Sonic Live! [no date]
     "The Last Game Cartridge Hero"
     Story and art: Ken Penders
     "It was a dark and stormy night."  When you can use that
sentence at the beginning of a review, you KNOW there are going to
be problems.
     It looks like Sonic and Robotnik are finally going to go one-
on-one, with an electronically zombified Sally in attendance.  By
the bottom of page three, Sonic has been blasted to particles by a
half-dozen SWATbots.  On the facing page, BTW, is an ad for the
live action remake of "101 Dalmatians" with Glenn Close as Cruella
DeVil.  Ivo Robotnik, have I got a girl for you!
     Quick cut to Chez Penders, where son Stephen is complaining
about HIS dying, at least in the video game sense.  He and Ken's
niece, Jessica, head off for school unaware of the gloved hand
reaching out for them from the TV screen.  On the other side of the
glass, a frustrated Sonic tries making sense of his location.
     Quick cut back to Mobius where Robotnik prepares to do away
with the rest of the freedom fighters.  Quick cut back to the
intermediate zone (get used to the jump cuts, gang).  The kids
return from school and Sonic senses someone at the other end of
wherever he is.  Unable to cross over to their side, he ends up
pulling Stephen and Jessica into wherever he is.  Once again, as in
"The Dream Zone" (Sonic #43), Sonic loses his hip-cool vocabulary
and begins speaking in tongues: "The surrounding energy surged to
the point where I was able to make contact with you.  Now the
energy surges are coalescing at another point!"  Sonic and the kids
head for that other point, without benefit of a yellow brick road.
     As part of an economy drive, Robotnik plans to launch the
remaining freedom fighters into orbit aboard the same rocket that
will carry a "network of killer satellites" into orbit above
Mobius.  Sally, BTW, has been placed "in the rocket's lower level
but I wouldn't worry about her."  In fact, nobody gives her a
thought for the next 17 pages.  Sonic and the kids materialize on
the rocket's scaffolding.  The grudge match between Robotnik and
Sonic is postponed while SWATbots take the two kids hostage.  Sonic
breaks out of the temporary stalemate and whisks Stephen and
Jessica to the rocket's control room.  While he tries to figure out
how to abort the launch, Robotnik is left to contemplate the portal
through which the three emerged.  Sonic manages to stop the
countdown by what amounts to sheer dumb idiot luck, but upon
returning to the portal he and the kids get sucked in.
     Once on the other side, they find Robotnik, Snively and a
bunch of SWATbots.  They also find that Stephen and Jessica have
been drawn in a manga-esque style with huge eyebrows; Jessica,
however, lacks the big huge enormous eyes with gigantic pupils and
about four highlights per eye.  Seems Robotnik's been a busy little
boy, bringing in several versions of himself from multiple
universes to construct a gigantic robot of himself.  Stephen
guesses all this in a moment because he's watched so much "Star
Trek"; Sonic is confused because of the reference to "Space Trek"
which was probably done to placate the legal beagles at Archie
and/or Paramount.  The three are taken prisoner and end up sharing
a cell with...well, they're never really identified by their full
names.  There's a black-haired guy named Mori and a blond named
Jerry.  Employees of Sega, I can only suppose.  Meanwhile, Robotnik
figures out that the "multi-dimensional portal to our world" was
created by Mori and Jerry "in the act of creating so-called
entertainment."  Hey, it's ROBOTNIK'S phrase, not mine! 
Unfortunately, the Doctor doesn't have much time to gloat before
the alternative Robotniks begin to turn on him.  Meanwhile (got
whiplash yet?), Sonic, the kids, and the Sega employees get busted
out by what turns out to be a redhead in a walkaround Robotnik
suit, possibly Jennifer Hunn of Sega in a thankless cameo.  With a
vast reluctance, Sonic rescues Robotnik from himself (or should
that be "his selves"?).  The only way to wrap up this story is to
punch in an access code on a control panel that just happens to
resemble a gigantic Sega game pad.  Being a 90s kinda kid, Stephen
knows the codes.  The code shuts down the SWATbots; I tried it on
my Game Gear and it didn't do a thing.  The giant Robotnik...well,
that never DID become a serious part of the plot any more than the
killer satellites.  After Jerry and Mori guess that they can send
Sonic and Robotnik back where they came from, Sonic says farewell
to the kids and makes the return trip.  He happens to find Sally
and Tails and the group having escaped from the rocket, about which
more later, while Stephen and Jessica grab another game cart.  They
also get credit for their contributions on Freddy's "Sonic Live!"
page, and they get drawings published on the Fan Art page, proving
once again it's not what you know but who you know.
     This story was probably doomed from the moment Ken Penders
took the title from the 1993 Arnold Schwarzenegger bomb, "The Last
Action Hero."  In that film, a boy named Danny (no relation) uses
a "magic ticket" to find himself in the latest Arnold-style action
movie.  Whether or not it was an interesting premise for a film,
the end result was a disaster.  Most critics agreed that the film
had no clear direction--it didn't know whether it wanted to BE an
Arnold movie or a SPOOF of an Arnold movie.  Something of the same
aimlessness is on display in this story.
     When I first read the premise I thought it would go in either
one of two directions: either real people would find themselves
inside the world of a video game (as in Disney' "Tron") or else the
game characters would find themselves in the real world (as in
Woody Allen's "The Purple Rose of Cairo").  Ken ends up banishing
everyone to a "neither world" which is neither like reality nor the
games nor even like the animated Mobius.  This was a fatal
miscalculation.
     Introducing humans into the game grid might have posed some
problems, but nothing that couldn't have been thought through. 
Bringing Sonic and Robotnik into the real world, however, would
have been rife with possibilities.  While Stephen and Jessica try
to introduce Sonic to their lifestyle (in scenes reminiscent of
E.T. discovering television and beer), Robotnik could decide to
take over Earth.  As a character from a video game he'd be in a
position to do it, too.  Since he and Sonic owe their corporeality
to negative electrons striking phosphors on a TV screen, he could
use his devious mind to figure out a way to tap into ambient
electromagnetic energy and microwaves and make himself as
formidable a foe as the shape-shifting T-1000 from "Terminator 2". 
Until Stephen and Jessica save the world using...refrigerator
magnets.  Seriously!  The magnets would have a major disruptive
influence on the electrons in Robotnik's body (something the kids
would discover when Sonic is seriously weakened the closer he gets
to the family fridge).  So it's easy to imagine Stephen and
Jessica, armed with a handful of tacky refrigerator magnets and
hurling them at Robotnik like a couple of ninjas throwing
shurikens, cutting him down to size and enabling Sonic to subdue
him and return to their own reality.
     There were certainly a couple of stories in the situation that
Ken COULD have told, and which would have worked far better than
the one he DID tell.  But neither improvements in art (having seen
Ken's artwork for an issue of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" I
know that he's no slouch as a portraitist) nor in writing could
have corrected the most basic flaw in the piece.
     I've been regularly corresponding with a member of this list. 
Well, actually, he's been writing fan mail to Princess Sally and
I've been sending them along   ;-)  .  He has said repeatedly that
his life on Earth is boring and that if he could get to Mobius he'd
go there in a heartbeat.  I don't think this impulse should be
ignored.  This, after all, is what's at the heart of fandom: the
fact that fictional characters can become so real that people
recognize them as distinct personalities.  They consider them to be
as real and as knowable as people in their own lives.  In short,
they CARE about the characters.
     This is nothing new; people have been feeling this way about
fictional characters for centuries.  Hamlet asks "What's Hecuba to
him, or he to Hecuba?" when one of the dramatic players weeps for
a fictional character.  At some point, everyone has encountered in
fiction characters who have taken on just such a reality, whether
it's Huckleberry Finn, Walter Mitty, or Bigwig, Fiver and the rest
of the rabbits in Richard Adams' "Watership Down."  This is a
valuable resource, it helps fuel such success as the comic book
enjoys and, sadly, Ken Penders and Archie are squandering it.
     In looking back on this story, I was reminded of the words of
a producer of another Hollywood film, "Heaven's Gate," which cost
$35 million in 1980 and was aptly summarized in one review as "an
unqualified disaster."  In surveying the audience at a preview of
the film, Stephen Bach realized that they were dead silent
("comatose with boredom" as he put it) because "not one of them had
been made to CARE about what was happening on that screen." [_Final
Cut_, p. 361, emphasis original].  Sonic fans care deeply about
Sonic and Tails and, yes, they care about the soon-to-be-late
Princess Sally.  Had they been made to care about Stephen and
Jessica or the Sega people to an equal degree, the story would have
been different.
     "The Substitute Freedom Fighters"
     Story: Rich Koslowski; Art: Art Mawhinney
     This is a prequel/sequel to "Last Game Cartridge Hero". 
Having watched David Letterman use a "monkey cam", Rotor devises a
Walrus Cam; actually, it's a small video camera that attaches to
his tool belt and which can send images back to Knothole.  The team
sans Sonic then heads out to deal with some approaching SWATbots,
only to be captured instead.  Meanwhile, in a special guest
appearance, Larry Lynx arrives in Knothole.  I came on board kind
of late so I missed his initial appearance.  But there's no way he
can miss Robotnik's visage on a monitor in Rotor's deserted hut. 
Before Larry suffers a full-blown panic attack, he spots something
on another monitor: a bunch of Mobians in training.  He heads out
there (don't ask me how he knows where to go to find them), and
runs into Sally's old team from her miniseries, along with another
one-shot creature making a cameo, Cyril the Eagle.  He puts some
SWATbots out of commission by relying on his jinx karma, which
doesn't seem to affect the other freedom fighters.  To make a short
story shorter, they liberate Sally and the others from the rocket. 
In gratitude, Sally promotes everyone to B-Team status with Larry
as leader.
     This is storytelling at its simplest: get from point A to
point B nice and easy.  Art Mawhinney's visuals are perfect as
always.  The fact that Larry came back for this one and has been
promoted gives me reason to hope that there MAY be a chance for the
return of Fiona Fox.
     One further point about Art's drawings of Sally.  She's
looking good these days.  In one sense, that's a bad sign.  When
Mad Magazine did their parody of the film version of Erich Segal's
book "Love Story," they stated that the Ali McGraw character was
suffering from "old movie disease".  It's a condition where the
more beautiful you look, the closer to death you are.  By the time
the Ali character is in the hospital dying, "the color has come
back to her cheeks, the mascara has come back to her eyes, and her
teeth have all straightened!"  In a sense, Sally's beauty has
marked her for death.
     "Knuckles Quest 2"
     Story: Kent Taylor; Art: Pat Spaziante [presumably; the
credits sort of lump them together]
     In tracking down a lead in his search for the King's Sword,
Knuckles finds a remote hut in the Great Forest.  The owner, who
apparently doesn't believe in keeping a watchdog, instead keeps a
nasty one-eyed beastie called a Devil Watcher.  Knuckles tries
feeding him a felled tree, only to watch it disappear.  Other
security measures include two leopard-like Blood Beasts, a square-
jawed Berserker with bigger pecs than Dolly Parton, a Grim Reaper
and a dragon.  Knuckles decides to try thinking his way out of this
one based on the words of the Ancient Walkers from the previous
story.  Realizing that the one thing all these creatures have in
common is that they're characters from Mobian fairy tales, Knuckles
states outright that they're illusions and apologizes to his host
for intruding.  The creatures fade and Knuckles confronts the
resident, Merlin Prower.  Yes, there IS a family resemblance. 
Merlin identifies himself as a Charlatan, once in the service of
the King (and now presumably retired).  He says he doesn't know
where the Sword is, but suggests that the Knuckster try asking
someone in the Land of Dark, which doesn't appear on any AAA Trip-tiks.
     Fans have agreed that this is the best story in the issue, and
it's easy to see why.  They care about Knuckles getting the sword
if it'll help the King to recover.  And the fact that we're
introduced to someone who's an obvious relative of Tails is an
unbeatable hook.
     But does anybody else harbor a mistrust of Merlin?  He is,
after all, a charlatan.  Charlatans are by definition those who
claim to know more than they do.  By extension, he may not be
telling all that he DOES know.  Does anyone else expect to see
Merlin popping up later on, and in an unflattering light? 
Knuckles, given his unfamiliarity with the Knothole crew, unaware
of the surname "Prower", and not seeing the resemblance to Sonic's
friend Tails, doesn't make the connection.  That kind of monumental
cluelessness qualifies him to be a comic book publisher.