Sonic #121 [May 2003]
     Spaz/Ribeiro/Ray cover: One of the reasons that the covers
have become what they are is that Pat Spaziante reportedly chafed
under the book's tight deadlines and complained that he was doing
covers that were generally unrelated to the stories inside.  So
from now until S124 we have these generic covers featuring
stripped-down Spaziante character drawing accompanied by blocks
of text that are generally unrelated to the story inside.

     Axer frontispiece of Prince Elias.  I love the coloring of
the sky behind him.  I'm not sure about the expression on his
face though.  Perhaps he's still in shock after having read the
script.

     "The Prince and the Revolution"
     Story: Benny Lee; Art: Ron Lim; Ink: Jim Amash and Pam
Eklund; Coloring: [Jason] Jensen; Lettering: Jeff Powell; Editor:
Justin F. Gabrie; Managing Editor: Victor Gorelick; Editor-in-
Chief: Richard Goldwater.
     It would appear that chief executives in Benny Lee stories
suffer from trust issues.  In S116's "Operation: Off-Switch,"
President Square brings Sonic and Bunnie on board to go look for
Rouge after having recently dispatched her to find Robotnik; I
say "recently" after factoring in the time it would have taken
the two Mobians to get to Station Square from Knothole.  So after
having dispatched Geoffrey Sinjin and Hershey to track down
Prince Elias in S118's "Heart to Heart," King Max can only
contain himself for three issues before ordering Sonic and Sally
to track down Geoff and Hershey.  Control freaks.
     As for the aforementioned operatives, they're trying to
outrun (outfly?) some missiles fired at them from one of
Robotnik's airships.  Having taken a hit in the tail assembly,
Geoff is forced to do an emergency landing in Feral Forest. 
While the locals rush off to the crash site, a couple of people
stay behind: a very pregnant female named Meg and her "husband":
guess who.
     Geoff and Hershey don't appear to have gotten more than a
case of bad hair from their encounter with the missiles as Geoff
goes into rabble-rouser mode.  I'd advise Geoff to lose the
stupid-looking MIB sunglasses, which prevent him from noticing
that Elias is standing at the edge of the rabble.  Having been
there and heard that, Elias walks out on Geoff as Meg wonders
whether this has anything to do with the past that hubby won't
talk to her about.  It's a little late to worry about the
background of your child's father, Megpie.  She follows him home,
but she in turn is followed by Geoff and Hershey, who promptly
blow Elias's cover.
     Eli, the Prince Formerly Known as Elias, starts packing up
to move on, ignoring the fact that given the condition of Meg's
condition they may not get far.  He also tries ignoring Geoff,
but suddenly gets the urge to knock his block off for
manipulating him the way he did throughout most of 2001.  But
just at this point we get a visit from MOM, my new shorthand
reference to the Menace of the Month: in this case, a squad of E-
105 bots led by Eggman himself.  Robotnik takes a couple panels
to gloat before Sonic arrives and smacks some of the bots upside
their metallic heads.  Robotnik's numerical advantage is then
thinned out as the Feral Foresters close ranks behind Sonic and
Sally.  With his battle cry "Let's do it to it!," Sonic and the
others charge the line of bots...
     And it's all over in the next panel as Robotnik runs away! 
This is the first time that anyone has even HINTED that orgos can
beat bots in close-quarter fighting, as well as a blatant
contradiction of the results of the orgo vs. bot fight in S118's
"Robotnik's Return;" make up your mind, Ben!  The royal sibs are
reunited, but Eli(as) has gone native to the point where he's not
up to returning to Knothole.
     HEAD: Benny Lee has written one of the great Sonic stories;
at least it WOULD have been great if it hadn't been restricted to
eleven measly pages.  This is one of those stories that had to
lose a lot of juicy stuff in order to fit the page allotment,
specifically the back story.  A number of important questions
thus go unanswered: What was Elias's initial reception in the
village like?  What's the story behind his pairing up with Meg? 
And most important, just how long has he been away, anyhow?  I
don't know how long the gestation period is for Mobian tree
squirrels (Meg's tail is a giveaway), but I really didn't think
he'd been gone that long.
     Lee in this story mines one of the classic manga/anime
dilemmas, one that relates back to Confucian social ethics. 
Confucius taught that in a harmonious society one's social
obligations ("giri" in Japanese) must take precedence over the
desires of an individual ("ninjo").  To invert the formula, to be
carried away by desire, is to court disaster.  In this case,
Elias is still carrying a certain amount of "giri" baggage being
the titular successor to the Acorn throne.  He thought he could
outrun that when he realized in S102's "Family Dysfunction" that
little sister was the better candidate.  That's when he dropped
out, literally.  Yet Lee has established, as well as he can in
the pages allotted, that he's acquired some "ninjo" since
arriving at the village.  We don't get to see much of him in
Domestic Bliss mode, but we have to assume that he wants to stay,
otherwise he'd have kept running after having knocked up Meg.
     And Elias's over-reaction to Geoff's hectoring him on page
[7] makes perfect sense if he feels that Geoff is the voice of
"giri" trying to drag him back to his responsibilities, the
responsibilities from which he'd run away.  It's not as if
Sally's been officially upgraded to next-in-line-to-the-throne
since S102, as far as we've seen.  By the final scene, Elias is
still making a case for "ninjo" though he could just as easily
make a case for the new "giri" he's assumed: his family is now
Meg and whoever she's got in the oven rather than his parents and
Sally.  His role is now defined by the community where he's
settled down.
     The fact that the story is limited to 11 pages in length is
the ONLY excuse for Benny Lee's disposing of the fight at the end
of the story in-between panels.  In any other context, this would
be justifiably labeled hack writing, pure and simple.  I know Lee
needed to get the fight and thus the story over with, and I'm
glad that he decided that the fight scene was the most expendable
element in the story, but is it any wonder that comic books have
been considered something of a bastardized form of writing when
you run across something like this?
     Speaking of bastards, there has been a bit of comment on
Ken's message board about Elias, who's only a couple years older
than Sally, his having gotten busy with Meg and about the message
that this sends out in an Archie comic about teen pregnancy and
so on.  Again, since the page budget couldn't cover a back story,
we don't know whether or not Meg's impending motherhood would
have been considered a GOOD thing by the villagers.
     Before the 18th Century there was a practice among the clans
of Scotland known as "handfasting."  It was a kind of trial
marriage, but not quite the same as cohabitation the way it's
presently practiced.  A couple would live together for a year and
a day, and the union could be dissolved only if the woman DIDN'T
get pregnant.  The object of handfasting wasn't sexual
satisfaction or compatibility but the numerical survival of the
clan; it was all about making babies.
     I wasn't all that surprised to see Meg in the family way. 
An agrarian society such as the village where Elias has put down
roots becomes aware of the cycles and nuances of fertility,
whether of the soil or its animals or, by extension, its members. 
I don't know whether any of this occurred to Benny Lee, though.
     Overall the story does what it needs to do and does it
pretty well.  My only, and major, regret is that lacking a back
story Elias is left as stranded as he was before he took off in
"Family Dysfunction."  We see what's happening with him but we
have no idea why.  Head Score: 7.
     EYE: Admittedly, I cringed when I saw that Ron Lim was going
to be illustrating this.  He draws a mean-looking doomsday device
(Caterkiller 2 in S119) and I can't fault his drawing of
hyoomons.  But here, the emotional stakes are way higher than
they were even in S114's "Twice Told Tails."  In that story,
Sonic had to react to the "death" of the Faux-Tails and the
return of the genuine article.  Here it's mainly about Elias and
Meg and their reaction to the events in what had been their
ordered and pastoral lives.  OK, Elias looks suitably disgruntled
in reaction to Geoffrey.  Still, Ron's art has improved only a
little; the crowd scene at the top of page [5] is so heavily
inked it looks like something out of a coloring book, and Meg's
expression at the bottom of the same page demands way more
subtlety than Ron can deliver.  Eye Score: 6.
     HEART: This story proceeds on the assumption, an assumption
that it couldn't spell out because of its page restrictions: that
Elias is not only settled down but happy where he is.
     As stated earlier, Elias is not happy to see Geoff show up,
having dealt with Geoff in the past.  He clearly sees Geoff as a
threat to the life he's come to know.  But I keep coming back to
the question, "What sort of life is it?"  Lee can do no more than
hint at it.
     This is where the 11-page story format reveals its
limitations.  In a longer story arc, the writer would have a
chance show Elias and Meg in their daily routine.  The writer's
task is much more than that, or course: it's to depict the
characters in a sympathetic light, to give us a feel for what
their lives are like.  This is important; the reader needs to
know that they're happy in their lives in order to sense that
happiness being threatened by the intrusion from outside
represented first by Geoff and then by Robotnik.
     Benny Lee works hard to do that here, but the demands of the
main plot overrule him.  This story could have been SO much
better had it been a 22-pager spread over two issues.  We'd have
come to get a better idea of who Meg is and what she saw in
Elias, and what he saw in her for that matter.  We'd have come to
understand the villagers, who would have been more than a
cheering section for Geoff and extras for the non-existent fight
scene.  Speaking of which, we might have actually HAD a fight
scene wherein we'd learn how a bunch of apparently unarmed
furries could tackle a squad of Robotnik's robots (Hint: think
what the Ewoks did to the Imperial Storm Troopers in "Return of
the Jedi").  I understand the reasoning behind the current short-
story format of the comic, but that's not to say that I like it
or that the comic couldn't be better by a return to longer
stories and arcs.  Heart: 6.

     "Afterlife: Part 1"
     Writer: Ken Penders; Art: Art Mawhinney; Ink: Ken Penders;
Color: J[ason] Jensen; Lettering: Vickie Williams, Editor: Justin
Gabrie.
     As an aged echidna cleric, Mitre Kali-Ca, delivers a funeral
oration over the uncasketed remains of Knuckles, and as we cut to
various reaction shots of family and friends, we find Knuckles
himself in attendance at his own departure.  He's still in
nightlight mode and suddenly finds himself surrounded by a bunch
of relatives who weren't on the guest list: other Guardians who
have died ... excuse me, "evolved to a higher plane," according
to Steppenwolf.  Harlan elaborates by saying: "We have connected
to the Chaos Force ... that which binds all together," which is a
... no, I'll wait until the funeral's over.  As his dead
relatives try to explain to Knuckles the meaning of different
planes of existence, the Goddess Aurora sends two "herald" comin'
for to carry Knuckles home: a couple of Chao.  That means the new
kid gets to cross over while the dead relatives stay behind.  No
wonder almost none of them are smiling.
     HEAD: I am NOT going to get into any flame wars about Ken's
vision of the afterlife versus that of small-o orthodox
Christianity.  I'm also not going to get into a discussion or
defense of my own beliefs on the subject.  I will only offer a
few observations about the story for what they're worth.
     I'm not as surprised at the absence of a casket for
Knuckles's remains as I am at the placement of the "shroud."  It
doesn't cover the entire body, but is merely draped across his
naughty bits, which weren't naughty enough to warrant covering up
when he was alive.
     I don't know if this laying-out is an interim arrangement,
with gravediggers waiting off-panel to bury the body, or if the
body is simply going to be left for the elements and nature to
dispose of.  If the latter is true, the closest funeral custom I
can think of that relates to this is the Zoroastrian "tower of
silence." [Note: if you've just eaten, you might want to skip to
the next paragraph]  Because Zoroastrian belief prohibited the
pollution of the earth with a corpse, a dead body would be cut
up, the pieces placed on a grate in the "tower of silence", then
the grate would be raised to the open sky where flies and
scavenger birds would dispose of everything except the bones.
     But Ken's story isn't about echidna burial customs.  It's
about Knuckles's encounter with his dead relatives, the Mitre's
funeral oration, and the survivors Knuckles left behind.  The
latter appear to be of least importance.  Ken does no more than
take a quick peek in on various attendees at the funeral before
cutting back to the Mirte's eulogy.  The result is that
Remington, Julie-Su, Vector, Espio, et al. are the least involved
in this story.
     Kali-Ca's speech is pretty much standard stuff, judging from
the funeral sermons I've heard over the years: a little biography
plus expressions of regret at his passing.  The Mitre probably
went on to make some connection to echidna religious beliefs, but
that was probably during the part when Knuckles was shmoozing
with his relatives.  
     OK, I groaned when Ken pretty directly quoted the first (and
second-best) "Star Wars" movie (for me "Empire Strikes Back"
occupies the top slot) in working in a reference to the Force. 
It was derivative and heavy-handed but not that much of a
surprise, when you consider that several thousand Britons in a
recent survey listed their religion as "Jedi."  Which I think
says at least as much about the state of the Church of England
than it does about George Lucas as myth-maker.
     It's pretty clear as the story develops that despite the
impression left in "Welcome To The Dark Side" (S100) that dead
Guardians go to Guardian Heaven, they instead appear to slip over
into Guardian Purgatory rather than gaining direct access to the
presence of Aurora.  Sorry, Hawking, but this doesn't strike me
as being "Something wonderful."  Which makes me wonder why the
Guardians are "quarantined" in their own plane of existence
before gaining access to the next level.  Given the history of
the Guardians, maybe it's an inversion of the old saying: "Hell
doesn't want 'em, and Aurora is afraid they'll take over."
     Knuckles is told that Locke would have taught him all this
"but felt it best that you seek out the answers."  In other
words, Locke couldn't tell the young Knuckles to "go ask your
mother" after their separation, and it's clear from K10's
"Forgotten Tribe: Part 1" that Locke was perfectly content to let
the matter slide.  So he acted like any Master of the Universe
and did the parental procrastination thing: "They had begun
sending her to Sunday school at St. James' Episcopal Church, at
Madison and Seventh-first.  That was the way you took care of
religion.  You enrolled them at St. James', and you avoided
talking or thinking about religion again."  Tom Wolfe, "Bonfire
of the Vanities"
     Overall it's a good story, but I can only wish that Ken had
kept his urge to sprinkle dialogue balloons across the page in
check.  One of the defining moments in the history of animation
was the funeral of Snow White, and part of its effectiveness was
the fact that none of the dwarves said anything as they stood
beside her casket.  Grumpy's breaking down and turning away was
an especially telling scene.  As I said last time, silence
communicates the profound depth of grief far better than words
ever can. Head Score: 8.
     EYE: Mawhinney really has his work cut out for him: this
book doesn't make a habit of trying to communicate pathos ... or
very many other emotions, for that matter.  The survivors look
properly sorrowful while the Guardians ... well, it took me a bit
to realize why they're not particularly happy to see Knuckles. 
I've also read criticism on the Message Board that Vector is off-
model.  Personally, I think it's more expressive this way.  Eye
Score: 9.
     HEART: This book has a maddening habit of great set-ups, of
stepping up to the edge, and then backing away.  Neither in this
story nor in last issue's "Those Were The Days" do I get the
impression that Julie-Su really cared for Knuckles.  I mean
REALLY cared, taking it a notch or two beyond Lara-Le's mourning
for the death of her child.  Would it have been so difficult to
have shown her kneeling beside the body in the last panel and
weeping while the others walked away?  Or was the spell of the
Soultouch broken by Knuckles's death?
     Don't get me wrong; this is a far cry from the bad old days
when just about everyone in the comic was dead behind the eyes. 
But maybe the Archie Comic style is simply too conservative to
allow for a go-for-broke display of emotion, I don't know. 
Still, underplayed is better than not played at all.  Heart
Score: 10.

     Fan Art: Leonard Lane gives us Hyper-Metal Sonic, Laurel
Plyer draws Sally and Nicole, and Cameron Turner gives us the
Blue Blur.  What Zac Streich's drawing loses for being in black-
and-white it more than makes up for in execution.  But why is
Sonic wearing a bathrobe?

     "Song Bird"
     Story: Romy Chacon; Art: Steven Butler; Ink: Jim Amash;
Color: [Jason] Jensen; Lettering: Jeff Powell; Editor: Justin
Gabrie.
     Mina, in a plot continuance from last month, finds herself
on stage backed up by the Knothole Knuts, which sounds like the
name for a band that mainly does cover versions.  She hasn't done
a lot of prep work for this gig and doesn't even know what song
she's supposed to sing.  She starts to choke again, but pulls it
together because Sonic has confidence in her, which leads to an
early candidate for Best Dialogue of 2003: "I could kill that
hedgehog if I didn't like him so much!"
     She launches into what I think was an early Madonna song,
and manages to win over the crowd.  Even Sally, with her turned-
up nose to the grindstone back at the castle, pauses to give a
listen.  Mina finished her act to pretty-near universal acclaim;
Sally, however, comes down with a case of deja vu.
     HEAD: Romy Chacon manages to take the Mina's concert idea up
one step by giving the kid stage fright, following up on Mina's
loss of confidence last time.  So it's not just a cast of A Star
Is Born: she has to earn it to some extent.
     For Sally, this pretty much has the same effect as S99's
Huge Misunderstanding Scene, though presented way more plausibly
than in "Blow By Blow."  She's not wandering all over the Great
Forest in some stupid Arabian Nights dancing girl outfit.  She's
actually doing something in-character.  That doesn't make the
Huge Misunderstanding Scene, Take Two any easier to take, though. 
Head Score: 9.
     EYE: It's official: Steven Butler is the Mina master.  Check
out the range of facial expressions she has on the first two
pages.  THIS is what I mean by subtlety of emotional expression. 
I don't know why he went with the rose motif, which is a manga
convention from way back, but it's not out of place.  Great work. 
Eye Score: 10.
     HEART: I wish that Steve and Romy were available for
questioning, because I'd like to know who came up with Sonic's
gesture toward Mina at the end of the story.  It must look
compromising from a distance, which is why Sally is bummed out. 
But there's more to it, I feel.
     The gesture, which is called a chin-chuck by art critic Leo
Steinberg, has a history of use in ancient, medieval and
Renaissance art: "It is first encountered in New Kingdom Egypt as
a token of affection or of erotic persuasion ... In Archaic Greek
painting the gesture is given to wooers, and it occurs more than
once in the Iliad to denote supplication ... In Late Antique art,
the caress of the chin is allegorized to express the union of
Cupid and Psyche, the god of Love espousing the human soul ...
And the gesture proliferates in medieval art into representations
both of profane lovers and of the Madonna and Child ... Thus no
Christian artist, medieval or Renaissance, would have taken this
long-fixed convention as anything but a sign of erotic communion,
either carnal or spiritual."
     So why does it look so strange?  "[T]he chin-chuck as a
symbolic form has suffered a gradual debasement since the 17th
century.  It may still befit children, giving or getting it; but
between adults, a chin-chuck administered by man to woman is
patronizing, faintly demeaning ... and implies something of a
mockery when the receiver is male ... what had been a mature
lovers' gambit in medieval and Renaissance practice has come to
look comical."
     My own feeling about the gesture is one of ambiguity.  If
Sonic was more intently romantic, he might have caressed her
cheek, a far more definite gesture.  He keeps a certain amount of
distance here, and the chin-chuck DOES look sort of comical, to
use Steinberg's term.  But the comedy is offset by the intense
eye contact.
     That's why I'd love to hear from Romy Chacon and/or Steven
Butler as to just what dictated that particular gesture.  Until I
do, this can only be considered a preliminary review.  So drop me
a line at drazen@andrews.edu; I'd love to know what the story is
behind that panel.
     Speaking of panels, the isolation of the final panel is a
stroke of genius on Steve Butler's part.  It hints as just how
devastated Sally is by this turn of events, something that did
NOT come through in "Blow by Blow" thanks to a confused and
confusing narrative line coupled with Ron Lim's artwork.
     This story is a set-up to a two-part story arc, one dictated
(I get the feeling after reading this issue's "Off-Panel") by
Justin Gabrie.  I STILL think that this whole romantic triangle
angle should be allowed to die, but I can't fault Romy and Steve
for making the corpse look good.  Heart Score: 9.

     Off-Panel: Right idea, Sal, wrong target.
     This Justin: OK, Justin, you don't have to justify your work
habits to us.  And while the quality of the book in general is
starting to swing upward (this issue alone touches on matters
concerning love, life and death), I'm not yet ready to concede
that this is the way it's going to be from now on.  This book has
a history of getting good, then heading south like Canada geese
in October.  
     Blurb for S122: the triangle becomes a square when Nack re-
enters the picture.  Whoever wrote the blurb let their modifier
dangle: the way that it reads, the phrase "Nack the Weasel
kidnaps her" could indicate either Sally or Mina.  In "Afterlife
2" Knuckles apparently starts flashing back for the benefit of
the reader; either that or omniscience is not one of Aurora's
attributes.  
     Sonic-Grams: Luna the Yoshi makes some good points and hopes
that the specials can be revived some time soon.  Abe Flower
wants a Sonic t-shirt, and the person who replied to the letter
seconds the motion but indicates that they don't know how to make
it happen.  Here's an idea: Richard Goldwater ponies up some
cash, then the lawyers on call at Archie go to Sammy Corporation
in Japan (the company that recently bought up what was left of
Sega) and talk North American licensing rights for t-shirts and
other merchandise.  I believe that's how the system works when
you don't own a character outright.  Giles gets a dig in by
telling Ken that he's "put poor old Knux through the ringer"
lately.  Sarah Scully learns that NiGHTS #1-3 is a long-distant
memory.  And Katrice catches a discrepancy in the Guardian
continuity.  I know the feeling, Ken; my editor stumbled on a
plot hole in my second book that I had to fill in before he could
send me a copy of the manuscript for final proofing and changes. 
Which he wanted back in two weeks.  Hey, that's what editors do.