Sonic Universe #27 [June 2011]

Yardley!/Hunzeker cover: Before going into battle against Enerjak, Silver checks himself in the mirror to see if he has any spinach stuck in his teeth. Unfortunately, there aren’t any mirrors around and Enerjak’s headgear is the best he can come up with. Good portrait.

“Fractured Mirror: Part 3: Shattered”

Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Tracy Yardley!; Ink: Jim Amash; Color: Ray Dillon; Lettering: Phil Felix; Editor: Paul Kaminski; Editor-in-Chief: Victor Gorelick; President: Mike Pellerito; Sega Licensing reps: Cindy Chau and Jerry Chu

We’re back with the Silver vs. Enerjak brawl, and they brought their A-games. They also brought their B-movie dialogue:

Silver: “You ruined this world! You sent your Prelates to my zone! I WILL defeat you!”

Enerjak: “Traveler, you cannot begin to FATHOM me, much less stop me.”

And as a reminder that this isn’t just a singles match, we get a 2-page splash of the Prelates vs the Recolors, complete with name tags, making this feel like a freshman mixer at a very weird community college. This is followed by a page of taunting from E-dawg, telling Silver that he’s gotten bored playing with the Recolors and is looking for new collectibles. He asks Silver if his home world is any fun, and instead of saying “Yeah, if you like hanging around a couple of old farts all day,” tries launching the Big E into orbit. Silver has a plan, but first he tells Jani-Ca that the mother-daughter reunion will have to be put on hold.

In a mercifully wordless sequence, we see Jani-Ca swinging her sword and Silver harvesting the Cores of the Prelates. This then kicks off a VERY extended sequence that features a LOT of talk, especially after Dagger (the Rotor Recolor) asks out loud whether restoring the Cores to their owners’ bodies is really such a good idea until they can get someone in to dust and vacuum the place. That ticks off Silver who wishes HIS problems were that simple.

And meanwhile, Enerjak has just been hanging around and taking it all in. The Recolors know what THAT means and begin to scatter, but EJ recaptures the Cores and Scarlette (the Bunnie Recolor) for good measure. This ticks off Demo (the Bean Recolor). Silver (the Sonic Recolor) tries to rally the troops and instead is treated by Enerjak to a heaping helping of Shut Up. As Enerjak goes into completest collector mode, Silver wastes a panel reminding himself why he isn’t all that nostalgic about returning to his home world.

By now, Enerjak has thinned out the Recolor herd so that it’s just him and Jani-Ca, whom he begins to talk to death. This gives Silver a chance to power up and attack Enerjak as a prelude to … attacking Enerjak some more as a segue into the final installment. Expect Silver to attack Enerjak a lot.

HEAD: What we have here is a comic book sandwich: a layer of action, followed by a layer of talk, followed by another layer of action. It’s pretty standard comic book stuff, except for the sequence where Silver harvests the Cores. The action there is so straightforward that, really, no dialogue was required. I can only hope that Ian does this more often. I assume he’s getting paid by the page, not by the word.

This time around, even Enerjak stands back and phones it in. Whether he’s saving himself for the next issue or has gotten bored with the script, it’s your call. He isn’t exactly breaking a sweat here, even when he’s eyeball-to-eyeball with Jani-Ca.

The big dramatic development here is the reduction of the Recolors to Cores themselves. Or it would have been had Ian and Tracy dwelt on the process of the transformation. We don’t get to see it; what we get are occasional frames showing Enerjak with glowing Nerf™ balls in and around his hand. That doesn’t exactly scream “evil,” and even the transformation sequences in “Sonic Unleashed” were more of a show. Did Editorial think that it was just too traumatic for a generation raised on shooter and fighting video games? Instead, Enerjak and Silver have to content themselves with tossing chunks of the scenery at each other. Kinda loses something, if you ask me.

Jani-Ca gets the juiciest acting here, especially when she sees Silver powering up into butt-kicking mode. Otherwise, she’s going through the motions like everyone else.

Again, this is probably due to the fact that this is issue 3 of a 4-issue arc. That means, unfortunately, no real story development until next issue. That there’s also no real character development involving anybody goes without saying.

That may not be for want of trying. Ian let it be known on the Archie Comics Web site that a sequence involving Payback the Fiona Recolor that hinted at some prior relationship with Enerjak was axed by Editorial.

Let me be up-front about this: I like foreshadowing as much as the next writer unless it threatens to trip up the flow of the story. And I’ve seen that happen way too many times over the course of the Sonic comics’ history. Ken Penders or Mike Gallagher or Karl Bollers would drop an irrelevant bit of foreshadowing into a story where it would just sit there like a ginormous sticky note to the author reminding him “Develop this idea one of these days.” More often than not, that development never took place. I get the feeling that, by nixing the Payback sequence, Editorial was just doing their job.

But we’re heading into the home stretch, which is where Ian can pull this thing together. We’ll see. Head Score: 6.

EYE: This time around, Ray Dillon gets his groove back and brings his coloring sensibilities to the characters and not just to the scenery. In the last issue, the characters seemed to stand in the way of his coloring schemes. This installment feels much better. The splash page in the beginning was especially impressive. Eye Score: 9.

HEART: Possibly for the same reason that Ian and Tracy didn’t play up the transformation of the Prelates into Cores (except for just one panel where Jani-Ca lets the sword do the talking), the mother-daughter confrontation likewise felt dialed down considerably. OK, so showing Jani-Ca doing something that in any other context would look a lot like matricide might get the nose of someone in Editorial out of joint. But this is the ONE emotionally charged sequence in this comic, and Ian punts it. Hopefully something in the final installment will redeem the lack here. Heart Score: 5.

Sonic Spin: Paul Kaminski contrasts this arc with the alleged “Fun-filled woodland critter romp” that was the Treasure Team Tango arc. Someone please forward the memo to Paul that stated that Editorial should NEVER try to do Marketing’s job. Also included are some Yardley! sketches and the splash page prelim.

Fan Art: I don’t know whether Angel’s Jani-Ca statuette is a modified Knuckles or original work, and there’s no way from the photo that I can get a handle on the scale, but it seriously rocks. Kristina’s portrait of Silver isn’t bad, either. As for Joshua’s take on Omega, his line “I like you! Let us burn things together!” is from the aforementioned “fun-filled woodland critter romp.”

Fan Funnies: It’s fast and furious chilidog eating action between Sonic and Mammoth Mogul, whose sloppiness with the chili won’t look good at the casino. Thanks go to Tandy.

Off-Panel: “Deck the halls with Cores of victims/Fa la la la la la la la la.”

Fan Mail: Courtney gushes like a well of Oklahoma crude, and living in the Sooner State may explain why she has a hard time finding the comic. Heck, I live in Michigan and haven’t had much luck, either; that’s why I get my fix through the mail. Nicolis asks about Eggman, Bean and Team Hooligan. Brian flashes his collector credentials, and then asks about the possibility of SonicX comic digests, when Rough first appeared in the comic, and whether Scourge is really Evil Sonic. Tying in with the SonicX request, he also asks whether Chris Thorndike will put in an appearance. This question elicits a response of “…”. I think we can guess what the majority of the fans would think of that idea, but like I said earlier, even if the CCA no longer exists Archie Comics still has standards.