And so one more institution comes to an end. Last year Archie management pulled the plug on the Knuckles line. This year it was decided that for economic reasons the Sonic Specials should bite the dust. I haven't called them "Sonic Super Specials," as it says on the cover, because frankly they weren't always that super. SSS15 is the last such special, and it isn't even all that special because this is an "inventory issue." That is, the stories herein were ones that were pretty much lying around the office. Had the fans had their way (if I interpret the coconut wireless correctly), they would have preferred to wait for something substantive, such as the "Knuckles: 20 Years Later" or the "Chosen One" story arcs. But instead we close out this chapter of Archie Comic history with: Sonic Super Special #15 [Nov 2000] Spaz/Penders/Ray cover: Sonic, surrounded by ice in which is reflected the image of Naugus. It never could have showed up in the thumbnails in the comic, so it's just as well that it wasn't prominently featured. Sonic is blowing steam and sweating in the midst of the cold; he's got reason to sweat. "Naugus Games" Story: Ken Penders; Art: "Many hands" (I swear on my complete set of Knuckles comics, that's what it says!); Breakdowns (nervous and otherwise): Ken Penders; Lettering: Josh and Aimeee Ray; Coloring: Josh and Aimee Ray; Seps: Josh and Aimee Ray; Editorial: G-Force. We're actually off to a good start with the first page splash: a bundled-up Sonic has returned to the Southern Tundra. "I don't know why I'm back," he thinks, adding "Actually, I do know why I'm back." This level of introspective confusion is NOT a good sign. Turns out that Sonic has returned in order to pay his respects to Eddy the Yeti, who you'll recall was crushed to death at the end of "A Friend Indeed" (S66). Gee, why ARE you here, Sonic? Shouldn't the job of remembering Eddy's memory be better left to Nate Morgan, who was the one who settled in with him in the first place? Come to think of it, it's been a while since Dr. Shrimpenstein figured in any of the recent Sonic stories [he last appeared in "Family Matters," in S88, in a wordless walk-on at the beginning of the story]. Has anybody noticed his subsequent absence? Does anybody care? After a page of exposition wherein we learn what was NOT told to us in the original story [that Naugus wasn't terminated by Nate's power ring eyepiece after all, but merely returned to the Forbidden Zone], Sonic places a rose on the site of Nate's old hideaway. Yet the rose is far more substantial than the story in that it causes a cave-in. Sonic slides into the darkness as the story goes to hell.... We then get four pages mostly consisting of panels that are almost completely black except for Sonic's eyes and the odd shaft of light. No wonder nobody wanted credit for the artwork here. I knew that the process of turning out Sonic comics these days has devolved into a mad dash, but nobody apparently had either the time or the inclination to do simple drawings of Sonic and then subject them to heavy gray scale. But if you think THIS is an artistic cheat, just wait. Short story shorter: Sonic stumbles around in the dark until he sees a small opening and spins his way through until he locates what appears to be Nate's old power ring stash. Sonic is so impressed by the horde he goes off-model at the bottom of page 9. Unfortunately, the pile is a trap used to liberate... I took the time to check out Naugus's last appearance. He did NOT look that butt-ugly when Steven Butler drew him! Again, small wonder that the artist chose to hide behind the pseudonym "Manny Hans" or whatever. The portrait at the top of page 14 looks especially awful, as if someone had dashed off the drawing and couldn't be bothered with doing any clean-up before it was faxed to the printer using a phone line that had a lot of noise on it. The self-proclaimed "master of the elements" unleashes some fireballs at Sonic which he's able to dodge. Then, to demonstrate how cheap of a villain he REALLY is, he unleashes "the overwhelming power of a snowstorm." It actually proves to be pretty underwhelming: we get 6 (count 'em, six!) pages of mostly snowflake patterns with word balloons. All that snow reminds me of an old 9" black-and-white portable I had in my dorm room in grad school, but anyway. By the time we get to page 22, TEN of the preceding pages have been dashed off in the most perfunctory manner possible. You want to know how bad it's gotten over at Archie? Look at pages 17-22. Oh, yeah, there IS a story going on: Knowing that Naugus can find him in the blizzard if he stands still, Sonic keeps on the move. We know this by the semi-shifting orientation of the word balloons. After being taunted by Sonic, Naugus tries to justify this whole sorry exercise by saying that Sonic's return to the Tundra was HIS idea: "Was it not my strong mind that touched you from another dimension? [Eeeeeeeeww!] Was it not my mind that forced you to use that power ring to set me free?" On cue, Sonic pulls a ring out from his jacket; this dissipates the snow and reveals more bad artwork. Sonic bids Naugus return to the Forbidden Zone...and the big wuss turns around and does just that! Loser! As the spirit of Eddy the Yeti watches all this in the last panel, Sonic sums up this story quite neatly: "Aw, who cares?" HEAD: OK, it would have been nice if the story had a believable premise, but as stated earlier, there's no real reason for Sonic to make the trek no matter how much profound dialogue Ken has him spout in the beginning. And from there, everything goes downhill: Sonic stumbles around in the dark, inadvertently releases Naugus who does a couple low-level maneuvers (at one point during the blizzard Sonic compares it to a game of tag) and then the threat is quickly dismissed. Seems that the only REAL purpose of this story was to let us know that Naugus is still alive but the writers can't be bothered with resurrecting him as a real threat just at the moment. And if they don't care, why should we? Head Score: 3. EYE: How to describe the artwork here? "Uneven" is about the kindest thing I can say, with obvious differences in style at the beginning, middle and end. "Careless" also springs to mind. And then there's the fact that the unnamed artists cut corners like crazy during the "dark" and "snowstorm" sequences. Ten pages out of 25, a whopping 40%, are dealt with in this off- handed manner. This leaves the indelible impression of having been produced in a blind panic, shoved between two covers, and kicked out into the world. This is bad artwork that goes beyond bad; it is metaphysically bad! What do I mean by "metaphysically bad?" I'm thinking of St. Thomas Aquinas's definition of God as "something greater than which cannot be conceived." The art here, in all its carelessness and dash, approaches that level of suckitude. Even Jay Oliveras, when committing the monumentally awful artwork in "Ghost Busted" (SSS8), at least bothered to draw something in every panel; he didn't try to get away with repeating some lame-o Christmas wrapping paper pattern and calling it a blizzard. It looks like Many Hands have got a lock on the Worst Story Art category for 2000. Eye Score: 1. HEART: The ONLY thing that could have saved this whole sorry exercise would have been a menacing villain. Instead, we get Naugus. Let's trace a little of the history of this two-bit character. He only appeared once in the SatAM Sonic, in the ep titled "The Void." Interestingly enough, he wasn't even a villain in that ep. He was a prisoner in the Void, having been sent there by Robotnik. Naugus's bag of tricks was also fairly shallow. The ONLY thing he could do was shape-shift, particularly Robotnik's head, much to Snively's amusement. His only concern, once he escaped from the Void, was to get revenge on Robotnik by...shape-shifting Robotnik's head, much to Snively's amusement. He, like Sally's father, was forced to return to the Void at the end of the ep when he started crystallizing and realized that he couldn't live on Mobius any more. Ben Hurst, co-writer for Sonic season #2, had planned to have Naugus break out of the Void for the third season (those were his red eyes on display at the end of the Doomsday ep). Ken and Karl have run with the notion, but barely in a straight line. As you can see, Naugus (who acquired the ungainly name "Ixis" somewhere along the way) has become a lot more buff than he was on TV and has become adept/inept at manipulating the elements. He doesn't do any better here going against Sonic than he did in "A Friend Indeed." In fact, since he's up against a plain old Sonic rather than a supercharged version, you could argue that he's slipping. Obviously, Naugus has fallen on hard times. Nobody seems to know what to do with him to make him a formidable villain, and I'd frankly hoped that he'd been killed off in the last encounter. But if the writers are serious about resurrecting him and wreaking havoc on Mobius with him, perhaps they'd do well to study a far more serious villain: "him" from The Powerpuff Girls. The villain known as "him" (for theological reason I refuse to spell it with a capital H) has been described as the creepiest villain on kidvid today. Like Naugus he has crab claw hands as well as skinny legs, go-go boots, and some kind of Santa jacket. Facially he looks like a cartoon Satan. The English language is inadequate to describe the voice work for the character. But, like stupidity, evil is as evil does. And what he does is play mind games. These usually involve sewing dissent: turning the citizens of Townsville against the Powerpuff Girls and the Girls against each other. It may not be as dramatic as fireballs, windstorms and blizzards, but BOY is it effective! And this is where Naugus is sadly lacking. It was OK when he possessed King Acorn and was then exorcized in "Return of the King," but what's he accomplished since then? Not a whole lot. And in this story he gets NO traction whatsoever! Sonic comes through without a scratch! Maybe with some actual thought he could be a villain to reckon with, but in this round Ken didn't seem to know what to do with him, possibly because he didn't have the time. Naugus is, to quote an old baseball term, a bum. As in the saying, "Throw the bum out!" PLEASE!! Heart Score: 1. "Sonic Spin City" Story: Mike Gallather; Art: Mike Gallagher; Ink: Harvo; Lettering: Vickie Williams; Colors and Seps: Josh and Aimeee Ray. After trashing a couple SWATbots, Sonic finds that "one of them dropped a matchbook." While Gallagher begs the question of what robots would need matches for, Sonic checks out the "dump." Rusty's is sort of reminiscent of the Bottom of the Barrel Bar and Grill from "Court Martial" (S40) and boasts the same clientele: Caterkiller, Bat Brain, an unusually shrimpy Grounder, and a ComBot. Before anyone can start fighting the lights go out and the floor show starts. The patrons watch a curvaceous SWATbot slinging around an extension cord as if it were a feathered boa. But the ComBot grabs at its ankle and it turns out that the "it" is a "she": it's Bunnie, long overdue for a major appearance. She and Sonic make short work of the bots until they realize that the ComBot's head is going to explode. They leave. That's it. HEAD: When I first glanced at this story I asked myself "What the hell is THIS crap?" Then I remembered that the title, "Sonic Spin City," is supposed to be a pun not only on "Sonic spin" but also "Sin City," the very un-Archie-like comic produced by Frank Miller. Which I've never seen. I wonder how many readers can say the same. Here's an idea: when doing a parody, make sure it's a parody of something that your audience is familiar with; otherwise, you're only telling yourself a joke. But this being the age of the Internet, I don't have to drive the ten miles to the nearest comic shop to get an idea of Mike Gallagher's source material. So I logged on to a couple SC sites and after having done so I had to ask myself "What the hell is THIS crap?" Not that Miller isn't good at what he does, it's just that I've lost all taste for this kind of noir ugly. I got off the grim slide a while back and have no intention of getting back on, so that obviously affects my ability to "appreciate" this parody. As a parody it works about as well as can be expected. Of course, since Gallagher is writing for Archie he can never BEGIN to approach whatever eroticism Miller may have built into his stories. There's violence enough, but it's perpetrated against robots so that makes it all right. Still, despite the trendy trappings there's nothing here that hasn't been seen before. Sonic fights some bots; so what else is new? A night club for robots; see the reference above to "Court Martial." I'm not sure how to take the notion of Bunnie as a bot exotic dancer, but it sure beats Bunnie-as-Godzilla from "Zone Wars: Giant Robotno" (SSS12)! Gallagher doesn't go the distance with the parody, again because this is an Archie comic, but it's an interesting experiment, noteworthy for being the last of its kind. Head Score: 5. EYE: Frank Miller's "Sin City" artwork has an edginess to it that reminds me of broken glass. That level of emocation is NOT exactly on display here, but I don't have a problem with that. What I have to wonder about, though, is why Josh and Aimeee Ray received credit for color and seps when it looks like Harvo did most of the work. He must have used enough India ink for this story to do a year's worth of Spaz covers. Eye Score: 5. HEART: Again, there's nothing going on here that hasn't happened before. There's something here for the Bunnie fan boys, but the style kind of gets in the way. And lacking anything new in the way of content, this particular story is all ABOUT style. In the aesthetic debate concerning style versus substance, form versus content, you can probably guess which side I come down on. A good story can always have a chance at redeeming weak artwork, but the flashiest artwork can't save a weak story. The art ends up being a distraction if it doesn't make you care about what happens to the players. And in the end, maybe that's why Sonic clings to a share of an ever-decreasing market despite the harsh economic realities. Because the fans CARE about Sonic and Tails and Sally and Knuckles and the rest of the crowd. Here, Sonic and Bunnie are simply a means by which Mike Gallagher can goof on Frank Miller. Ultimately, like the makeovers for Sonic and Amy Rose, this story is about style and not substance. Heart Score: 3. Pin-Up: No, it's not a pic of Bunnie lap-dancing at Rusty's; instead, it's a Spaz pic of Sonic and Naugus in a snowstorm. With no cheap snowflake effects, either. Sonic-Grams: A bunch of letters WRT the last few Specials. Scott Ogden wonders where he can find Sonic merchandise; you guys in Sega's Marketing Dept. want to field that one? The tenacity of Editorial knows no bounds: they STILL insist on spelling Tikal's name wrong. Ben Stackenheim asks about "the dog guy who looks like Arnold Schwarzeneggar," and the editors finally cut loose and admit that his name was "von Stryker." They dropped the "von" at first because they didn't want to jeopardize the German market. Wonder what it says that they're using the original name? Fan Art: There are some nice items on display here in a two- page spread, including Rachel Hoijducko's portrait of Sally and Kendra Brown's drawing of Julie-Su in blue jeans. But pride of place goes to the FOUR contributions by Charles Kusiak: a Sally/Tails double portrait; a dead-on rendering of Amy Rose as Chibi Moon (with Sonic as that high tech cat head/ball she carries around); and even an attempt to fashion a silk purse out of the biggest sow's ear from the SatAM second season, "Ro- Becca."