Sonic Universe #4 (July 2009) Yardley!/Jensen cover/recruiting poster. Actually, if the POV was pulled back a little and the GUN flag made more prominent, it would be a classic recruiting poster. Although I'm not sure what the slogan would be: "G.U.N. - WE'LL RECRUIT ANYTHING!" "The Ultimate Lifeform" Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Tracy Yardley; Ink: Jim Amash; Color: Jason Jensen; Lettering: Teresa Davidson; Editor: Mike Pellerito; Editor-in-Chief: Victor Gorelick; Sega Licensing Reps: Cindy Chau and Jerry Chu "Another day, another mission." That's how blase' Shadow is about the next mission which involves being teleported to a Special Zone along with Rouge. The tech details are being handled by Hope, who in addition to acting as a GUN grease monkey is also working as their resident quantum mechanic. She beams them up to one of the Special Zone planets usually made up of red, gold and blue spheres that can earn you a Chaos Emerald if you snatch all the right ones. Without them, though, the planet looks like an oversized disco mirror ball. And if Rouge thinks THAT'S surreal, wait until she sees the host. Meet Feist. He was little more than a bit player when he was introduced in S43's "The Dream Zone" while Sonic was wandering around inside King Max's head. At the time, I honestly thought he looked like a badger (which may say something about the quality of Manny Galan's artwork 12 years ago before he found his niche as the prime artist for the Knuckles comic) but here he's an out-of-the-closet panda. Though he claims to be a god in this realm, he's not that hot of one, having let himself be defeated by Naugus, one of the lamest Sonic comic villains of all time and ending up imprisoned in the Zone of Silence. But his appearance is enough to impress Rouge; Shadow remains unconvinced. Feist is willing to award Shadow and Rouge a Chaos Emerald; the catch is, they have to earn it in a test of skill. Shadow thinks he can shortcut his way through Feist's Lava Reef Zone- like obstacle course, but discovers that Feist has pulled the plug on his Chaos Control function. To top that off, Feist also tells Shadow and Rouge that all their exposition about what's happening has used up half their allotted time. With Rouge riding the warm air updraft from the lava and Shadow taking over on foot, they just miss scoring the Chaos Emerald. As a result, they're sent back to GUN HQ without so much as a copy of the home game or a "Thanks for playing!" Cmdr. Tower isn't about to cut the two any slack despite Rouge's explanation, which sets up one of the best lines she's ever had in this comic: "Did you miss the part about the god-like being'?" Shadow, for his part, is too busy blaming himself. Having failed three missions in a row, Shadow is feeling less than ultimate, and he takes his frustrations out on Omega. Since much of his dialogue consists of "Hmph," "Hmph," and "Hmph," it's clear that his Y-chromosome has kicked in and he doesn't want to talk about it. Shadow then retreats to an overlook on the side of a conveniently-placed mountain, where he's joined by Hope. She manages to get Shadow to open up by saying "It's okay that you didn't get that Chaos Emerald." "I'm not supposed to fail," the Ultimate Lifeform replies. We then get a very rare page for this comic: Hope opens up to Shadow and provides some exposition as to how she was able to get out of Knothole before the Egg Armada attacked it, done in a way that isn't just narratively convenient but also a psychologically sound explanation of her motivation. She then breaks down and tells Shadow "I can't go back and face Sonic and the others now. They took me in, made me feel like family, and then I left them behind." Yardley! then shows us a frame of Shadow reaching out to place a hand on the shoulder of the weeping Hope. What happens next is just as rare: Shadow reassures Hope that her surviving the attack on Knothole wasn't the epic fail she feels it to be, at which point Hope then turns around (rather abruptly, if you ask me, but what can you expect from a 21-page story?) and tells Shadow the same thing: that his run-in with Feist means Shadow will know what to expect next time. Hope then demonstrates that Shadow is as much a teddy bear as he is a moody, angsty hedgehog by hugging the stuffing out of him. Didn't see THAT one coming! She also tells him that she sees the two of them as displaced kindred spirits. Shadow wonders about this development, but in the end thinks that Maria Would Have Wanted It This Way. So the newly-christened Team Dark takes another run at Feistworld. This time the challenge consists of Feist's Cube, a maze somewhere inside of which is the Chaos Emerald. Despite the rookie mistake of not splitting up to look for it they eventually find it only to have Feist summon numerous other baubles, bangles and beads to form a protective shell around it. Once again, they miss it by thatmuch. At this point, Shadow orders the implementation of Plan B, a plan known and loved by military types throughout history: Shoot someone, take what you want, and then run away. In this case Omega does the shooting, Shadow does the snatching and, as full of himself as he ever was, Chaos Controls back to Headquarters. But we cut away from the rejoicing before anyone can unfurl a Mission Accomplished banner to fast-forward three decades as Knuckles and Julie-Su get ready to step out and turn things over to their daughter Lara-Su. Unfortunately for the junior Guardian, this upcoming exercise in going Back To The Future appears to be shaping up as a remake of "Adventures In Babysitting." HEAD: The good news is that Shadow actually gets taken down a notch in this story. When introduced in Sonic Adventure 2, he had a strong tendency to be the center of his own little universe until he mellowed somewhat after his Maria flashback and meeting up with Sonic, someone who could go toe-to-toe with him when he wasn't in Chaos Control mode. Here, after three blown missions in a row, he's even less of a happy camper than usual. And it's only natural for Hope, as the Maria surrogate, to even him out and give him some perspective in one of the few bits of character development to find its way into the comic in recent years. After being a convenient plot point for the first three stories, we're FINALLY graced with enough of her back story to see her as more of a personality here. Rouge, for her part, ends up being relegated to a supporting role but that's OK. "Team Dark," of course, did not originate with G.U.N.; according to "Sonic Heroes" the three of them got together once Rouge released Shadow from coldsleep and caused Omega to come back online and start shooting up the place. It was her idea to join forces to go after Eggman and to declare the three of them a team. In this, she resembles Anzu Mazaki from the "Yu-Go-Oh!" franchise, aka "Tea Gardner" in English. It was Anzu/Tea [pronounced with two syllables] who drew a smiley face on the hands of Yugi, herself, Joey and Tristan to signify their being friends, though neither Rouge nor Hope whips out a Sharpie in order to do the same thing here. Cmdr. Tower hints that the name "Team Dark" will be explained later on; I wouldn't be surprised if he wants to use the name to designate the team as specializing in covert or "black" ops. Feist looks impressive here, but once more an Archie writer doesn't quite get the concept of "god-like." Despite Feist's being omniscient and omnipotent enough to anticipate and deactivate Shadow's Chaos Control capability at the beginning of the story, he not only forgets to do so during the second challenge but doesn't even take the precaution of disabling the "tin soldier" Omega's weapons systems even though they have more of a nuisance value than anything else when used against Feist. Feist, as a result, comes off not so much "god-like" as god-lite. Still, any reunion of Feist and Shadow won't be pretty. Speaking of "lite," Team Dark missteps and turns into Team Lite at the end of the story. The one thing that really earned them their name was the outsider status of each of its members: Shadows as the self-proclaimed Ultimate Lifeform and angsty loner; Rouge as an admitted thief ready to play any and all sides for personal gain; Omega as a walking weapons system. They were a collection of outcasts and misfits, unaligned with anyone. Perfectly understandable, but as far as Archie Editorial was concerned also perfectly unacceptable. Which is why the final panel of the story is so galling: Shadow throwing his best Captain America salute to Cmdr. Tower as he hands over the Chaos Emerald, which causes Tower to declare "With these two Chaos Emeralds, G.U.N. is even more of a force to reckon with...." All hints of the outsider status of the team members are dropped down the memory hole as they turn into "dogs of the military," to borrow a phrase from Hiromu Arakawa's manga/anime series "Fullmetal Alchemist." This is NOT the Shadow we know and find difficult to love. I look forward to the story when these dogs remember that they have teeth. This is one of those all-too-typical Archie Sonic stories: great on the first reading, but when you stop and think about it after you're done the questions and problem areas start blooming like dandelions. Sure, it was good to see Shadow get his head together after having been repeatedly bested, and I have nothing against the Hope character development. Still, the ending feels like a total sell-out, especially after the whole Feist-as-deity plot point is seriously compromised. I really wanted to like this story, but I was thoroughly disappointed by the ending. Head Score: 7. EYE: Yardley! does a great job here, especially in his disambiguation (to borrow a term from Wikipedia) of Feist WRT his species. He handled the center section between Shadow and Hope especially well; it's easier to misstep in a development section than in a mere action sequence. Hope's expression was a little more self-assured in the second half of the sequence than I'd have thought, but it ultimately worked for me. Eye Score: 10. HEART: One of the most enduring tropes in Victorian literature was the Plucky Orphan. For boys such as Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist and Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick, the trajectory to the end of the book usually involves hard work ending in respectability. Which is probably one reason why Mark Twain refused to go there with his own "orphan," Huckleberry Finn, whom nobody could accuse of seeking respectability. As for the girls of 19th century literature, the surest plot trajectory lay in adoption, whether by a saint or at least a reformed sinner who cares for them (e.g., Eppie in George Eliot's "Silas Marner" or Johanna Spyri's Heidi) or a sinner who gives them a hard time (e.g., Mary Lennox in "The Secret Garden" and Sara Crewe in "A Little Princess," both by Frances Hodgson Burnett). The alternative was that, like Nello in "A Dog of Flanders" or the Little Match Girl in Hans Christian Andersen's story, they'd get to die a beautiful and tragic death. The Plucky Orphan survived into the 20th century in several incarnations in the comics. After the success of Harold Gray's "Little Orphan Annie" strip in the 1920s, a competing syndicate launched "Little Annie Rooney," named for a character in a British music hall song from the 1890s. They each had a canine companion and a catch-phrase: "Leapin' lizards, Sandy!" and "Gloriosky, Zero!", respectively. After World War 2, a male war orphan showed up in the person of Gus Edson's "Dondi," so named because we first see him wandering dazed through his shot-up Italian village only able to repeatedly ask "Donde ... donde" ("Where?") as he searched for his slain parents. I honestly thought that this was where the character of Hope was going when she was introduced along with the rest of the humans who showed up back in S91's "Crash." This was especially true with Karl Bollers's celebrated story "A Girl Named Hope" in S108, which took the form of a petition/letter from Hope to the Acorns asking for asylum in Knothole when, for reasons that Karl never developed, everyone else from the "Crash" story who failed to get roboticized were shipped out to Station Square. After that, however, Hope quickly faded from the story line. Personally, I thought it was criminal that a character with that much potential for development should have been mothballed like that. But worse was to follow. Part of Ian Flynn's housekeeping chores when he became head writer for the comic was to have her edged out of the story, first by being out of town when the Egg Fleet attacked, then by having her tell Snively that she was leaving to become an engineer so that she could kick his sorry butt for destroying Knothole. She then took off, and I honestly thought I'd never see her again. I'm happy to report that Ian has proven me wrong. While it may have taken three issues for her to get the job done, we FINALLY get to a place where she can explain why she'd rather stay on a military base than go back to Knothole once she's learned all is well and everyone is alive. Some readers might think that this is only an interruption until the next fight; to me it's as necessary as the pause between heartbeats. I know that writing Sonic fanfic can never be mistaken for writing about real life. I mean, we're talking about talking animals here. But there's one thing I try to do even in my fanfic writing: even when the circumstances are unbelievable the stories still have to be plausible. There's a huge difference. Plausibility is where you write a story that plays by its own rules, even the ones you have to double-check as you write. For "Space Case," I had to know about how epilepsy affects a person's life; for "Runaway" I had to understand the dynamics of Bunnie's home life as a child and how it would have continued in her absence. Ian's scene with Hope explaining why she can't go back home to Knothole has that sense of plausibility. She may want to go back, but she's also afraid that she's let everyone down. Maybe she'll be able to do so someday, even before she becomes the kind of engineer she promised herself she'd be. And I like to think that Sonic, Sally and the gang would have the good grace to welcome her anyway. This sequence is a textbook example of the concept of Heart in action. Hope transcends the role she had assumed for the past 3 issues of walking plot device and becomes more of a person, someone about whom the reader can care. It rubs off on Shadow as well, and while it's a surprise to see him show concern for Hope in her distress it helps to broaden him as a character as well, pulling something out of him that transcends the iron-clad role he'd been assuming all along. Well done. Heart Score: 10. Off-Panel: The ONLY way this page can stand a chance of working is if you're aware of Lynne Truss's unlikely 2004 best- seller "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" about the importance of punctuation. The joke that tries to glom off the title is bad enough, but the misspelling of "chutes" for "shoots" doesn't even begin to make sense. Yes, PLEASE send Archie your Off-Panel contributions; this one is an Epic Fail! My Sonic Universe: The letters editor fails to tell Wesley W. that "Struth" is a contraction of the "mild oath" "God's truth!" [see www.urbandictionary.com] Simon L. makes a point that's got me wondering, too: now that Bunnie and Antoine have tied the knot, they've pretty much dropped off the page until called upon for an action story. This, in fact, is a fate that has befallen just about every other married couple in the Sonicverse: Bunnie and Antoine, Jules and Bernie Hedgehog, the Acorn king and queen, Amadeus and Rosemary Prower. We don't know anything about ANY of their married lives. I know Ken Penders had Knuckles's parents break up because he was trying to relate to the kids of divorce in the audience, but this aura of invisibility surrounding anybody's who's married sends a weird signal. John S. of the UK is told that the first dozen issues will consist of three 4-parters, "after that, we might switch things up." I like to think that they've even GOT stories in development beyond SU12.