Sonic Universe #12 (May 2010) Yardley!/Hunzeker cover: And it's the annual grudge match between the white and purple (Fin) and the red and green (Knuckles). Yes, it was meant to sound like something that happens on Friday evenings at the local high school, and it carries even less meaning. "Echoes of the Past: Part 4" Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Tracy Yardley!; Ink: Jim Amash; Color: Jason Jensen; Lettering: Teresa Davidson; Assistant Editor: Paul Kaminski; Editor: Mike Pellerito; Editor-in-Chief: Victor Gorelick; Sega Licensing agents: Cindy Chau and Jerry Chu By the end of part 3, things weren't looking so good for the home team: Fin had captured Knuckles's crew as well as the DUFF and turned them over to Duck Bill, Eggman's local operative and Grandmaster. Fin spells all this out in a one-page exposition while adding that he's just in it for the Master Emerald. He then commits the really elementary villain mistake of going to watch Angel Island's reunion with the hole in the ground from whence it came. That means he isn't in the room to watch when ... Duck Bill then frees everybody. "You have a lot of explaining to do, Bill," Barby says. We all know what THAT means: MORE exposition. As a result we get a page of D.B. explaining that he was pushed into the job of local despot by power-hungry platypuses. The troops were given the cyber- treatment (maybe that part of the deal was spelled out in the fine print of the recruiting brochure, but I doubt it), and Bill had to put on a show of compliance to make Eggman think he'd fully gone over. The DUFFs forgive him, and Bill and Guru both step back and let the other DUFFs start kicking tail. In the case of the Thrashmeister, it involves him using his outside voice to get everyone outside. Mighty, Espio and Knuckles then leave the fight to deal with Angel Island. Using the old Alley- Oop maneuver from countless Rocky and Bullwinkle episodes, Mighty launches Knux upward toward the island. Knuckles isn't too pleased when he gets there and finds that Fin is about to have his way with the Master Emerald. Fin tries turning on such charm as he has to avoid the inevitable fight by offering Knuckles what he's been prattling on about for much of the story arc: "the answers your forefathers could not and would not give you." This attempt to pull Knux toward the dark side is most definitively answered by Knuckles channeling Inigo Montoya's parting shot to Count Rugen: "I want my father back!" After a few more non-negotiable demands, he almost knocks Fin off the island, but then Fin thinks "My turn" and the too-even battle is joined. Each of them powers up, and each of them quotes conflicting versions of Tikal's Prayer. Fin then tries out a warp ring trick, sucking Knuckles halfway through and threatening to close the connection and theoretically slicing Knuckles in half (Ewwww!). But remember when Julie-Su and Ray were told to go to the Island and watch Knuckles's back? She's been doing just that and figures now would be a good time to wing Fin and disarm him. She probably could have been way more ruthless and done way more damage, but the CCA got in her eyes and spoiled her aim. In any event, Knux takes out the trash and dumps Fin off the edge of the island. That leaves four very predictable pages left for this story. In the first three, the DUFF take their leave of the Chaotix, with Thrash speaking vaguely of his unspecified "quest" and warp- ringing to parts unknown. There's also about as close to a romantic interlude between Knuckles and Julie-Su as this comic is going to see. Which leaves one page to account for the fact that Fin, like any other comic book super-villain, survived a fall that would have killed Princess Sally in "Endgame." If Ken Penders had had his way, anyhow. HEAD: I'll admit that I didn't see Duck Bill's face turn coming, though I probably should have. Perhaps I was so impatient for this story to get traction that I was blind-sided, I don't know. Not that that's a bad thing; it did shake up expectations a little. WRT Thrash's, I can remember when the whole mega-voice thing was done before, back in the 1950s. Although the circumstances under which the character of Felix The Cat was created are in dispute, he quickly became a star of silent cartoons in the 1920s; his popularity began to fade as sound came into its own and a certain rodent eclipsed the cat in popularity. Felix lived on in comic books and newspaper strips, and then in 1958 a series of Felix cartoons began which ran for three years. One of the minor characters in this series was a diminutive Eskimo, shorter than Felix himself, named Vavoom. That was not only his name, it was the only word in his vocabulary, and when he said it (always at the top of his lungs), it could rattle the ground and bore holes in the side of mountains. The only way for the resident villain to render him helpless: tape his mouth shut. I don't know if Ian grew up watching those old Felix cartoons, or if he happened to see the three episodes that included him, but I'm old enough that I couldn't help but think of Vavoom when Thrash went into action. It works well enough as a gimmick, but the modeling of the character is still too close to Sonic the Werehog from Sonic Unleashed for comfort. At least he's not modeled after the Robert McKimson Taz made famous in Warner Brothers cartoons. The comic devolves at the end to the basic Knuckles vs. Fin duel. Unfortunately, the fight itself devolves into the hoariest of comic book staples: the duel between two evenly-matched super fighters. The bottom panel on page [14], where their punches cancel each other out, says it all, as does the symmetry between the two of them reflected in the layout of the following page. Ordinarily, fights are supposed to have some kind of outcome. Ian understood that when he had Sonic go up against Robotnik yet again in S200's "Turnabout Is Fair Play," only to kick it up to a new level when he served up a cracked Eggman. But nothing gets older than having a battle between two equally- matched opponents who fight to a draw ... only to pick it up where they left off at a later date and fight to ANOTHER draw and so on and so on and rinse and repeat. Comic books are really susceptible to this syndrome. An exemplar of this, for me anyway, was the match-up between Superman and Mxyzptlk, pronounced mik-ZIZ-pit-lik in the recent Superman toons where the voicework for M was done by Gilbert Gottfried in a perfectly annoying expression of villainy. As I read the stories in the DC comics when I was a kid, it soon became a one-trick story line for me. Since the only way for Superman to prevail was to come up with a new way to make M say, write or spell his name backwards, their duels were all about how Superman would get him to do so. It literally became a situation where if you read one story you've read them all. The Knuckles vs. Fin grudge match is falling into the same tired routine. Fin won't do anything except exploit Knuckles in keeping with his own agenda of crazy, and Knux isn't able to get the upper hand and solve his Fin problem once and for all within the provisions of the CCA, though he came gratifyingly close this time around. In the end, whatever plans this book had for Fin, he's become just another comic book super-villain. And if there's one problem with being a comic book super- villain, it's the fact that after a point the villainy can be forgotten and it becomes all about the super. Even in this arc Fin's appearance was more for Knuckles's bedevilment than for any real objective this story might have had and communicated to the reader. Sure, Fin wants to "study" the Master Emerald, but to no particular end that Ian cares to share with the class. He's already got the warp ring tech thing going for him, so it's not as if he's powerless without the Master Emerald in his possession. This kind of renders the whole exercise pointless. And as I've noted earlier, Fin's warp ring tricks are getting stale from overuse. The Downunda setting was just an excuse to reintroduce the DUFF while, I might note, not making any changes in the characters that were created by the Gallagher-Manak team. And some of those changes are definitely necessary. A male roo with a pouch? A koala that looks more like a rodent? C'mon, this stuff should have been corrected after they debuted in the Tails miniseries, or at least tweaked a little bit. Is Editorial THAT insistent on leaving characters as they are? One bit of tweaking that DID happen, again without explanation, is that once more Ray's stutter has been left out of the story. I can't help but think that Archie got complaints and just quietly dropped it. If I'm wrong, I'm pretty sure they'll never tell, though I'd dearly like to know what happened. Wouldn't you? It's one thing for a story to devolve into fighting; it's another to have the fighting become a by-the-numbers exercise. That's what this felt like up until Fin tried to do his Saw The Guardian In Half With A Warp Ring trick, only to have Julie-Su put in her appearance as poster girl for the Second Amendment. Next time these two fight each other, how about having it MEAN something? Head Score: 6. EYE: Once again, Yardley! wins with great variations on panel shape (the diagonal when Thrash first opens up and cuts loose is particularly effective), and layout (the use of four vertical panels for the Knuckles launch sequence). Eye Score: 10. HEART: Knuckles, I'd like to re-introduce you to a couple of long-lost friends of yours: your nads. Finally, after three issues where Knuckles's sweating of the archaeological details made everything about Angel Island's design seem more and more like a parlor game Fin was playing with Knuckles's head, Knux decides to make this personal. That brings a welcome, if all-too-brief, emotional element to this story. This is another problem I have with the comic book genre: there are fights that have gone on for so long that it seems neither combatant can remember what it was that started the war in the first place. For the 1989 Batman motion picture, Batman's eternal/interminable war with the Joker was given context by having the J-man be the one who murdered Bruce Wayne's parents. Whether that was canon or not, at least it was an explanation. Fin's appearance in this comic, even within this arc, is becoming more and more pointless. It's getting to where Fin and Kunx are going up against each other on general principle. And after a point, that's not enough to justify a story line. I'm afraid that that point has already been reached here. The business with the incongruous architecture may resonate with fans on the late Knuckles comic book title, but I have to wonder how it went down with the newbies. To put it in the simplest manner possible, does Ian know why we should CARE about this slugfest? Heart Score: 5. Off-Panel: The Fin 4-framer could've been worse: he could've warped into his urologist's office. If I were Knuckles, I wouldn't be so exultant about his participation in this by-the- numbers exercise of a story. If I were him, I'd like to go back to the bit part in the Mobius 30 Years Later arc and resume picnicking with Julie-Su IF you know what I mean AND I think you do. BTW, it's already been a year; shouldn't Ian be writing fewer of these Off Panels and featuring more fan submissions? Letters: Joshua wants to know whether Amy Rose will get her own story arc; he's dusted when Mike tosses it back to the readers. We're NOT told, however, that she may play a prominent role in S210 when the story shifts to the insurgency within New Knothole while Sonic Universe covers the adventures of Sonic Tails, Sally and Khan in the Dragon Kingdom. Samantha asks what's so ultimate about Shadow, his Chaos Control ability, his heel turn in Mobius 30 Years Later, and is told obliquely that he'll be back. Say it with me, everyone: "Fangirl!" And Tony is told in the briefest manner possible about the Iron Dominion arc to appear in SU. Fan Art: The odd couple of Enerjak 2.0 and Dr. Fin by Alex, along with a sweet Knuckles-Julie-Su pairing by Dorian.