Sonic Universe #3 (June 2009) Yardley!/Jensen cover: Bots Gone Wild! Omega, E-102, and Shadow (who at times wondered whether he wasn't a droid himself) in a 3-way battle. Can I just say at this point that Shadow's Chaos Spear move, while a part of the games, looks totally ridiculous on paper? He's supposed to look menacing but he only reminds me of Zeus throwing lightning bolts around during the "Beethoven's Pastorale" segment of "Fantasia." "Old Soldiers" Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Tracy Yardley!; Ink: Jim Amash; Color: Jason Jensen; Lettering: Teresa Davidson; Editor: Mike Pellerito; Editor-in-Chief: Victor Gorelick; for Sega Licensing: Cindy Chau and Jerry Chu And now, it's time for "Dueling PowerPoint Presentations!" First up, looking like his right arm has been dislocated at the elbow, is the formerly unnamed Commander of G.U.N., now dubbed "Abraham Tower." And yes, he does have one brown eye and one blue eye, though blue and green would be more aesthetically pleasing if you ask me, and more reminiscent of the eyes of some cats. And his opponent: you know him, you hate him, no matter what name they give him, give it up for Ivo "Eggman" Robotnik. The subject of both their presentations is the E-102, aka Gamma, a robot from the first Sonic Adventure game. Since the trend in SU so far has been to recap previous game storylines, and since Gamma bought the bot farm in SA1, you KNOW where this is going so sit back and enjoy the ride. A word about their respective audiences. The Commander is lecturing Shadow and Rouge, though Shadow eventually solos on this mission. He's supposed to recruit the rogue robot who's been freelancing against Robotnik's forces to officially throw his lot in with G.U.N., though Shadow is hardly what I'd call an ideal military recruiter. Still, he takes the job because having failed to save Metal Sonic in SU#1 (which I have yet to receive) he wants to improve his batting average. Robotnik just wants Omega, whose dialogue in "Sonic Heroes" was some of the most headache-inducing in video game history, to "reduce it to slag." Rouge, BTW, has neither dialogue nor purpose in this scene. Nice to know that even with a new title the writing for this comic can still be as pointless as it was back in the day. Still a consummate loner, Shadow boards a G.U.N. helicopter without backup or hardware while Omega, who's cheesed that he's not getting the shot at Sonic that's part of his programming, takes off on his own steam while Robotnik and Snively try to weld this story to the happenings in S199. Over a forest somewhere or other, Shadow takes a flying leap out of the copter without a parachute. Kids, do NOT try this at home or anywhere else unless you've been designated as an Ultimate Life Form. But before he can find Gamma, Gamma finds him and targets him though he's been updated enough to know that Shadow has turned on Eggman. Gamma does his own Shadow impersonation, stating that he prefers to work alone. Shadow suggests he might benefit from having a pit crew at his back. Gamma proves to be rather easily convinced but on their way to the pick-up point Gamma's spider sense checks in just before Omega crashes the party. Omega starts out with the upper ... hand, I might as well say ... but then Gamma distracts him enough for Shadow to spin- dash into Omega. Shadow then tells Gamma to make tracks for the rendezvous point while he goes one-on-one with Omega. He then makes the mistake of spin-dashing right into the muzzle of Omega's arm which is in cannon mode. Omega then launches him conveniently out of the neighborhood, apparently never even giving Shadow a chance to "Chaos control" himself to a better location. Omega chases after Gamma, taunting his weaknesses while also calling him "Brother." In "Sonic Heroes" he preferred terms such as "useless heaps of metal" and "worthless consumer models" when trash-talking about other bots. We then get a page of Gamma back-talking to Omega then getting off several shots at him. The two then exchange the kind of dialogue usually reserved for samurai movies where the two combatants shout out their resumes before the final attack: "I will give you a glorious destruction" and "You will never destroy all of me, brother. You cannot destroy my soul." Gamma gets off one final file transfer to Omega before getting blasted while off-panel. And, true to Gamma's fate in SA1, we get the Zen moment of a Flickie bird rising from the blast site as Shadow arrives too late to do anything, having forgotten what "Chaos control" is for. Omega, now corrupted by Gamma's data, starts acting like the title character at the end of the Nelvana Care Bears episode "I, Robot Heart." In this case, it's Gamma's programming now resident in Omega enabling him to feel remorse. Shadow, proving he can think quicker than he can run across a snowy landscape, convinces Omega to throw in with G.U.N. and turn against Robotnik. The emotion "Resentment" appears to be part of the Gamma Emotions Suite software package because Omega agrees. And judging from Omega's line "If you tell anyone in G.U.N. I made a grave marker, or whined about my place in the world, I will turn you into linked sausage" so is "Threats, Elaborate." Back at HQ, Shadow is chilling (or as close to it as he gets) with Rouge and Hope Kintobor, last seen (by me, anyway) in S177's "Home, New Home" where she vowed to sharpen her engineering skills before coming back and kicking Eggman's butt for destroying Knothole two issues before. Shadow is still brooding about having lost Gamma, but there's no time to worry about that now since according to Rouge traveling between zones, the major plot point that enabled the interminable story arc involving Sonic and Scourge, is so simple a child can do it if the child is named "Hope Kintobor, prodigy mechanist." I should add at this point that a "mechanist" is nothing like a "mechanic." A Mechanist is someone who subscribes to the philosophy of Mechanism, which is the belief that everything in the universe has a mechanical cause (as opposed to Dynamism which holds that everything in the universe is the result of a force. Mechanists do NOT, as a result, make good Jedi Knights). Anyway, looks like Shadow, Rouge and maybe the newly-acquired Omega are now going shopping for a Chaos Emerald in another zone. HEAD: I realize that SU is still finding its voice, but based on having browsed SU2 at a store (I haven't received that one, either), the strategy for the first few issues appears to involve recycling the story lines of various older games. The account in SU2 might as well have been called "Sonic Adventure 2: The Good Parts." Or what Ian thought were the good parts, anyway. And the centerpiece for THIS story is the fate of Gamma, a very minor part of the previous Sonic Adventure game. This strategy might have worked had I the slightest amount of curiosity about the bot characters in the games. Personally, I found that a little of them went a LONG way. As a result, I needed patience in reading this story just to put up with the robot exchanges. "Wall-E," this isn't. And I needed a LOT of faith to believe that Omega would digest Gamma's "soul" when he was the recipient of the FTP from Gamma, and that his personality would be altered without his even having to restart first. Omega thus turns out to be a typical Robotnik product: major armaments, nonexistent firewall. Shadow maintained character pretty well throughout, even when sweet-talking Gamma and then Omega into joining G.U.N., which I still think highly unlikely. Maybe, thanks to S171's "I Am," he really has gotten over his Maria fetish. Speaking of blond girls, I was seriously taken aback by the sudden reappearance of Hope Kintobor in the narrative. I've already described briefly the circumstances under which she left the continuity. That leaves a HUGE gap where we don't know what happened in the interim. Loose Continuity strikes again, and I hate it. The disconnect was so bad I couldn't go to sleep the night I got the comic in the mail until I'd put together a rough plot outline to explain just HOW Hope wound up in G.U.N. That's how my mind works. I'll save that for the Heart section, though. Head Score: 6. EYE: Sorry to say, Tracy Yardley!'s artwork is at its most convincing when he's drawing bots. Commander Tower, especially in the very first panel where his right arm looks all wrong, reminded me way too much of Kozo Fuyutsuki, Gendo Ikari's right- hand man at NERV in "Neon Genesis Evangelion." And Hope ... well, she looked hopeless. There was nothing appealing about her facial modeling at all. It's hard to believe that Tracy and Steve Butler, who drew Hope in the Off-Panel in the back, were supposed to be working on the same character. Not that Tracy didn't do a good job with the exterior landscapes, but his work on Hope and Cmdr. Tower REALLY fell short. Eye Score: 5. HEART: My reaction after reading "Old Soldiers" was: To hell with the robots, what was Hope Kintobor's back story? Since Mike Pellerito said that this is our Sonic Universe as much as anyone else's, I felt free to come up with something that goes like this: Having left Knothole under the impression that it had been destroyed in S175's "Eggman Empire," Hope had informed Snively in S177's "Home, New Home" that she's going off to learn to be an engineer. With that, she exited the continuity. So how did that work out for her? My idea is that it didn't. She was pretty much abandoned in Knothole by the other humans "waaaaay back" (as the text boxes like to put it) in S108's "A Girl Named Hope," probably because the rest of the humans who returned to Mobius after their fruitless search for a world without furries to colonize wanted nothing to do with Robotnik or his relatives. I don't think that their attitudes would have softened over time. When she arrives in Station Square she's in for the hassle of her young life. She's not taken seriously because of her age when she asks to be let into an engineering school; after all, she doesn't even have a grade school education, let alone a high school diploma. And when she tries going to school, she learns that she still bears the stigma of the Kintobor name; she manages to make a run for it before the school principal can call G.U.N. and have her arrested. Not having any friends or family in Station Square doesn't help matters any, but it's not as if she thought all this through before leaving Knothole just in time to miss the attack by the Egg Armada. Thinking it useless to return to Knothole, she spends a couple of days eking out a marginal existence as a homeless child. In desperation, she decides to steal back her plane, which has since been impounded by G.U.N. and parked on their side of the airport. She doesn't know where to go any more, but she just wants to get out. A sentry bot almost nabs her but she's spirited to safety by ... Rouge. Rouge not only tells her that everyone is alive and well and living in New Knothole, she also takes her to G.U.N. Headquarters to get a square meal at the mess hall and a good night's sleep in Rouge's quarters. While Hope sleeps, Rouge talks to Commander Tower about taking in Hope as someone who not only has decent engineering skills but might also be a source of intelligence about Robotnik. Tower is cool to the idea, but then Shadow appears in order to back up Rouge. The death of Maria Kintobor at the hands of G.U.N. may be old news but Shadow still remembers, and is galled by the fact that G.U.N. still won't discuss it. Despite getting a measure of closure after encountering the virtual Maria in "I Am," he tells Tower that taking in the orphaned Hope would go a way toward righting the old wrong. Tower agrees, on condition that Rouge will act as Hope's handler. And THAT is how I deal with my insomnia! OK, I probably think about the comic way too much, but at least it offers an explanation as to the improbability of a 10- year-old child finding a home in a military unit, something that hasn't happened since Gus Edson created the comic strip "Dondi" in 1955 with an Italian war orphan adopted by an American GI as its central character. For me, there's also a measure, just a hint really, of the manga/anime "Gunslinger Girl" by Yutaka Aida in Hope's situation. "Gunslinger Girl," despite its title, is not set in the Old West. It's set in modern Italy where the secretive Social Welfare Agency uses its rehabilitation abilities as a cover for turning young girls into cybernetic operatives and assassins. Each girl is assigned a handler who is the "brother" (or fratello in Italian) to the girl to which he is assigned. There is even a Japanese Gunslinger Girl third-person shooter computer game where you play as a fratello (which is seriously creepy IMO). In any event, this all came together as a result of Ian's dropping Hope back into the story with no warning or explanation whatsoever. I'll probably work it up into a full-blown fanfic soon. Otherwise, I was kind of unsure about the whole emotions-as- software angle that Ian worked into the story. I had trouble buying into it when it was about Data in "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and I'm having trouble buying into it here. It's actually a pretty wide-spread trope in Japanese popcult, from "Astroboy" to "Ghosts In The Shell," but it's frankly not easy to pull off, especially when it's pretty much crammed into three pages in a comic book. It's an explanation that just doesn't work for me, I'm sorry. Heart Score: 6. Off Panel: There's a new sheriff in town and he's cleaning up ... oil spills. The humor here is dependent on Omega taking commands sort-of literally. For me, the funniest part was the silhouette of Eggman's tower which looks here like a giant Pez(tm) dispenser. And as hinted at earlier, Steven Butler's version of Hope is way cuter than Tracy Yardley!'s, while his Cmdr. Tower frankly looks a lot like George C. Scott as Patton. Not that there's anything wrong with that.