled down in Feral Forest with a VERY preggers furry named Megan. He hasn’t told her about His Dark Past and writer Karl Bollers dba “Benny Lee” didn’t tell us whether Elias was the father of Meg’s unsprung offspring. So all we’ve really learned is that Elias doesn’t need to take a paternity test. He does seem to have done the right thing by Meg, though, and he gets points for that.

Given the fact that this is a five-pager with only two panels that don’t feature substantial dialogue balloons, it’s pretty clear that Ian Flynn is primarily teeing up developments to come. Call it a necessary evil. Head: 7.

EYE: Evan Stanley is turning out to be a real find. Not only is his modeling good, but he uses a soft golden color scheme, evocative of firelight, as the colorist. It’s as close to Rembrandt as this comic will ever get. Eye Score: 10.

HEART: The problem with a five-pager like this is that it offers a limited amount of space to take care of the business of exposition. If there’s a LOT to get through, it also limits the Heart potential.

Ian does good work and bad work here. The good work is the meeting between Elias and Harvey Who. It’s pretty elementary: eyeball-to-eyeball, attitude-to-attitude. This is the sort of thing that plays well in a boy’s book.

I wish I could have said the same for the Acorns interlude. There’s a lot of Heart potential in the situation of the Royal Family down on their luck, the fact of Sally’s “loss” and Mama Meg. Maybe it’s the fact that they only got two pages to Harvey’s three, but this story comes off as if the characters are just reading their lines instead of feeling them. The one panel where King Max speaks should bristle with the emotional tension that’s par for the course when a close family member is deteriorating. It just doesn’t come off here. The story as a whole isn’t a failure by any means, but it’s not even close to taking it to the next level, either. That may have worked in scripts where the set-up was simpler, in stories such as “Father and Son” or “Stargazing.” Here, it’s just a story. Heart Score: 5.

SONIC SPIN: Those are good design studies for Harvey, but it

also demonstrates why Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole didn’t do so well at the box office (it lost about $24 million). I mean, owls flying and owls not flying are really your only options. The Happy Feet films were the proverbial birds of a different feather.

FAN ART: Gone but not forgotten, the fans and Sonic/Sally shippers, including Julia, Michael, and Meagan, are keeping the faith.

FAN FUNNIES: I’m sure I could have gotten the joke if I knew my Metal from my Mecha Sonic.

OFF PANEL: Yes, court rooms can be funny, as I remember from the old “Night Court” sitcom. In the case of “Law & Order,” they got the humor out of the way early on in the episode, especially in those with Jerry Orbach as Lennie Briscoe. By the back half of the show the courtroom drama took over, and what was left was a sense of tired irony, very well done by Steven Hill as Adam Schiff. Oh, and here they just go for the cheap grade school humor.

FAN MAIL: Kristy hopes Sally gets better soon, and expects to keep with the book for the next 4 years to issue #300. She’s told that Mighty and Charmy will be here eventually, that the fun and games will continue until S250 (Numerology, anyone?), but Editorial chooses not to comment on the odds for a Sonic/Amy pairing. Also, she’s told that Sonic’s speed is only “enhanced” by power rings. By comparison, all Alex wants to know is what’s happening with the Brotherhood of Retired Guardians, and Editorial chooses to distract him by pointing to Knuckles back issues. Like THAT’S going to help!