Sonic #101 [Nov 2001] Spaz/[Ribiero]/Harvo/Ray/Joe Pepitone cover: I included Nelson Ribiero's name in brackets because, although his name appears on the cover itself, it was left off of the cover description text back in the Sonic-Grams section. This on top of the boilerplate being left out of S99 all together gives me the impression that nobody's really in charge here. So what else is new? Oh, right, the cover: Robotnik and Sonic find themselves in the presence of ... well, the sneaks, the mittens, the chest band, and the dreads are all dead giveaways. Good thing, too, because I don't know WHAT'S going on above the neck. There's no sign of the eyes, the nose, any recognizable facial landmarks. It's like Knux is wearing some weird kind of helmet. Not a good look for him. "Altered States" Story: Karl Bollers; Art: Ron Lim; Ink: Pam Eklund and Andrew Pepoy; Lettering: Jeff Powell; Color: Frank Gagliardo; Editor/Art Director: J. F. Gabrie; Managing Editor: Victor Gorelick; Editor-In-Chief: Richard Goldwater. Just outside Robotropolis, Sonic realizes that Nate isn't with the group that they led out of the city last month. He makes a dash to save Nate but slams into the "energy dome" force field. Think it's going to be that simple? What we have here is a variation of the campfire storytelling game "And Then." So sit down, buckle up, and hang on: Sonic no sooner picks himself up off the ground than he's landed in the anime continuity, facing off against a less-than- menacing rendition of "Metal Robotnik," aka "Black Eggman." As Sonic and Tails take on the bot, Robotnik/Eggman gloats about his impending marriage to Princess Sara/Sera. Sara/Sera is the nekomimi/catgirl/female lead in the anime, only here Ron Lim makes her look more lapine than feline. As Sonic and Tails head for the city, Knuckles, with Aussie hat in place, tries to stop Metal Robotnik/Black Eggman but fails. And then ... Sonic finds himself in front of Castle Acorn as the King celebrates seven years of being allied with the Guardians, something that runs contrary to the events of S29's "My Special Friend." Knuckles is not only knighted, he's also officially betrothed to Sally. As Antoine does some pining for having lost the ground squirrel of his dreams, Sonic dashes off. Tails wants to follow him but is detained by his father, last seen in robotic form in "Eve of Destruction" (SSS9). Sonic then delivers about a page of exposition about the reunion of the Acorn family, and heads over to a diner run by his Uncle Chuck for a one-on-one. In a total kick in the continuity, we learn that Uncle Chuck resigned his royal post not so much because of Julian's treachery, which was apparently discovered in time to forestall the coup, but because of Sonic's parents being roboticized. We also learn that Tails's dad, Amadeus, was the Mobian of the hour. And then ... We actually manage to get a Sonic-Sally embrace that doesn't look like they're uncomfortable in each other's presence. I honestly thought that Ron Lim was repeating himself between the last panel on page 7 and the top panel on page 8. There ARE perceptible differences in the portraits of Sonic and Sally which, taken as a hole, leave the impression of "Why bother?" In the midst of our wondering, Robotnik, a Snively who looks like he was printed on Silly Putty(tm) and stretched, and a horde of SWATbots appear on the balcony upon which Sonic and Sally are standing. Robotnik demands that they hand over the "floraterminus file," whatever the heck THAT is. Robotnik tells the couple "There's no way out but down." "Works for us!" they reply as they take a flying leap, experience a bout with PhotoShop Blur, and manage to land on an air mattress inside a high-tech looking ship that Antoine and Bunnie are flying. Note: this is probably the only occasion in the entire history of the comic when Sonic and Sally will get horizontal in the same panel, so enjoy. Myself, I enjoyed Bunnie's rebel yell, a HUGE step up from what's passed as a Southern dialect in this comic over the years. Fan Art Minor [we'll get to Fan Art Major soon enough]: Mercedes Contreras gives us Big-Eyed Cute Tails, Christine Chong renders the Sonic Adventure 2 Sonic sky-boarding, and courtesy of David Badgaw Bunnie asks: "Does this comic make mah legs look fat?" Back on the ship, any celebrating Sonic and Sally might feel like doing is tempered by a bad case of deja vu. Seems Sally was also aware of her engagement to Knuckles, as well as the change in her family's dynamic. And then ... By now there have been so many shifts in the continuity that it appears safe for Ron and Karl to do what all along has been unthinkable: have Sonic shed a tear for Sally before heading off for her funeral. You can tell he's on his way to a funeral because he's wearing black sneakers. So is Tails. And Rotor's wearing a black cap and utility belt. As we're reminded by a flashback within this sequence, this is the result of Sal's actually having died as a result of her fall in "Endgame." You'd think Sally would rate something better than a generic headstone. And then ... A determined Sonic punches out Robotnik as "Endgame" heads for its denouement. And then ... We get a reprise of The Kiss from Endgame: The Director's Cut. And then ... Sonic, along with the reader, has finally run out of patience with the space-time displacement gimmick. He tells the mourners, including a Tails who looks like he's morphing into Goofy, that this is all wrong. They look at him as if he's just grown two extra heads. And then ... Sonic realizes that he's talking to Sally and everyone else from the current continuity. To prove it, we get some more stilted, wooden dialogue from Sally: "You're right. Reality has reverted." Everyone, in fact, seems to have been tripping. And then ... Uncle Chuck morphs into Nate as Tails suggests that Robotnik might have something to do with this. In fact, the Archie management realizes that the story's spun so far out of control that they utilize a text box to forge a link with the Knuckles back story, citing a development that isn't even hinted at in said story and which would have gone uncommented upon otherwise. But to prove that he's Nate, he goes into exposition mode, saying that their time-shifts are due to someone else's short-term time trips. And then ... Nate morphs back into Uncle Chuck who warns that the comic's continuity could suffer irreversible harm with all this time travel. And all this toing and froing finally brings us back to the question "Where's Nate, and are we going to rescue him?" And the Mobians rise up as one and declare "NO WAY!!" Now THAT'S a happy ending. HEAD: The entire issue is itself a victim of temporal displacement. Only in this case it wasn't a question of time travel. This issue, with both stories very loosely tied together by the time travel gimmick, SHOULD have been the long-anticipated Sonic #100 but for Sega's demand that S98 be a promo for Sonic Adventure 2. Archie just can't win for losing. As one person commented on Ken's message board, for a story in which nothing really happens it's not bad. It's certainly a sight better than some of the stories where something DID happen. Karl's use of temporal displacement isn't that bad; unfortunately, it's built on a questionable premise. In the classic SatAM two-parter by Allee and Hurst, "Blast To The Past," Sonic and Sally do a little time traveling of their own. They fail in their initial objective of thwarting Robotnik's coup. They succeed, however, in making sure that Rosie, Sally's nanny, is successful in getting herself to Knothole along with the kids. Rosie had been caught and roboticized in their previously-known reality. Once back in their own time, only Sonic and Sally are aware that the timeline has been changed. Tails says of Rosie: "She's ALWAYS been here." In this story, however, it's not only the time traveler who experiences temporal displacement, but everyone else as well. I have a problem with this concept. Granted that we're talking about the stuff of science fiction here, but it seems more logical that a reset of the timeline would affect characters by altering not only the circumstances of their existence but their CONSCIOUSNESS of the changes as well. Karl didn't go there. That doesn't make for an easy-to-deal-with narrative, however, and somebody, whether Karl or Justin, recognized this. I get the overpowering suspicion that not only was the expository text box on page 15 an afterthought inserted to minimize confusion, but so were all those small first-person text boxes: "And then everything changed!" "And again...." The former was inserted because Ken didn't go out of his way to even imply that Knuckles's experimenting with altering the past had a ripple effect on Sonic and the crew. We really don't know, in fact, whether Knuckles's time travel had any effects on Dimitri, Julie-Su or anyone else. As for the latter, there's no other hint in this story that it's a first-person narrative; on the contrary, comments by some of the participants, such as Sally and Rotor and Uncle Chuck, seem to imply that this was an episode in mass psychosis. Someone must have looked at this story, realized how seriously confusing it was, then added the text boxes. They didn't help much. Karl hops back and forth between a number of continuities, some totally made up, others derived from other sources. He didn't mine all the available continuities, though. If he had, we would've gotten cameo appearances from Tikal, Manic, Sonia, Scratch and Grounder. And that might have been fun, especially if the spatial-temporal lines got so blurred that there was some crossover. As it stands, though, this was an interesting experiment that got us right back where we started. Head Score: 6. EYE: I'd hoped that Ron's artwork would be showing signs of improvement by this point. Instead, he seems to have been working on flashy effects, such as falling into PhotoShop Blur, instead of character modeling. His drawing of Tails has, if anything, gotten worse. On page [13] Tails looks more like a cartoon dog than a fox/kitsune. Ron has a good layout sense, but again his modeling is in serious trouble. Sally and Bunnie are both way too long in the torso, and the size of Sonic's pupils changes from one page to the next. That may have been done to signify continuity shifts but the end result is simply too jarring. Eye Score: 4. HEART: Why did Archie suddenly bust loose and permit Sonic a halfway believable moment of grief on his way to Sally's funeral? The answer can be found in back issues where Sonic is permitted a family: "Sally's Quest" from the In Your Face special, and S22's "The Return" depict Sonic and Sally as married and as parents, but the writers also take pains to say that either this isn't happening on Mobius Prime or else it's only an alternative future. Either way, Sega and Archie refuse to endorse the notion that marriage, home and family are viable elements in the current continuity. This story, by its very nature, is an exercise in the unreal. Ironically, for that very reason, Sonic is able to get away with expressing some kind of emotion. So after kvetching for all these years about the emotional sterility of the comic, about the tendency of the creatives to duck and cover when a possibly emotional situation presents itself, am I satisfied with this change? My answer: "What change?" My beef has always been that Archie has sidestepped legitimate opportunities for emotional expression in their stories exactly when the material demanded it. All Karl did this time was render the emotional environment "safe" by throwing any pretext of reality out the window by the devise of time-shifting. None of the events in the story was real, so Sonic's grief was just as unreal. And as a final proof, check out the story's end where Sonic, stone-faced as ever, doesn't agonize for a microsecond about leaving Nate to a grim fate in Robotropolis. THAT'S the emotional climate of the comic we've come to expect: Sonic dead behind the eyes, just mouthing dialogue. Let me know when Archie gets serious. Heart Score: 5. "Reboot" Story: Ken Penders; Art: Dawn Best (debut); Ink: Andrew Pepoy; Lettering: Vickie Williams; Color: Frank Gagliardo; Editor: Justin Gabrie. Julie-Su and Knuckles get a moment together, and they start arguing. Good thing they got that hug in last month. Julie-Su can't believe Knux has gone over to Dimitri. And frankly, after hearing Knuckles's explanation, I can't believe it either: He says that he sensed a lot of anger from Tobor when he slipped out into the story last month. That took me by surprise, so I went back and checked. Well, seems Tobor was GLAD to be out of his prison, HOPEFUL of being reunited with his family on the Floating Island, SHOCKED to discover that the Dark Legion was up to their old tricks, SURPRISED by Kragok's reappearance, and finally DETERMINED to end this grudge match once and for all by sacrificing himself and Kragok. At this point Tobor passes out of this mode of existence and may have moved out of Knuckles's reception range. Bottom line: Knuckles was SO off-base in what he was sensing, which naturally led to an erroneous conclusion. Garbage in, garbage out. Knux confronts Dimitri and asks him about his abilities. Huge mistake! It's like asking Atilla the Hun about diplomacy. Dimitri tells him that thinking will make it so. For starters, Knuckles wills himself back to the past before the White Comet was supposed to destroy the early echidna civilization. Knuckles, ever the simplistic strategist, makes short work of said comet ... only to witness the destruction of the echidnas by a massive earthquake. Oops. Click on Edit, then Undo. Back aboard the Legion Warbird, Dimitri tells him that there are simply too many variables when it comes to time travel. He then tells Knuckles that "there are only three moments" that can be impacted. One down, two to go. HEAD: Two major problems with this story. The first one, cited above, was Knuckles's emotional illiteracy. It was Kragok, not Tobor, who came on with the bloodlust asking Tobor if he could smell what the 'Gok was cookin'. And it was TOBOR who was supposed to be angry? Either Dimitri really screwed up Knuckles's reception, or else Ken doesn't know anger when he tries to write it. And after recently reviewing S22's "The Return" for my Archives, I've reached the conclusion that it just might be the latter. Ken is a great action writer, and always has been. I can't say much, however, for his ability to write about how characters feel. As Stephen King pointed out in "On Writing," of the millions of words written by H. P. Lovecraft, only something like 5,000 of them are dialogue, and most of it is really bad. The man just never had an ear for the way people talk. Maybe Ken has a similar problem with the way his characters feel, a situation fostered not just by a preference for Bond-style action stories but by a publisher and even an industry where that sort of thing is discouraged if not forcefully slapped down. It isn't just a matter of emotional anemia, either. As with the Tobor situation cited above, some of the "emotional" moments in Ken's stories have been just plain inappropriate, even uncalled for. Geoff's kissing Sally at the end of "Deadliest of the Species," Locke doing the same to his ex, Lara-Le, in the Forbidden Zone arc, Knuckles's remark to Sally in K29's "My Special Friend" about her father and Sally's response; NONE of them felt real or honest. They happened because they were written that way. Charmy's reaction to the death of Mello in K13's "The Unsuspecting" was IMHO the ONLY time that Ken was able to take a genuine, powerful emotion and actually communicate it to the readers. Most of the time it feels forced, unnatural, almost an intrusion on the plot. As for the second problem, that depends on what Dimitri means by "three moments." For myself, figuring that Dimitri is your basic Nietzschean psycho power tripper, his explanation would go a little something like this: "There are only three moment: the past, the present, and the future. You've seen how tricky dealing with the past can be, and the future isn't much better. It's all fog and night: unknown and dangerous. No, boy, there's only now, only the present. And the only way to deal with the present is from a position of strength. What's needed is power ... and the will to use it!" I hope this is where Ken is going with this. Otherwise, if Dimitri suggests another venue in the past that needs changing, it'll be a sign that Ken is trying to have it both ways. Having demonstrated that the past is too unstable to attempt to change, Dimitri would be a fool to offer Knuckles other chances to try to change it. And Knuckles, of course, would be the biggest fool of all if he took Dimitri up on his offer. There's a third alternative that I'm surprised has yet to occur to Knuckles. I have to wonder why he simply doesn't subject everyone on the bridge except Julie-Su to the same kind of torture the Guardians inflicted on the Os in "Childhood's End" (K25) when they made the hyoomons feel as if their brains were on fire. If I were Knuckles, I'd go for the subtle touch of making every one of the Legionnaires feel as if their insides had turned to molten lead. I'd then add that they're going to feel that way for the rest of their lives; maybe I'd even threaten them with immortality, so that they wouldn't even know the release of death. Of course, they could make the pain stop at any time. Just tell Knuckles how to get his people back. Now! Would it kill Ken Penders to write something that simple? Head Score: 7. EYE: There probably isn't a fanfic writer or fan artist out there who, in the back of their minds, doesn't cherish The Dream. I don't have to tell some of you what The Dream is. For the benefit of the others, it's the hope that someone official, someone actually connected with the comic you buy month after month, will see your work and invite you into the Inner Circle, into the clubhouse on Mount Olympus. Well, for Dawn Best, the dream has come true. And we owe it all to the fact that something was eating Ken Penders's guts out. According to messages on his board, Ken had been experiencing a bad case of gastric reflux. Personally, I'm willing to bet cash money that Justin's short deadlines may have had a little something to do with that. It got so bad he needed to go in for minor surgery on a growth in his throat which mercifully was not malignant. He DID need to lateral his penciling duties over to someone else for a while, though, while he recuperated. So he announced on his message board that he was in the market for an apprentice. A number of fan artists sent in submissions, and Ken apparently liked what he saw in Dawn's art from the first. So what we have here is every fan artist's Dream. It's good news. And good art. If there's one thing that I think makes Dawn's art noteworthy, it's her use of gesture. There's a huge difference between "gesture" and "pose." The latter is used far too much in comic art, and not to good effect. Turn back to practically ANY drawing of Sally by Ron Lim in "Altered States," even the ones where she's falling. That's pose. Now go back to "Reboot" and look at the figure of Lien-Da on page 2 panel 3. Leaning on the post with one hand, the other jammed in her pocket, her hip cocked to one side; THAT'S gesture. Really good artists have a comprehension of it, not only in terms of knowing how a body is put together, but how to USE gesture to help the narrative along, to supply characterization when the dialogue doesn't. Just the way Lien-Da stands there tells you volumes about her. Dawn's off to a great start, and I wish her the very best. Eye Score: 10. HEART: Once more, there's not a whole lot of interaction going on here. I've already dealt with the emotional illiteracy of Knuckles's opening scene. And while there's an attempt at some kind of feeling as Knuckles watches an earthquake do what the comet was supposed to, it still feels distant, detached. Maybe it's a function of Ken having only six pages to work with, I don't know. This story is pretty much plot-driven. Heart Score: 4. Sega Data File It helps to go back and read Fred Gabrie's editorial in S100 before reading these two pages. There we read that the "realities" of the marketplace being what they were, nobody really expected the comic to last very long. Which is why you're looking at two pages from what would ordinarily be known as the Character Bible. A Character Bible is pretty much standard equipment in the entertainment industry. The best ones not only feature character biographies and model sheets, but notes with regard to how one character interacts with another. For Sally, for instance, there would be notes on her relationships with Sonic, Tails, Bunnie, Antoine, Geoffrey, her brother, her parents, Rosie and Knuckles. For openers. This isn't done just to take up space. Just as the model sheets keep the character on-model, a detailed explanation of the character interactions keeps the characters in-character. The closest a lot of new creatives ever came to seeing a Character Bible, as I understand it, was when Editorial would give then copies of the previous 4 or 5 issues of the comic and expect them to make do with that. That's why I give Archie points for even doing a Character Bible entry for Princess Sally after all this time. They finally got the message that the book may be around for a while and they should probably put something together. I'm also glad to see that, after consistently getting it wrong on the Archie Web site, they FINALLY spelled her middle name right, correcting a mistake first made during "Endgame." They lose points, however, for not detailing her relationships with the other characters, especially Sonic, as well as running that picture of Sal and Geoffrey from "Deadliest of the Species." This on top of rerunning the Sonic and Sally picture from "Endgame" in the exact same pose as part of "Altered States." What were they thinking? The map of the Floating Island did NOT appear in S13, though the island itself did. The map first appeared in "Rites of Passage" [Knuckles miniseries #1] and the place names recall various zones from the games. While the Forbidden Zone is featured, the exact location of the Royal Compound within said Zone isn't. Sonic-Grams: Ken tells the story of his talent search, and states his initial surprise that girls would be interested in the comic at all. It's assumptions like that which are helping to kill the industry. Blurb for S102; interesting cover art thumbnail, however generic. Letters: Ken sidesteps Grace's question about Mina's speed, and tells Sharin Farid that Monkey Khan will stick his hairy tail into the story somewhere down the line. Take your time, ape boy.