Sonic #68 (March 1999) Spaz-Harvo-Ray cover: Sonic with Sally in his arms amid the devastation of Mobitropolis. Feeling like you've been there and done that? Check out the cover of Sonic #37. But after this past year, I'm not complaining. "Surprise!" Story: Karl Bollers; Art: Steve Butler; Ink: Pam Eklund; Lettering: Jeff Powell; Coloring: Frank Gagliardo; Editorial: G- Force. Note: in addition to the more prosaic page numbers (sans Sonic's profile) they also show the same graphic of a candle being lit with the progression "One," "Two," "Three," etc. on each page. I knew the comic was being dumbed down emotionally, but intellectually? In a perverse way, you have to give the Editorial crowd at Archie Comics credit. The "Knothole Is Three Hours in The Future" plot point that was introduced in "The Big Goodbye" (Sonic #50) really hasn't been utilized AT ALL for the last YEAR AND A HALF. Archie Comics could have said: "Forget it; we'll go on like it never happened and explain it away in a year or two," which is what they did WRT Sally's "exotic" coloring in the early issues of the comic (see the Sonic-Grams of Sonic #16). But instead, Karl Bollers gives us a half-dozen text boxes dealing with the point and he STILL doesn't really do anything with it except mention the fact that Knothole IS three hours in the future. Because that's their story and they're sticking with it! Of more import is the fact that Sally, despite her stated intention of getting the place ready for Sonic's return ("Shadows in the Dark," Sonic #67), now wonders whether he'll even show up. Rotor then incorrectly states that Sonic has "been here for the other fifteen" birthdays. FACT: "Here" can't mean Knothole because Sonic was five years old when Robotnik took over and he was part of the group that took refuge in Knothole as a result. But when was the last time an Archie writer bothered with a fact-checker? In a nice two-page spread we see that the Mobitropolis Urban Renewal campaign has made great strides in the "several weeks" since Robotnik was overthrown. Actually, it would have been more realistic to say "months" despite the fact that it feels like years since "Back To Basics" (Sonic #57) when Sonic and Tails split the scene. On the street we see three die-hard Star Wars fans looking for the theater where the prequel will be shown. The three figures in the Ben Kenobi-style threads are, of course, Sonic, Tails and Nate Morgan. Sonic thinks that the festivities might have something to do with himself; looks like the Sandblast Citizens sized up Sonic's ego correctly. And AGAIN with the space thing! At least it has a point this time around: setting up the ineffectual meteorite shower later on (yeah, like I gave something away just now!). Over on the Left Coast, on an island Ken designated "West Robotropolis" on his Mobius map but which Karl Bollers has rechristened "Big Kahuna Island," a number of lesser kahunas (Snively, Drago, and the other bit player villains from issues past) debate what to do with the crystalline forms of Kodos and Arachnis. Snively doesn't say much as he's coming down with a severe case of flop-sweat, caused by not knowing how exactly he and everyone else escaped from the Devil's Gulag Island Penal Institution With No Consistent Name back during the Icon story arc (Sonic #62-63). Not knowing what exactly happened is a situation to which the readers can readily relate. But just as the situation threatens to degenerate into a brawl and we face the prospect of the villains killing off each other and putting themselves and us out of our misery, Kodos the Species- Unspecified and Arachnis-San snap out of it without so much as a FWAAASH! from a magic sword, let alone a PLAUSIBLE explanation. Kodos appears to be in the mood for a hostile takeover of the Villains Trust, and the more hostile the better. Back at the Great Forest, Knothole may or may not be three hours in the future but it appears to be outside the range of Mobitropolis's cell phone service, for only when Sally emerges from Knothole can Nicole's call-waiting function kick in. Sally fields the call and discover's she's got male, the male in this case being her father. Let's review: last time we saw Sally and Max together, in "Ultimatum" (Sonic #60) and "The Mission" (#64), the relationship between father and daughter was going downhill faster than Picabo Street. So what accounts for the sudden attitude adjustment? Unfortunately, the characters never bother to ask but simply conclude that the King's cryptic communique has to do with Sonic. Back in town, the locals who begin lining the sidewalks don't seem to be paying much attention to the three identically- dressed strangers; if this were a Knuckles story, the EST troopers would be all over them in case they turned out to be Dark Legionnaires. Tails, being shorter than virtually everyone except Nate the Main Morgan, tries to fly up to get a better view but Sonic quickly clips his wings...so to speak. This maneuver doesn't escape the attention of Rosie, who happens to be nearby. Unfortunately, before anything can be developed along these lines, Karl Bollers succumbs to the lure of mere fashion. Keep in mind that he wrote this like about six months ago, when "Deep Impact" had made its impact at the box office and "Armageddon" was just getting hot. So, without any real point (except that it has something to do with the satellite water-torture subplot), we get four pages of a meteorite shower. The biggest problem I have is that it didn't even have to BE a meteorite shower--a Day of Fury-induced hyper-hailstorm would have worked just as well. Anyway, Sonic and Tails go into hero mode, Nate proves he really HAS gotten out of the hero business by ducking and covering, Dulcy flies in to provide air cover, Antoine worries about his trousers when AFAIK he's never worn trousers, and Sonic and Sally are reunited on page 12 in a page that's long on action and short on feeling, though I have to admit I liked the use of the silhouette at the bottom of the page. It's not the reunion I would have liked to see (a full-page splash of Sonic and Sally in a tender embrace as Mobitropolis falls apart all around them with the lyrics to "God Only Knows" by the Beach Boys in the background) and Steve Butler takes pains NOT to show anything happening below the neckline between Sonic and Sally as a way of keeping the watchdogs from Sega at bay. As Sonic introduces Nate to the group, Sally realizes that some wires got crossed somewhere when her father called. So everyone heads over to the palace where they discover the King's real agenda: introducing the long lost Prince Elias to the populace. After appearing in the second and third installments of the Forbidden Zone arc, where he looked and acted like a fairly decent sort, all Elias does here is strike a pose. Not word one passes between him and his sister and the survival (barely) of Queen Alicia is mentioned only in passing. In other words, Karl Bollers is handed some dynamite set-ups for some grand storytelling and managed to avoid them as if they were live grenades, all for the sake of spending 25% of his page allotment on a meteorite shower that changed nothing. And King Max's way of breaking the news to his own daughter leaves a lot to be desired. This is the psychological equivalent of a boot to the head for Sally. I had fully expected that Robotnik would have shown up in this issue to crash the party, but it's beginning to look as if there'll be little to choose between Buttnik and Mad Max. And it doesn't help that Geoffrey St. John immediately starts acting like his old self again (i.e., like someone suffering from cranio-rectal insertion). Max immediately stands up for "Uncle Nate" (who doesn't have the height advantage, anyway) as the emotional tone shifts dramatically. But before anyone can say anything else we zip past the Know Your Superheroes pages to the by-now pointless Sonic birthday poster. If "Back To Basics" resembled a clip show in its story structure, "Surprise!" looks more like a shopping list: get Sonic and Tails back, check; do the satellite thing, check; work on the subvillains, check; one meteorite shower, check; reunite Sonic and his friends, check; make sure that Sonic and Sally don't get too physical and/or mushy, DOUBLE check; bring in Elias, check; cut to the birthday poster, check please. What we have here, people, is an ODTAA. In 1926, British writer and poet John Masefield wrote an adventure novel with the title ODTAA. I've tried reading it, and its plot set in a vaguely Hispanic setting that could be old California or the Caribbean simply didn't register. Yet the most intriguing thing about the book was its enigmatic title, which had nothing to do with any person, place or thing in the entire novel. Masefield finally admitted that the word was an acronym for "One Damned Thing After Another" which was a good description of the story structure. As someone else characterized it: Hero tries this, hero tries that, hero tries the other thing unsuccessfully; hero tries the other thing again in greater detail; hero succeeds. Masefield wrote two other adventure novels but it was clear that the field belonged to the likes of Edgar Rice Burroughs so Masefield concentrated on poetry. He was no slouch at it, either; he was named Poet Laureate of Britain in the 1930s. Yet Karl Bollers has pulled so much together into the 16 allotted pages that while he can tell a story, there's no single story that's told WELL. And there was nothing preventing him from dropping, say, the 2-page subvillain subplot and the 1-page satellite subplot and trimming the meteorite shower by half. That would have afforded plenty of slack for the stories that SHOULD have been told: Sally meets Elias, Sally learning what happened to her mother. "There are two things my mother told me before she died," according to Lucy, the ditzy GenX secretary on TV's "The Practice": "One was, never let yourself get pushed around by someone bigger and more powerful than you. [The other thing was:] You can always trump them with a dead mother." Those developments could have brought the house down and been a nice reality check for Sonic. Instead, in the blurb for next month's Sonic we're told "the vigil beside Queen Alicia's bedside continues in peace...." In other words, they're shining it off. This is gonna cost you some big points, Archie. Because I now have A RATING SYSTEM! Last year, Ken Penders suggested that I start rating the issues somehow. I've always been leery of rating systems, because they tend to focus on the What at the expense of the Why. Besides, the quality of the stories can vary greatly in a single issue. How, for instance, to rate Sonic #60 which featured both Frank Strom's "Arsenal of the Iron King" and Ken Penders's "The Ultimatum"? I decided, therefore to use three scales to measure different aspects of the story: HEAD: This has to do with the narrative, the writing. Are there plot holes? Is there even a plot? Are the characterizations true or false to the characters? Here, Karl has a good grasp of characterization, and the communication breakdown between Sally and Mad Max was a good touch. Still, the meteorite shower bit was yesterday's news, and the satellite and subvillain bits could have been dropped for the sake of some REAL storytelling. On a scale of 1 to 10, this story gets a HEAD SCORE of: 6. EYE: This is about the look of the thing. Are the characters on-model? Does the layout work? There's a lot to recommend this story visually, though Bunnie looks like she's going through a growth spurt these days. The two-page spread on pages 2-3 I thought was rather charming with its feel of everyday life on Mobius. And as I said, the use of silhouette at the bottom of page 12 gave it a nice feel; too bad the technique represented a hedging of bets in order to keep Sega happy. The birthday poster, in fact, ended up being one of the weaker pages. This gets an EYE SCORE of: 8. HEART: I go into more detail about this quality in my Best/Worst List for 1998. For the moment, the question to be asked is: do the writer and artist work to make the readers CARE about these characters? I got that sense WRT Sonic, Sally and their old comrades. The King gets nudged closer to being the villain du jour, which can't help Sally's emotional state. But Karl squandered the chance to show the reunion of brother and sister and mother and child. Heck, I'd like to have been around for Max's reaction to seeing the woman he once loved on ice. For dropping the ball, this story gets a HEART SCORE of: 4. Just barely. Know Your Heroes: Unlike the renegade surgeon created by Osamu Tezuka, this Blackjack is a detective and card sharp. After a series of improbable coincidences saves his life, he becomes a superhero with no visible means of support. Actually I've always been partial to the not-so-super superheroes like Batman and Captain America who weren't dependent on super powers. They were poster boys for self-improvement. BTW, Paul Castiglia informed me that a lot of these old superheroes have gotten a new lease on life thanks to the Internet. They're under the "Mighty Crusaders" section of the Archie Comics Web site. "Tales of the Freedom Fighters Presents: "Lupe and the Wolf Pack: Part 2: "Survival of the Fittest" Story: Ken Penders; Art: Sam Maxwell, Ink: Ken Penders; Lettering: Ken Penders; Coloring: Jeff Powell; Editorial: G- Force. Hang on to page 1: it's the scorecard without which you can't tell the players. That was a major problem I had with the previous installment: who was who. The Pack investigates an abandoned building and finds two orphaned human girls: Athena who has red hair and Aerial who has yellow hair. I avoid using the terms "redhead" and "blond" because we're talking primary colors here. Lupe has to decide what to do. End of story. It's an interesting development in that we get a look at a different segment of the Overlander population. And Ken has worked at giving the pack members distinct personalities. Reynard is immediately suspicious of the children, while Diablo shows a streak of practicality. HEAD SCORE: 8. Sam Maxwell's art could stand some tweaking. Because it's just the girls and the Pack members, there's no scale to work with so there's no telling how old the girls are just by looking. What should be a scar on Lupe's face ends up looking like a moustache half the time, and the last panel on page 5 is extremely confusing: is Aerial supposed to be lying on the floor or floating in space? And I know those are supposed to be cornrows and/or dreadlocks in the headfur of Leeta and Lyco, but instead the two of them look like they're wearing hairpieces made out of sausages. EYE SCORE: 3. It's too soon to know how the girls relate to each other and to the wolves, but the fact that Athena is supposed to be a mute could give the character a nice Chaplinesque touch if handled properly. And in this comic that's one big "if." Too soon to tell but the potential is there. Tentative HEART SCORE: 5. Sonic Grams: Well, the "friendly nemesis" angle really IS dead if Jerry Springer can't milk it for a few rating points. The "Letter of the Month" by Kathleen Najera is one of several letters that state that the Icon arc left something to be desired. Questions about Sonic proposing to Sally, the return of the Anti-Sonic, and Uncle Chuck getting deroboticized are all neatly sidestepped. Blurbs for Sonic #69, Knuckles #22, and Special #8. The "Find Your Name" page is followed by the Fan Art page: And I thought Steven Butler drew Bunnie on the long side! Ashley Byrd's rendering makes Bunnie look like a statue by Giacometti. Logan Andres anticipated the sequel to last month's "Tomb Raider," Joe Jason Soosiah teams Sonic and Knuckles against Buttnik, and Edenio Gonzalez doesn't fool me for a minute: that's Mega-Man wearing that phoney Sonic head from "Endgame!" And finally we have the Pro Art by "Former Brenda Starr comic strip artist Ramona Fradon." "Brenda Starr." There was a time, in the early 1980s, when reading "Brenda Starr" was an experience because the strip's story lines had descended to levels of weirdness and incoherency unheard of in the industry since the demise of "Krazy Kat." Even BEFORE Ramona Fradon and writer Linda Sutter took over the strip from the retiring Dale Messick, we witnessed the birth of Brenda's daughter, Starr Twinkle; listened as the infant Starr began making ironic asides in the Sunday strips; witnessed the expunging of an entire year's worth of material involving Brenda and a predatory millionaire named "Cash Wallstreet" and an unemployed window washer name Asha Wallclimber who stalks Brenda (mind you, this was BEFORE they tried the same thing on the TV show "Dallas"!); went numb when Messick took the premise that Brenda Starr can't cook and stretched it out for over a month's worth of strips; went into shock when Brenda's editor, Mr. Livwright, died of a heart attack and his Australian sister, Nevera, took over the "Flash" (the paper where Brenda works) and tries to ban coffee from the newsroom. Ah, but then Sutter and Fradon took over when Messick announced her retirement. And what happened? In a memorable four-month story arc, Brenda and family (husband Basil St. John, daughter Starr, and Gertie the maid) go to California and encounter Silicone Valley computer genius "Dr. Kissintel" whose coveted new microchip somehow migrates from inside a golf ball to Starr Twinkle's Captain Zoom video game. International spies in identical panel trucks chase Brenda and the chip all over the Pebble Beach golf course. Arab terrorists roll Brenda up in a rug which they dangle from a crane over the Pacific Ocean (I swear on the collected works of Jack Kirby, it all really happened!), as Brenda refuses to talk to the traffic reporter hovering next to her in a helicopter because she's a PRINT reporter! And some klutz lets the chip fall into the Pacific Ocean and that's the end of the story arc. I won't even BEGIN to tell you about the Inca Indian in the reed boat and the lederhosen-wearing dwarf and how they escaped from the Bermuda Triangle, or about the thinly-disguised jabs at Roone Arledge and "Good Morning America," or about Brenda's encounter with glam rock star "Boy Brenda" and his big hit "Comma Quotation Mark." But let me point out that at this point in the Sonic saga we have a long-lost prince, a Queen on ice, a Shrimpenstein human scientist, meteorite showers, crystal statues that resume a living form with no explanation, equally unexplained jailbreaks, and wolves interacting with human children amid the ruins of a post-apocalyptic St. Louis, Missouri. Ramona Fraydon should feel right at home on Mobius.