Sonic Super Special #14 Spaz/Penders/Ray cover: We've got Sonic with fingers that look like sausages, we've got Julie-Su looking alarmed, we've got Robotnik showing more ivory than a piano showroom, we've got Snively in a lime-green suit and a Snidely Whiplash moustache, we've got Sally in a power suit and I don't mean the kind from "Zone Wars: Giant Robotno" (S12), we've got Knuckles swinging, we've got Dimitri almost totally obscured at the top of the drawing, we've got a couple armored echidnas, we've got action, we've got machinery, we've got incoherency, heck, we've got a contender for Worst Cover Art for 2000! "Law of the Land" Story: Evan Skolnick (debut); Script: Jim Spivey (debut); Art: Suzanne Paddock (debut); Ink: Harvo; Color: Josh and Aimee Ray; Lettering: Vickie Williams; Editorial: G-Force. Ain't zone portals a drag? Sonic and Sally are just off on their own minding their own business when one opens up, a couple echidnas in body armor jump out, smack (excuse me, "SMAK") Sally around, "arrest" Sonic, and spirit him away to...the Planet of the Lawyers!! [Gratuitous movie quote: "IT'S A MADHOUSE!! A MADHOOOUSE!!!] In this zone the judicial system has been automated. Unfortunately, the holo-judge is Robotnik. The prosecutor is Snively in a clown suit. I mean, come on! Green racing stripes? They sure ain't pin stripes! And for the defense: You're going to learn a number of helpful phrases in the course of this review that you may not have encountered before. One of them is "high concept." It's a show biz phrase which is roughly defined as: "Sell me on this idea you have for a [musical/movie/TV pilot] in ten words or less." The fewer words the better. It's the equivalent of getting one's foot in the door; you don't even need to really think through the idea; it just has to be able to fit into one short sentence that captures the essence of the end-product. A few examples: "Shanghai Noon": A Jackie Chan western. "Chicken Run": "Stalag 17" with chickens. "The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle:" Rocky and Bullwinkle meets Roger Rabbit. "Law of the Land": Sally McBeal. Yeah, boys and girls, this little 12-page exercise seems to have been inspired more by a bad pun than by a good story idea. But we persevere. According to Sally's page of exposition, this zone's current state of affairs came about after a get-tough-on-crime administration took over. Soon, even trivial transgressions were resulting in serious jail time. Could've been worse, though; I don't remember Sal bringing up the subject of capital punishment. And computerizing the legal system by bringing the Judgmental Unrelenting Digitized Government Enforcer online didn't help matters any. How the J.U.D.G.E. got echidnas to act as his shock troops is never spelled out. At least the writers have got Sonic's character down right; he impulsively dashes off to unplug the J.U.D.G.E. without any kind of strategy. He nearly gets nabbed in a sequence that makes me think that this was originally designed as a two-parter meant to run as a back story. I mean, why the one-page recap of what we already know unless this was meant to run in two segments published a month apart? Sonic manages to retreat back to Sally's office where an off-hand comment of hers gives Sonic an idea. The idea: rack up so many misdemeanor charges that the system overloads. Which sounds sorta kinda like how cyber-hackers managed to make mincemeat of e-bay a couple months back, so it's not that far- fetched. With the J.U.D.G.E. offline, Zonic then shows up to prevent anything even remotely resembling the sexual shenanigans of "Ally McBeal" from taking place. This IS an Archie comic, after all. HEAD: What can I say about the plot? Been there, done that, saw the episode of "Doug" on Nickelodeon where Doug imagines he's Quailman doing battle against the Rulemeister and his "silly and pointless rules." They were always referred to as "silly and pointless rules," BTW; no point in making Broadcast Standards and Practices think you were advocating anarchy. So we see Sonic committing "minor offences and misdemeanors" to get around the emulation clause. We're talking penny ante stuff like jaywalking and "cutting in line." Sonic never commits a SERIOUS crime, such as...oh, I don't know...theft of intellectual property. Interesting concept, intellectual property. It refers to the creation of something that need not physically exist. The most obvious example is getting the idea for a book or a song. When Ray Parker Jr. alleged that Huey Lewis ripped off the theme from "Ghostbusters" to write "I Want A New Drug," that was an intellectual property case. If you ask me, though, I think a stronger case could be made that the theme from "Ghostbusters" was itself ripped off from "Soul Finger" by the Bar Kays, but I digress. We're talking about intellectual property and lawsuits, two matters very much on the mind of the management at Archie Comics these days. I reported in the course of my review of S84 that Dan DeCarlo had been let go by Archie Comics after over 40 years of defining the look of the product. At first I thought that the management had decided that with the souring outlook for the industry as a whole they were willing to put an old workhorse out to pasture. That ain't the half of it! Seems there's been talk of a live action "Josie and the Pussycats" movie floating around. Yeah, I KNOW it sounds thin, but Dan DeCarlo took it seriously enough to press his claim to being the creator of Josie et al. This precipitated his dismissal from Archie, which claimed that someone in MANAGEMENT created (or co-created) the characters. I'll wait a minute to let the laughter die down. Anyway, that's led not only to the lawsuit filed by DeCarlo wherein he seeks to get his propers, but to a statement by the Archie management that appeared in one of the industry publications. I didn't read the statement, but those fans who have were shocked by its tone: "like a father delivering a lecture" was how one reader put it. Archie even clamped down on a column in a fanzine, "Riverdale Ramblings," for even bringing up the subject. [BEGIN EDITORIAL MODE] Ken Penders has stated on his Web site's message board that the publisher has decided to fly in the face of the most elementary marketing wisdom and NOT do anything special to promote Sonic #100, for reasons Ken couldn't/wouldn't get into. While my own guess is that they've decided to let Queen Alicia die (and who wants to hype a funeral?), I think fans have something bigger to worry about: whether Archie Comics will still be in business next year when S100 is scheduled to appear. The hassling of Melissa Joan Hart, it would seem, was not an isolated incident of bad corporate judgment. Taken together, recent events leave the impression that the management of Archie Comics has lost perspective and is seriously out of control. It would be easy to say that all those repetitive, mush-brained plot lines have finally taken their toll, but that does nothing to explain the apparent bunker mentality that seems to have settled down in Mamaroneck. IMHO the management's recent spate of bad decision-making threatens the existence of the entire company, quite apart from shaky market conditions. Even in a strong market, where's the logic in honking off your customers by dumping your top talent over something that should have been worked out through arbitration? They just don't seem to care that they're losing the public relations war; they'd better START caring, and FAST! [END EDITORIAL MODE] Aside from the Sally/Ally pun that inspired this story, it worked surprisingly well. They didn't push the gimmick too far, which suits me just fine. I've lost my enthusiasm for "Ally McBeal," anyway. If you asked me what the show is about, all I could tell you about the show is that the law firm has a unisex bathroom and the people who work at the firm have sex with each other every chance they get. It's probably just me; I prefer lawyer shows that are more serious about the law: "The Practice" and "Law & Order" are my current faves. But this story wasn't half bad. The new kids, Skolnick and Spivey, show promise. Head Score: 8. EYE: If you thought that Jim Fry's style has been influenced by manga, check out newcomer Suzanne Paddock's work. She's used a venerable convention of manga and given Sonic and Sally two highlights per eyeball. If this were a REAL manga, though, they'd have FOUR highlights per eyeball. Large eyes have come to denote sympathy, gentleness and femininity, while a star highlight in the eye denotes yearning, longing, dreaming...the very depths of a character's soul. Cold, evil people tend to have small eyes. Why the eye fascination? Personally I think you can find the answer in the researches of Konrad Lorenz. In addition to discovering the phenomenon of "imprinting" wherein the newborn will tend to bond with the first thing it sees, his research also concluded that the eyes of an infant are its most dominant facial feature. Therefore, when we look at the pictures of Sally and Julie-Su on the cover of this issue, we find them attractive because they have those large baby eyes that make us feel (at least unconsciously) all warm and protective... Sorry; got carried away again. I had mixed feelings about the Sally McBeal character design. There's been ample notice of the fact that Sally's head has always been oversized when compared with her body, and Paddock has amply lampooned that notion. Unfortunately, in pushing the identification of Sally and the character portrayed by Callista Flockhart she's made this Sally look positively anorexic. NOT a good look for her, no matter what Sonic says. And what's with her disappearing- reappearing lips? Now you see 'em, now you don't! Paddock's artwork is good, but I don't know if I want to see it on a regular basis. Eye Score: 6. HEART: The point of this story was Sonic's cleverness in taking the J.U.D.G.E. offline. That's not a bad thing, BTW; at least he didn't go around merely kicking butt. Yet Sally McBeal served no real purpose in the story. She was there to bring Sonic (and the readers) up to speed and that was about it. There was no reference to a parallel Sonic in Litigopolis, or any real reason given why Sally would be willing to cut Sonic some slack aside from her appraisal of the dysfunctional legal system. Maybe Skolnik and Spivey didn't feel the need to fill out the character, assuming her to be an extension of the Sally on Mobius Prime, and with only 12 pages at their disposal they had to cut corners somewhere. It still feels too much like Sonic is the only one in the zone with a personality. One of the drawbacks of comic book writing, I suppose. Heart Score: 6. "The Best of Times, The Worst of Times" Story: Ken Penders; Art: Steve Butler; Ink: Pam Eklund; Color: Josh and Aimee Ray, Lettering: Vickie Williams; Editorial: G-Force. Regular readers of these reviews will be familiar with the Bollers Opening Gambit: Stretching the opening action, however insignificant, over the first three pages of a story. Well, friends and neighbors, we have something even more venerable here: The Joe Gillis Opening Gambit. Joe Gillis is the central character in Billy Wilder's 1950 classic motion picture, "Sunset Boulevard." A failed screenwriter, Joe finds himself in the palatial home (and the clutches) of Norma Desmond, aging silent film star whose grip on reality is about as firm as that of Miss Havisham in "Great Expectations" (to keep things in a Dickensian vein). When the film opens, we find Joe floating face down in Norma Desmond's swimming pool, and he then proceeds to narrate the film from the soggy beyond. This isn't exactly the same piece of real estate where Knuckles begins the tale, in one of several compromises that mar an otherwise excellent story structure. This story really opens with Knuckles, the Chaotix, Julie- Su, and Constable Remington (with a piece of arm candy) attending the Lara-Le/Wynmacher nuptials. Vector only shoots off his yap a little bit, and Remington gets called away from the reception. You didn't expect Locke to show up at the wedding, did you? Turns out he's got a meeting with the rest of the Brotherhood, including the last unnamed member of the Guardian line, Mathias, who appears to be blind and is decked out in purple and gold. His duds are way more tasteful than those of Rembrandt in "Childhood's End" (K25) where it looks like Rembrandt had a habit of dressing in the dark. Where has Mathias been? Keeping company with Joe Gillis. Ken has tried to be subtle about it but it's still pretty obvious. "The concept of time is irrelevant to one such as I," he says, and that can only be true if one has passed from time to eternity. Add that to his talking about "having given up my physical form" and the upcoming sequence involving Hawking on page 20 and you get the impression that the Brotherhood is only an intermediate step to get to the Netherhood. Or whatever Ken wants to call it. Anyway, the issue at hand is that having sensed a disturbance in the Force Mathias reveals that Dimitri is on the move again. So are Knuckles, Julie-Su and the Chaotix, as they gallop across the landscape on pashaback. The Constable, though, after dropping off his date, goes to that most reliable of news sources: a cabbie. Harry, in this case. Seems General Buzzcut is running out of patience with echidna politicians, as well as with Ken Penders who hasn't used him in a story line since the Dark Alliance arc (K22-24). Let's see: so far Ken has gotten Wynmacher and Lara-Le married, invoked the Dark Legion, and brought back Harry and General Buzzcut. Now that the Knuckles comic is kaput, I suppose some housecleaning is in order. Knuckles and the group arrive at the ruins of Dark Legion HQ, while the Brotherhood shows up at the Grand Conservatory. While it appears that the latter are doing a pretty good job starting to clean house, we cut away to Lara-Le and Wynmacher arriving for their honeymoon at...Albion?!? I had some problems with that. In the first place, isn't Albion supposed to be on Mobius Prime? And in the second place, from the ending of the Forgotten Tribe arc (K12) I got the impression that Albion was some sort of mystico-hidden Brigadoonish type place, and not the echidna equivalent of the Four Seasons. Kinda cheapens the effect, if you ask me. Back in Echidnaopolis, Buzzcut and his cohorts are moving out when they come upon an EST roadblock. It becomes a question of who does something stupid first. One of the convenient things about being in Dark Legion Central is that there's always someone lurking about somewhere. In "Shadows" (SSS11) it was Simon. Here, it's a bunch of Legionnaires who kidnap Julie-Su while Knuckles and the Chaotix have their hands full. And after being in a vegetative state since Knuckles #6's "Zero Hour and Counting," Steppenwolf calls Hawking home to the Netherhood. Methinks we haven't heard the last of this plot point. Julie-Su is taken to a Klingon warbird, much like the one in "Star Trek IV." The boys in Legal at Archie Comics may have had other things on their minds because unlike the bat'tleh that was pretty much censored in "Door To The Past" (S82), they let it pass. Julie-Su is "welcomed" by Lien-Da, who's shed her leather outfit from the Dark Alliance arc; I wonder if anyone complained. She's thrown in a cell with Simon and Floren-Ca (remember Floren- Ca? She was alluded to in "Shadows". Ken must REALLY want to clean house!). Lien-Da discusses this with...Moritori Rex, who appears to have undergone lasik eye surgery at some point. And now we come to the big special effects set piece of the story. Dimitri activates a "quantum beam" that envelopes much of the Floating Island and even Albion, unless the inclusion of a picture of the honeymooners on page 24 was a continuity error. [Semi-obligatory movie quote: "Oh, now THERE'S a big surprise!!"] It's this spreading force field that kicks Knuckles in the back during the prologue. But that's nothing compared to the kick in the head the readers get when Dimitri declares that the beam simply banished everyone to another zone. Looks like Ken's even supplying his own spoilers now. HEAD: It's a good story with several serious flaws that I wish Ken had caught before they were carved in stone. In the first place, he makes the same mistake that Tom Rolston and Karl Bollers made in "Stop...Sonic Time!" (SSS5). It's a natural enough mistake, though. The vast majority of stories people read are written in the third person (he said, she did, they thought, etc.). As a result, the author has the advantage of omniscience. This means that he/she can describe things happening that the principle character(s) need know nothing about. But in a first person story (I did, we said, etc.), everything is supposed to happen only from the point of view of the narrator. That can make for interesting story-telling, but you lose omniscience in the first person. There's no way that an author can describe what's happening somewhere other than where his/her primary character is at any given moment. I learned this by personal experience, having written the fanfic "My Quills Are Quick" in the first person style of Mickey Spillane. Here, however, Ken starts out in the first person with the segue from the Prologue (the Joe Gillis Opening Gambit) to the wedding scene, at which point he drops all pretense to writing in the first person. If he had kept writing in the first person, of course, there would be no way that Knuckles could know about Remington's conversation with Harry, or Hawking's demise, or the arrival of his mother and stepfather on Albion, or Julie-Su's reunion with Simon and Floren-Ca, or ANYTHING that happened anyplace while he was somewhere else. It makes me wonder whether the Prologue wasn't a late addition to the story, something tacked on to fill out the page allotment and hook the reader, or whether someone thought that opening with the Lara-Le/Wynmacher wedding was too wussy for the comic. My own suggestion, if I were editing this story, would have been to drop the Joe Gillis opening and any pretense to writing in the first person all together, move the Prologue sequence to its rightful place in the narrative (in this case, between pages 24 and 25), and maybe borrow one of those pages as a true prologue incorporating dialogue along these lines: KNUCKLES seen standing alone, looking out toward the horizon. JULIE-SU walks up to him. JULIE-SU: "Give it up, Knuckles." KNUCKLES: "He'll be here! He's my dad." JULIE-SU: "And she's his ex-wife! You honestly think he'd want to put himself through that?" KNUCKLES: (deflated) "You're right. But they got together for my birthday party!" JULIE-SU: "That was for YOU; this is for HER. He's doing her, and himself, a favor by staying away. Now let's go; they're just about to start." OK, so it's a little on the wussy side itself, but I still think it's a great opening that gives Knuckles a little bit of an interior life, as well as a great foreshadowing of Knuckles' state of mind when he comes to and finds everyone gone. Beyond all that, the few other continuity problems (the placement of Albion, the change of Moritori Rex) are nominal. But I was seriously surprised when Dimitri made that "exiling everyone to a zone" statement. Not only does it undercut his reputation for ruthlessness, it made the ending of the story that much less of a cliffhanger. We now know that everyone is alive and...somewhere, and Knuckles has to find them. When Knuckles DOES find out everyone he cares about is alive (including Julie- Su, who's still on board the Klingon warbird), the reader will be in a position to say "You've only just found out?" Dimitri's balloon could have been dropped from the story and it would have made subsequent developments far more powerful. Unless someone in Editorial and/or Legal insisted that it be put in there so as not to run afoul of some provision of the Comic Code. Or else Ken did it himself to avoid a repeat of the kind of grief he got from the fans during "Endgame." I'm sure Ken will go public about it on his Message Board at some point. Head Score: 9. EYE: Absolutely amazing! Butler's work is great here, even stronger than it was during the Sonic Adventure adaptation. On some pages (the wedding scene, in particular) I found myself wondering whether Manny Galan hadn't dropped in to do a guest shot. Makes me realize what the fans are missing with the cancellation of the book. Eye Score: 10. HEART: This story is like one of those Lethal Weapon movies where you KNOW that the person for whom life is starting to finally get good may as well be walking around with a target painted on his forehead. Actually, there's more than a little "Endgame" in this story as well. Just as Sonic has to deal with Sally's "demise" and his being implicated in same, now Knuckles will have to deal with his big time "failure" as a Guardian. Again, I figure that members of the Netherhood will feature in Knux's redemption. So far, so good. Heart Score: 9. No letters, no artwork, just the Freditor bludgeoning us to death for a paragraph by telling us what we should have been able to conclude ourselves about Knuckles' impending emotional state. But that's going to have to wait until the summer vacation's over. Until then, we'll have to make do with more bot-kicking in the Sonic comic (the cover of #88 is on display, which shows you how little Archie values the current story lines) as well as the Monkey Khan origin story. Which may not go over well with the core audience. But most of them will probably spend a good portion of the summer with their noses buried in "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire." I can't say that I'm displeased by the prospect. If Archie is going to lose readers, better they should lose them to REAL BOOKS!