Sonic #119 [Mar 2003] Spaz/Ribiero/Ray cover: generic art and weird text. The Christmassy blurb for the cover story loses its punch because the magazine comes out in late January. Only 5 more covers of this kind to go. Axer-Jensen impressive frontispiece: too bad THIS couldn't have found its way onto the cover. "Cater-killer's Coming!" Story: Benny Lee; Art: Ron Lim; Ink: Andrew Pepoy; Color: [Jason] Jensen; Lettering: Jeff Powell; Editor: J. F. Gabrie; Managing Editor: Victor Gorelick; Editor-in-Chief: Richard Goldwater. The town of "Furville" gets a wake-up call from Sonic a few moments before the REAL wake-up call arrives in the form of a totally re-designed "Cater-killer." If anyone was expecting Sonic to pick on someone his own size, fuggedaboudit! C-K2 has morphed into a basic machine of destruction as big as a train. According to a holographic projection of Robotnik (looks like this train has on-board entertainment), this new and improved C- K2 has its sights set on Knothole. We know this to be true because Justin Gabrie said so in the text box on page [6]. Fortunately for Sonic, the real hero of this story arrives by plane: Tails. Tails has not only provided a chase plane to keep up with C- K2, he's also analyzed its strengths and weaknesses. Sonic and Tails abandon the plane in mid-flight, which reminds me of what comedian Steven Wright said about skydiving as a sport: "I don't see any reason to get out of a plane when it's working." Justin should have inserted a text box saying "Really REALLY don't try this at home!!" but he saves that warning for Sonic's maneuver for penetrating C-K2's outer hull: to "vibrate fast enough to slip our molecules through Cater-Killer's." Mike Gallagher could have come up with something just as effective but far stupider, but what the heck, it works. Once inside, Sonic is too wrung out to be of much use, so it's up to Tails to jazz up C-K2's programming and send it off a nearby cliff and into a nearby body of water. HEAD: Mark Lungo asked me a question that frankly left me stumped, and it's one I hope Justin Gabrie can answer for the benefit of the class: if the cover stories have been cut back to a mere eleven pages in length, why do we need to be reminded of the story title every three pages? What's with the "Part 1," "Part 2," "Part 3" jazz? It's not as if the scenes change so dramatically from one "part" to the next that we'll forget where we are. It also has nothing to do with any change in the pacing of the story, which is pretty consistently fast throughout. This is a classic example of Archie Comics hanging onto a tradition (in this case the use of running titles) when the need for it has disappeared. There have also been developments in this comic where a perfectly workable reality has suffered from trying to be "improved" by some bonehead Editorial decision. We didn't need to know that Knothole was C-K2's next target. Sure, it raises the stakes for Sonic, but it also muddies the waters by introducing a plot point that subsequent writers will have to deal with. Unless they simply choose to ignore the plot point thinking that someone else can deal with it, which seemed to be standard procedure for the writers back in 2001. It simply wasn't NECESSARY to the plot; Sonic was already trying to stop C- K2 on general principle. This is the same kind of editorial short-sightedness that led to the destruction of Robotropolis by the writers and editors. They were blessed with a perfectly serviceable back story: the Knothole Freedom Fighters, operating from their secret base somewhere in the Great Forest, were trying to recapture their former capital city, Mobitropolis, rechristened Robotropolis by Robotnik when he took it over. Sonic and company managed to do this in "Endgame" but lost it again around issue #75. Robotnik, who'd learned the location of Knothole, had managed to forget it after having been fed a computer virus, I believe. Then a bunch of planet-hopping Overlanders returned and occupied the city, only to abandon it when it became clear that it was built on a toxic waste dump or something, and that Robotnik was pretty cruddy himself. Before then, Knothole had undergone some serious urban renewal so that it's doubtful that its location could now be considered a secret. By the time the implications of that move had become clear, Robotropolis had been reduced to smouldering wreckage by a couple three nuclear missiles fired from Station Square so Robotnik, as will be seen in the last story in this book, has had to build himself his own Fortress of Solitude hidey-hole somewhere else on the planet. It's debatable how many of these plot point, if any, were actually necessary to the comic continuity; I still think the development of Knothole in "New Order" (S94) was a HUGE mistake, since the stories have gotten very low mileage out of all that building activity. The hospital and high school served as backdrops, nothing more. This is what happens when a comic becomes driven by its plot points rather than by its characters. The saving grace of this story, whether Benny Lee meant it to be or not, is that Sonic takes a back seat to Tails. The little guy flies in to give Sonic a lift (What DID happen to the plane after they bailed out?), deliver the Nate Morgan Memorial Exposition Balloon, reprogram C-K2 once they got inside, then air-lifted Sonic to safety as C-K2 went into the drink. This isn't much of a stretch if you've seen the original Sonic anime [not to be confused with a Sonic anime TV series, "Sonic X," which has been shopped around the syndie market]; in that one, Tails was the scientific genius. The final page of Tails not getting the joke is a cute touch, and I can sympathize with his plight. "Off the deep end" is an expression used WRT swimming pools. When you do your swimming in a natural body of water, the concept sort of loosens up. I can't imagine Tails doing a lot of swimming, anyway; when's the last time you smelled a wet fox? Head Score: 6. EYE: I've taken heat from Karl Bollers and some others on Ken Penders's message board who've come to the defense of Ron Lim's artwork. They claim that he's gotten better. Frankly I hadn't believed it. Until now. I don't know if it's simply the change in inkers to Andrew Pepoy or the impressive coloring by Jason Jensen, but Lim's work here is a step up from what it had been. This is especially true for C-K2, which reminds me of the Silver Flash or one of those other futuristic-looking railroad trains from the middle of last century. Can't say I like his face modeling of Tails any better, but I couldn't help but be impressed by the layout on page [11]. Hope he keeps this up. Eye Score: 8. HEART: This is an action story, and it serves the purpose. It sure wasn't character-driven. In this story, if any character was driving the plot, it was the new and allegedly-improved Cater-Killer. I've only been with the comic since #18 so I don't remember what the original Cater- Killer was like. In THIS story, he's been turned into a mindless killing machine with zero personality. C-K2 is nothing more than a retread of the Doomsday Machine from the Star Trek: Original Series ep of the same name. That ep is significant for Sonic fans because the character of Commodore Decker was played by William Windom, who would go on to do the voice work for Uncle Chuck in the SatAM series. And if you want to see what a character-driven story is like, roll tape on the second season SatAM ep "Sonic Conversion," where Uncle Chuck and Bunnie are both temporarily deroboticized. The difference? The P-word: "personality." For someone who ends up being the hero of the story, Tails doesn't get to HAVE a personality here: he says his lines and goes through the motions and that's about it. Sonic has more of a personality here but he doesn't end up doing much this time around except waking up Furville and penetrating C-K2 by getting a bad case of the shakes. And C-K2, as I've said, is reduced to a machine with no personality at all. I'm not spoiling anything by saying that of the two stories still to come in this issue, "Dust Bunnie" is also plot-driven while "Time Code" depends more on personality. I still maintain that it's possible to integrate plot- and personality-driven stories in this comic, but the overwhelming tendency is to think in terms of Either/Or instead of Both/And. I have no way of knowing which way the upcoming Sonic-Sally-Mina story arcs will go. We'll have to wait and see. The only attempt at generating any kind of emotional involvement this time around is the gratuitous plot point that C-K2 is headed for Knothole; see my comments above on the wisdom of THAT idea. Heart Score: 5. "Dust Bunnie" Story: Karl Bollers; Art: Steven Butler; Ink: Jim Amash; Coloring: Jason Jensen; Lettering: Jeff Powell; Editor: J. F. Gabrie. Well, THIS story starts off with a bang, or rather a FOOM as Bunnie is blown out of the sky. "That's the last time I answer a distress signal without calling for back-up!" she tells herself. There's a lot of that going around: after all, that's how Amadeus Prower, Tails's dear old dad, got roboticized in "Eve of Destruction" (SSS9). Bunnie wakes up to find herself under glass so thick she can't punch a hole in it. She then meets up with the one-eyed Jack Rabbit who had wanted to keep Sonic prisoner the first time around and now wants revenge. If you're wondering "Revenge for what?", I'll go over the back story in the HEAD section below. Anyway, Bunnie takes part in yet another mindless fight sequence involving roboticized Mobians. Mercifully, this one is way shorter than her encounter with Rouge three issues ago, as she leaves Jack and his cohorts to clean up their own back yard. HEAD: For the benefit of those of you who came to the comic late, by which I mean only within the last five years, permit me to spell out the back story: During their Round The World Tour, Sonic and Tails arrive at Sandblast City, where they're treated like royalty. Something about the set-up, though, doesn't feel right. They eventually learn that S.C. maintains itself under a force field dome, which we can see Bunnie falling through on the first page, that the roboticized Mobians in those parts keep trying to get into the city (sort of like the zombie horde in "Night of the Living Dead"), and that Jack is actually keeping them prisoner. They disable the force field, the controls of which were hidden inside a statue of Sonic in the city center, and take off as the city is on the verge of being overrun by roboticized Mobians. When I heard that Karl Bollers was dusting off this story and running it past us again, I wondered whether he'd take the opportunity to fill in any of the plot holes I stumbled over five years ago. Why are the roboticized Mobians in that neighborhood in apparent revolt, since Robotnik had bitten the big one in the course of "Endgame"? Why keep Sonic and Tails prisoner, especially if you have a perfectly functioning force field? These questions were left unanswered the first time around. I figured that Karl couldn't do too much by way of exposition with a page limit of 5. And I wasn't disappointed: Karl offers nothing whatsoever by way of explanation for the back story. It all comes down to: get Bunnie into a fight, then get her out. And that's disappointment enough. Head Score: 4. EYE: Forget about leggy girls with lavender hair and enormous eyes. If you want to know what "manga art" is all about, look at page [4]. This has the look and feel of a story board. Bunnie is the focal point as the camera, as it were, zooms in on her as she fights off the horde of roboticized Mobians without any word balloons or text boxes cluttering up the scene. This is where manga parted company with American comic books. From the very beginning of the genre, Osamu Tezuka's "Shin Takarajima" ("New Treasure Island," 1947), manga has made no secret of its debt not to Western comics but to Western cinema: "I felt that existing comics were limiting.... Most were drawn ... as if seated in an audience viewing a stage, where the actors emerge from the wings and interact. This made it impossible to create dramatic or psychological effects, so I began to use cinematic techniques.... French and German movies that I had seen as a schoolboy became my model. I experimented with close-ups and different angles, and instead of using only one frame for an action scene or the climax (as was customary), I made a point of depicting a movement or facial expression with many frames, even many pages." [Osamu Tezuka, quoted in Frederik L. Schodt's "Manga! Manga!: The World of Japanese Comics"]. Add this to the list of really stunning page art that has appeared in the Sonic comic, and it's not that long of a list. Stephen Butler jumps to an early lead in the category Best Story Art of 2003 on the strength of that one page alone. Eye Score: 10. HEART: As I read this story, I got a sick feeling in my stomach that could best be summed up in two words: "Backstreet Project." The Backstreet Project is my own shorthand for the narrow and unimaginative way some comic book stories are conceived. In the original, misbegotten Backstreet Project, Stan Lee could think of nothing better to do with the Backstreet Boys than turn them into garden-variety superheroes. Sadly, Karl subjects Bunnie to the same fate. This is an even greater disservice to Bunnie than "Bat Fight!" (S116) where Bunnie came off more like a sparring partner for Rouge than as a superheroine. The first and last panels of this story, in fact, show her in flight, which is an ability she only acquired in the course of SSS11's "Upgrade." That story, however, was more than just a superpower showcase. Ken made the core of that story the scene where Antoine assures Bunnie that he cares for her and is sticking by her no matter what. As I said in the 2002 Best-Worst List, I've always enjoyed writing for Bunnie myself, in part because she never struck me as being just another dull superhero(ine). Parts of her have been mechanized, sure, but if the character underneath the hardware wasn't appealing, it wouldn't have worked. That's why for me the SatAM Bunnie is still a touchstone. The marriage of the writing with Christine Cavanaugh's voice work brought her to life not as a super character, but as someone who had, as she put it, a heart and mind of her own. Both of those qualities are missing here. Karl simply drops her into a variation on the Thunderdome and waits for the nuts and bolts to start flying. And that, as I also said in the Best/Worst List, gets very old very fast. Once more, it comes down to personality. The Sonic comic, I maintain, simply wouldn't have made it this far if that quality had been lacking. Sonic is fast and Tails can fly and Bunnie's strength has been artificially enhanced, but so what? That's standard equipment on a lot of superheroes who have fallen by the wayside over the years. It was the personalities of these characters that kept the fans coming back, not any super powers per se. And that goes for the not-so-super characters as well: Sally and Rotor and yes, even Antoine. It's not unusual for me to receive story drafts or ideas from fans wanting hints and suggestions. One piece of advice I freely pass along whenever I can is: if you've got the personalities of the characters nailed down, that's half the battle of writing for them. The powers are secondary; the powers aren't why we CARE about these creatures. I know Karl can do GREAT work within the limitations of the five-page format: "A Girl Named Hope" and "The Crush" (S108 and 109, respectively) attest to that. Maybe it's because I'm no fan of mindless fight stories of any length, but this exercise was pointless as well as mindless. While Bunnie got through the fight in spectacular style, the outcome was never really in doubt, was it? Heart Score: 2. Fan Art: Joshuua [sic] Fuentes resurrects Eggman from the Sonic CD game (how to get past him: wait until he leads with his gut); and James Nadel does a spectacular depiction of the Death Egg going kaboom. But otherwise this section belongs to the ladies: both Kelli Ann Murray and Heidi Blair do good-looking tributes to that bad girl, Lien-Da (Heidi, BTW, goes by the handle "Lien-Da" on Ken's message board), and Sara Haye's drawing of Amy Rose with human proportions finds a counterpoint in Samantha Moro's chibi Rouge: this is probably the only time you'll find Rouge's name in the same sentence with the word "kawaii." "Time Code" Story: Karl Bollers; Art: Art Mawhinney; Ink: Nelson Ribiero; Color: Jason Jensen; Lettering: Jeff Powell; Editor: J. F. Gabrie. What you have here is mostly banter between Knothole's resident wirehead, Rotor, and Sally handheld computer, Nicole. Rotor, for all his genius and effort, can't discover Nicole's origin. That, however, was spelled out as part of the "Sally's Quest" arc which dates back to S17(!) and ended with the controversial In Your Face special. The most Rotor can squeeze out of Nicole is a rude icon he passes along to Robotnik. HEAD: I meant what I said when I called the culmination of "Sally's Quest" controversial. At the time, well over eight years ago, Sega was supremely uneasy with the projected future of Sonic and Sally and the rest of the gang, including Bunnie made whole, Sonic and Sally as parents, and King Max as a grandfather. It was a happy ending, but Sega was so afraid of commitment at the time that they pressured the writers, Mike Kanterovich and Ken Penders, into including a weasely text box saying that this is only one possible future scenario. Sega is still around, though a casualty of the Hardware Wars, and in a nicely subversive move the future that Sega dreaded so much back in the '90s is presented with no apology this time around. I guess that means it's canonical now. Nicole's speech, if you can call it that, is a little on the breezy side. I'm used to Nicole having a flatter speaking style; here it/she sounds too much like DiZZi, the talking laptop from "Beyblades." Not a major stumbling block, though. I don't know whose idea it was to put all that writing on all those sheets of paper on Rotor's work station, but it does obey one of the rules I set for myself when writing: IF YOU HAVE TO INCLUDE AN IN-JOKE, KEEP IT IN THE BACKGROUND. This is where Ken Penders faltered in "My Special Friend" (Knuckles #29) by resurrecting the variant colorings of Sally when the book first came out and presenting it as a plot point after it had been long forgotten by the readers. I didn't even try to make sense of the scribblings here, which is just as well since a number of them appear to be related to the Transformers series, which was a taste that I never acquired. I was a little unsure of the spelling of "bupkus" on the last page, so I went to the primary source for such matters: Leo Rosten's "Joys of Yiddish." There, I discovered that Rosten gives the preferred spelling of the word as either "bupkes" or "bobkes." The apparent confusion is understandable, though; the word comes from the Russian word for "beans," and so it has to pass through two different alphabets before appearing in English: the Russian Cyrillic and the Hebrew characters with which Yiddish is written. No harm, no foul. And as mentioned earlier, Robotnik now seems to have taken up residence in a Fortress Of Solitude that still manages to play to his ego. Any veteran of the games, though, knows that Robotnik's image shows up in building designs and background motifs in the games, right up to and including Sonic Adventure 2. On the plus side, this story is more character-driven, the characters being Rotor and Nicole. Unfortunately, aside from linking itself back to the original Kanterovich and Penders story, this too is as pointless as the other two stories in this issue. Sonic and Tails conquer a Robotnik wonder weapon; seen it. Bunnie gets in a fight and defeats the bad "guys"; seen it. Rotor is too smart for his younger self; an interesting idea that I wish could have been the basis of a REAL story. Head Score: 5. EYE: Art Mawhinney does the art for this story with authority, and why not: he did the art for the original "Sally's Quest." And I have to complement Jensen for the use of the green screen; somehow it looks more retro and more convincing that if Rotor had been using a 16-bit High Color monitor. Eye Score: 10. HEART: As I said earlier, there's something a little subversive, and I mean that in a good way, about Karl's endorsing the "Sally's Quest" denouement. Mike and Ken had a great idea in that story: by way of explaining Nicole provenance, they have Nicole built by a future Rotor and sent back into the past to help Sally. It's a very benign twist on the Terminator premise, and I'm glad Karl or Justin haven't tried to reinvent Nicole's origins. The implication here, though, is that this IS Mobius Prime, and the future of Mobius Prime has Sonic and Sally married with rugrats and running Mobius. In effect, this communicates the message: "Don't take any of the upcoming Sonic-Sally-Mina stuff too seriously." Which takes a load off my mind. After seeing how much of a non-starter that whole triangle angle turned out to be since its introduction in 2001, I'm not dreading the prospects of its being resurrected and shoved onstage so much. After all, we know now how the story REALLY ends. Heart Score: 6. Off-Panel: "Gallagher d'Onofrio?" I don't know which was worse, the art or the poor excuse for a pun that was the punchline. This Justin: No Sonic-Grams this time around; only blurbs for issues #120-123, leading up to #125. Since I've taken heat for prejudging issues in the past I won't comment on anything here, except for one comment by J. Fred: "This issue [S125] will try to fit in every single character in the Sonic Comic Universe." Quite a few fans with favorite minor characters, such as Kragok and Drago, sat up and took notice when they saw that. They expressed hope on Ken's message board that this meant that the characters will find their way back into the continuity. Hate to break this to you kids, but what we have here is another example of Stunt Casting. In animation, Stunt Casting is when a famous person does the voice for their own character putting in a cameo appearance [which has happened more times than I can count on The Simpsons] or a different character. Again going back to The Simpsons as an example, we have Dustin Hoffman doing the voice of a substitute teacher in Lisa's class, and Michael Jackson doing the voice work for someone who sort of THINKS he's Michael Jackson. When this principle has been carried over into the Sonic comic, the results can be described in two word: "Parallel Paradigm." This was the infamous story in Sonic Special #7 where we had a Sonic-Image Comics crossover, despite the fact that nothing much came of the cross-pollenation. I don't know why, but someone at Archie Comics feels the need to do something spectacular when a milestone issue rolls around once every 25 issues. Let's look at Archie's track record: S25: A single-issue story marking the debut of Pat Spaziante as story artist. S50: Management insists on a "jam session" finale to the "Endgame" story arc, switching artists and writers every few pages. Add in some EXTREMELY poor editing to cut what had been a 40-page story down to 24 and "Endgame" winds up being a train wreck of Biblical proportions. Archie had to issue a "Director's Cut" Special in order to make sense out of the plate of hash that was S50. S75: The return of Robotnik, which is special enough, I suppose. S100: Should have been more special, but Sega's insistence on a Sonic Adventure 2 "prequel" in S98 throws off the book's timing. I am NOT looking forward to S125, given past performance by the comic. It will be interesting to see, though, how Archie handles the roll call of the dead: Kragok, Kodos, Eddy the Yeti, Julayla, Uma Arachnis, Monk, Mello, and a good number of Knuckles's ancestors. Too bad this will hit the stands some time during the summer; if they could have waited a few more months, they could have come out with an All Saints Day issue (if you don't mind the presence of a couple sinners in the mix).