Sonic #103 [Jan 2002]
     Spaz/Harvo/Ray cover : this could have served as the cover
of S98, with Sonic on one side of the divide and a shadow-y Sonic
on the other.  You can ignore the "Quantum Leap" headline on the
front.

     "Freedom Fighters of the Galaxy: Part 1"
     Story: Mike Gallagher; Art: Jim Valentino; Ink: Harvo;
Color: Stephanie Vozzo; Lettering: Vickie Williams; Editor/Art
Director: Justin Gabrie; Managing Editor: Victor Gorelick;
Editor-In-Chief: Richard Goldwater.
     We open with Zonic the Zone Cop narrating the prologue from
his customary 90-degree angle.  We all know what THAT means:
another crummy Zone story.  This one takes place in a "divergent
future" a thousand years after the events we've been slogging
through recently.  So we're basically told that we really don't
have to care about what will transpire because these aren't the
real characters.  Most of them, anyway.
     A shuttle lands in a Mobitropolis that's "a ravaged husk,"
all noir darkness and flames and destruction.  Yet this is what
the pilot of the shuttle calls home.  The pilot in question bears
Sonic's silhouette but that's about all; he's otherwise clad from
headquills to sneakers in a black-and powder blue body suit.  His
face is similarly masked, so the shape of Sonic's eyes is about
all the expression he's allowed; sort of like the "dark" sequence
in the infamous "Naugus Games" (SSS15).  Not a good sign for a
comic where the creatives routinely have trouble getting the
characters to register emotions.
     Anyway, his arrival is being watched by a figure perched
gargoyle-like on a building ledge.  This character, who looks
like Tails with impossibly long and slicked-down headfur, takes a
flying leap downward and immediately starts insulting Sonic's
taste in clothes.  We then hear Sonic deliver one of many bits of
hard-core bad comic book dialogue in this story: "Don't 'dis' my
suit, pal.  It allows me to focus and fire my speed power as a
bolt of psycho-kinetic energy!"  Which stops the "Tails" who has
two CAT tails instead of two fox tails.
     Sonic then goes into exposition mode, explaining that he was
launched into Space by Robotnik, where he was picked up by the
"Pearlmen."  These are totally stupid-looking aliens with
clamshell heads.  After saving Sonic's life by fitting him with
his survival suit, they forget all about him, as if he were an
underused plot point in an Archie comic.  Sonic was put in
suspended animation for no good reason, then shuttled off the
ship after an unspecified period of time.  Thus Mike Gallagher
keeps alive the detailed, clockwork precision that's come to mark
plotting in the Sonic comics.
     Anyway, now the exposition lamp shines on Tails, or rather,
"Tailon."  After Sonic's disappearance Robotnik started "The War
Of The World," which looks more like another version of his
"Operation: Wasteland" from S22's "The Return."  Only this time,
Robotnik managed to kill himself off along with almost everyone
else.  Or, as Tailon so eloquently puts it: "In the end, the fat
man sang.  This planet was toasted and abandoned."
     Tailon himself isn't even a proper Mobian; rather, he's a
self-described "inhumutant."  Personally, I'd stick with "furry." 
Anyway, Tailon scoots Sonic out of the way of a gang of robo-
echidnas, but Sonic wants to bust some heads after a thousand
years of doing nothing.  If the pose at the bottom of page 6
looks familiar, it was used as the dummy cover for this issue in
the preview media, sans Tailon.
     Sonic and Tailon make short work of the group, Sonic by a
combination of running and telekinesis.  When a larger army comes
at them, though, the party is crashed by...
     OK, I'm more of a Sonic fanboy than an all-around comic book
geek.  No secret there.  And that's why I am HUGELY in the debt
of Mike Deckard, aka mikeon_line, for explaining who's supposed
to be whom in this story.  And now's as good a time as any to
spell it out:
     Sonic, Tails/Tailon, and the rest of the Freedom Fighters of
the Galaxy who make their appearance at this point are all
modeled on members of the Guardians of the Galaxy, created by ...
Jim Valentino.  Sonic is supposed to be modeled on Major Vance
Astro, who was also psychokinetic and similarly clad in silver
and black.  Tailon is supposed to be Talon, Captain Rotor 27 is
Captain Charlie 27, Saleta is Aleta, Bunni is Nikki, and Twan-Du
is Yondu.  There's also the redundantly-named Hawkhawk, modeled
on Starhawk.  The group then goes into action: Hawkhawk spews
forth ponderous comic book dialogue in an effort to talk the
echidna-bots to death, Captain Rotor 27 prefers the direct
approach and slaps the bots around, Twan-Du is set up with a bow
and arrow, Bunni is armed with a Buzz Lightyear-style glove-
mounted laser beam as well as the same bag of Southern-fried
cliches she dipped into way back in Mike Gallagher's "Rage
Against The Machine" (S39), while Saleta has some kind of light
thing happening.
     With the bots vanquished and the gang all together, we then
get HUGE amounts of exposition: three and a half pages worth. 
Seems that after Mobius was rendered uninhabitable after
Robotnik's big check-out, Sally, Bunnie, Rotor and Antoine
managed to survive (sing along with me: "Gee, what are the
odds?") and each went their separate ways in individual
spacecrafts; so these characters are their descendants who have
changed under the influence of their new home worlds.  But this
state of affairs was interrupted by the invasion of The Shark,
who don't look nearly as stupid as the Pearlmen.  Their job was
to thin the herd on each of the planets to insure that only
Saleta, Captain Rotor 27, Twan-Du, Hawkhawk and Bunni would be
left alive to form the Freedom Fighters of the Galaxy since they
couldn't do anything else with their lives.
     The group prepares to offer fellowships to Sonic and Tailon
when they're interrupted by a messenger of doom.  We also get yet
more comic book dialogue from Hawkhawk that is so stilted,
overblown, and self-important that it deserves to be quoted in
full: "Behold!  It is Silver Snively!  He is herald to the
greatest menace in the universe and whose arrival here is now a
foregone conclusion ... Oh, unkind Fate!  Silver Snively's
master, Robolactus, the Planet Glutton is coming   and he
hungers!"
     To quote a line from the film "Soapdish": "Now why can't I
write $#!+ like that?"

     HEAD: There are basically two kinds of crossover stories. 
In one kind, the characters from Continuity A meet the characters
from Continuity B and each retains their own personalities.  This
was the situation in Ken Penders's "Parallel Paradigm" (SSS7)
where the Knothole crowd met up with various Image Comic
characters as well as some of the cast from Ken Penders's own
"Lost Ones."  The results can range from interesting to downright
weird; the most out-there example of this kind of crossover I've
found to date is Ian The Potto's "Over The Hills And Far Away."
     The second kind of crossover story, however, is tricker to
write.  In it the characters from Continuity A BECOME the
characters from Continuity B.  The trick here is to figure out
how much of the old A characters will live on in the B
characters.
     This has been debated on Ken's message board, in the context
of adapting the Sonic cast to various anime.  Casting the
Knothole furries as characters in the series "Outlaw Star" seems
easy enough, with Sonic as Gene Starwind, Tails as Jim Hawking,
Sally as Melfina, etc.  There are enough characters to go around
and their roles (leading man, young sidekick, alpha female)
already pretty much correspond to the Knothole cast.  Doing a
"Tenchi Muyo!" crossover, however, is another matter.  Sure,
Sally could be cast as Princess Aeka, but who'd be cast in the
all-important role of Ryoko?  She's very much the wild child, and
nobody in the Sonic world is as sexually forward as she is.  And
never will be if Archie management has anything to say about it. 
Hershey could be cast as Kiyone because she's not ditzy enough to
be Mihoshi.  Neither is Amy Rose since her makeover, which also
makes her too old to play Sasami.  There are simply not enough
different kinds of females in the Sonic cast to make it work.
     So I'll have to take the Sonic/Guardians of the Galaxy
crossover on faith.  On the outside it seems to work in the way
that a Sonic/Outlaw Star crossover would work: you've got a
pretty good one-to-one character correlation.  As Mike Deckard
points out, though, some accommodations have had to be made. 
While the origins story here is, as he puts it, an "Archified"
version of the original, some attitude adjustments have happened. 
Tailon, for instance, lacks the outgoing trickster qualities of
the original Talon, a self-described "lovable flake."  While
Rotor is a very close fit to Captain Charlie 27, the sarcasm of
Bunnie's role model was seriously toned down.
     Mike Gallagher has taken a few other liberties with the
source material, and one gets the impression that he was goofing
on the Guardians.  Bunni's hair, for instance, is NOT supposed to
be flames, but it's due to "static electricity."  Personally, I
think it was because Gallagher remembers back in 1993 when there
was an incident in Dayton, Ohio, involving a fire and somehow
"Bevis and Butthead" got blamed for it, which is when they
started running the "they're not role models" disclaimer before
episodes.  So I think Gallagher's steering clear of a possible
Emulation Clause violation.  He also goofs with the Twan-Du do, 
working in a "Gaul" (the old Roman name for France)
"stones"/gallstones joke, a subject to which I can unfortunately
relate.
     Taken together, all this has fans wondering on Ken's board
just how MUCH of a goof this is.  It has its comedic elements as
well as the aforementioned jokes, and while I'm in no position to
know whether comic book writers in general have started writing
more natural-sounding dialogue, there's no way anybody can take
Hawkhawk's dialogue seriously.  Yet these elements rub elbows
with the whole Tragic Past Of The Main Characters exposition as
well as the Dystopian Present angle.  So we have the struggle
between types on display not only in concept but in execution.
     That said, the story itself works pretty well as far as it
goes, which isn't very far considering how much exposition we
have to endure.  In one respect, however, Mike Gallagher has
apparently learned a valuable lesson from a previous Sonic story
on how NOT to write for comics.
     If anyone asks me what it takes to be a good writer, the
first thing I tell them is: "Read.  Everything.  And not just
comic books."  Yet reading comics can also be instructive.  Take
Kanterovich and Penders's "Bedtime Tails" (S38).  In it, Tails
regales an ailing Sonic with a comic book story wherein Sonic,
Sally, Tails and Rotor appear as a parody of the Fantastic Four. 
Unfortunately, wearing spandex is about all the team does.  Sonic
opens up the throttle and that's about it.  Tails doesn't even
FLY, furcryinoutloud!  And these are supposed to be superheroes? 
So I'm glad Mike actually followed through and demonstrated the
Freedom Fighters of the Galaxy actually ACTING LIKE superheroes,
if only in one sequence.  The moral of this story: If you're
going to rip something off, DO SOMETHING with the stolen goods!
     It's hard to tell where this story is going, but so far it's
not a disaster, except for Hawkhawk's dialogue.  Makes me wonder
why this story couldn't have appeared in SSS15 instead of "Naugus
Games" and "Sonic Spin City."  The Specials would have gone out
on a better note.  Head Score: 7.
     EYE: Jim Valentino gets to goof on his own creations in
terms of the artwork, so the costumes are right.  Beyond that, I
actually found myself liking some of the designs.  Bunni looks
cute and I like seeing her with an intact bunny bod, despite her
feet being way too big, and Jim does a better job of drawing
Sally/Saleta here than he did for SSS11's "Ascension."  Even the
"old" Sally on page 12 looks better.  I'm impressed.
     Most impressive of all, though, is a small moment at the
beginning of the story.  It's the scene where Tailon somersaults
off his ledge and lands on the ground.  It appears, not in the
form of speed lines trailing behind a single pose, but in a
three-pose drawing.
     Amid all the discussion of the comic's artists trying to do
more manga/anime style artwork, Jim Valentino here demonstrates
one facet of that style: action drawing.  One of the reasons
manga has left Western-style comics in the creative dust is that
early on manga decided it wasn't going to be LIKE comics; it'd
rather be like motion pictures.  Beginning with Osamu Tezuka,
manga artists have paid close attention to Western cinematic
techniques: they spread a single action over a number of panels
to build tension or to evoke a mood, they use fade-ins and fade-
outs, close-ups and tracking shots, montages and, in this case,
superimposition.
     Like a multiple-exposure photograph, or more accurately like
the sequence of drawings used to animate a motion in a cartoon,
manga artists can take a single action and draw the character
executing it in several consecutive positions on the same page,
so that the reader follows the action visually instead of being
told it just happened thanks to the aforementioned speed lines. 
One of the finest examples I've seen of this was in a boy's comic
I saw back in the 1980s: "Mirukii Sensei," that appeared in an
issue of "Shonen King" magazine.  It was a story about a young
woman named Mirukii, who is a high school phys ed teacher and, of
course, something of a babe.  In one story, where she comes upon
a group of toughs beating up one of her students, she interposes
herself between the gang and the student. She does this by
leaping over the group, using one of the members as if he was a
pommel horse.  The vault, the jump and the landing, are spread
out across the bottom of two facing pages and is depicted in
eight separate poses.  I have NEVER forgotten that sequence.  So
it's nice to see, even to a minor extent, that Jim Valentino has
recognized the technique and managed to work it into a story as
retro as this one.  Eye Score: 9.
     HEART: About the only point of empathy here is the Mobius
backstory.  I found myself wondering, though, why Bunnie, Sally,
Rotor and Antoine split up?  I know the obvious answer: to fit
the plot of the Guardians of the Galaxy.  Still, I've really come
to think of them as a team, and even Karl Bollers, in announcing
that starting with S105 he'll be concentrating more on the
original Freedom Fighters, has apparently seen the light in terms
of viewing them as a unit.  Perhaps the disappearances of Sonic
and Tails was too much for them to take, I don't know.  It could
have worked that way.  Heart Score: 7.

     Fan Art: Two entries from my home town, duh great city uh
Chicaguh.  One is a rough Sally Moon portrait -- you have to look
kind of hard to see the Moon Scepter -- and the other is a
manga/anime tribute to four of the ladies of Mobius.  Aaron Wohl
contributes a drawing of Sonic wearing Soap Shoes, but top honors
HAVE to go to Kevin Mayorga's killer drawing of the Sonic Kids,
including kid versions of Bunnie and even Dulcy!

     "Myth-Taken Identity"
     Story: Mike Gallagher; Art: Dave Manak; Ink: Harvo; Color:
Frank Gagliardo; Lettering: Vickie Williams; Editor/Art director:
Justin Gabrie.
     The story starts with a page that reminds me of the Enzo's
birthday ep from "Reboot;" I still crack up thinking of the
parodies of William Shatner and the Village People from that one. 
Anyway, seems Duck "Bill" Platypus, Walt the transsexual wallaby,
Barby the lab rat (I will NEVER concede that she's a koala until
they change her design!) and Guru Emu are auditioning for a 
replacement for Wombat Stu, who's presently undergoing treatment
for nanobot infestation and most likely regretting that he ever
signed up with Geoffrey Sinjin.  As it's been well over three
years since these characters have graced the pages of the comic,
Mike Gallagher thinks this would be a good time for, you guessed
it, MORE exposition and backstory.  Three pages out of a six-page
story, in fact.  We get an account of their meeting, of their
initial move against Croc-Bot, and of Robotnik's intervention
which more or less set up the Tails miniseries and a subplot in
"Endgame" which, in somebody's editorial wisdom, was almost
completely cut from the first version and had to be inserted more
or less sideways into Endgame: The Director's Cut (SSS6).  And to
REALLY keep things moving, there are allusions to a "latest
disturbance" which one of the Downunda wannabes identifies as the
bunyip, yet another leftover plot point from S61.  To be
continued.
     HEAD: This one's a bit more fun than "Freedom Fighters of
the Galaxy," especially since the source material isn't so
apocalyptically depressing.  It also demonstrates what happens
when you start out with relatively well-defined characters.  This
is an absolute must when writing any kind of story, and it's the
weak spot of crossover stories of the "Freedom Fighters of the
Galaxy" variety where you don't know if you're dealing with
Sally-in-an-Aleta-costume or Aleta-as-Sally.  Mike's always had a
strong comedic touch and he plays to his strength here.  Head
Score: 8.
     EYE: Dave Manak has been Mike's artistic sidekick since the
comic's inception, and his work does justice to the relatively
light material.  What's a surprise is Frank Gagliardo's
characteristically nuanced coloring job.  Dave had in the past
worked with Barry Grossman as colorist, with the results being as
flat and uniform as the coloring of a cel for a 1960's Hanna-
Barbera cartoon.  Frank's blended work here adds a new dimension
to the characters.  I don't know why I'm drawn to the fact that
the tip of Walt's tail shifts to yellow but it doesn't seem all
that odd.  It's a good look for them.  Eye Score: 8.
     HEART: N/A

     No, I'm NOT about to spend time filling in the Knuckles
family tree; I'll wait until next month.  What I DID notice about
the two-page spread, though, is that this is the FIRST time since
S90's "Between a Rock and a Hard Place" that Knuckles earns the
nickname "Rad Red."  Frankly I'm getting tired of the green look
and the sooner Ken loses it, which is supposed to happen some
time in 2002, the better.
     Sonic-Grams: Ken explains why the break in the continuity. 
He says, in part, that it "allow[ed] Justin a chance to
experiment a bit with the book."  "Experiment"?  Perform CPR
would be a better description.  This past year has been a
disaster as far as the comic is concerned, so it's small wonder
that the story lines are being retooled.  He confirms that FFOTG
was meant for a Sonic Special; I'd like to know whose idea it was
not to run it in SSS15 in favor of the four-color mucus that
actually appeared.  I don't feel comfortable with Ken's allusion
to pulling rabbits out of hats; it tells me he still hasn't
learned his lesson from the Tails-isn't-Tails plot point
controversy.
     S104: We're told Jim Valentino won't be doing the art for
the next FFOTG installment; instead, Ken Penders and Dawn Best
will do the honors.  Plus a notice that Scott Shaw! and Joe
Pepitone were left off the credits list for S100, without
mentioning that Ken Penders was also left off the list as well.  
     Letters: Ken goes online and takes some letters from the
Sonic lists, from the aforementioned mikeon_line, Ian the Potto,
and Bune.  Nice to see the online fans getting their propers.