Sonic #123 [Jul 2003] Spaz/Ribeiro artwork: Sonic and Sally enjoy a lighthearted moment before experiencing the trauma within. It's still a nice study, and I humbly suggest that the creatives make the following use of it: Scan it, remove the title and other distractions, save it to a file, then when Justin Gabrie gives you another assignment with an impossibly short deadline, send this to him via e-mail with the following Subject line: "You want it WHEN?!?" Axer/Tomas/Jensen frontispiece: Conor Tomas has been inking the Axer frontispieces since S117 (!) and the management has only just now gotten around to giving him his props. Sonic, Sally, Mina, Nack, and three anonymous numpfs (Nice word, huh? I got it from Scotty Arsenault's e-comic "Commander Kitty" at, of course, www.commanderkitty.com). "Heart Held Hostage: Part 2" Story: Karl Bollers; Art: J. Axer; Ink: Conor Tomas; Color: Jason Jensen; Lettering: Jeff Powell; Editor: Justin F. Gabrie; Managing Editor: Victor Gorelick; Editor-in-Chief: Richard Goldwater. First it was the setting for "Casper" the movie, then is was part of the "Backstreet's Back" video; now Whipstaff Manor puts in yet one more appearance, this time as the hideout of Nack and his whatevers. Before the inevitable rescue, Sonic realizes that he's been shadowed by Mina. He doesn't try very hard, however, to convince her to make herself scarce. Inside, Sally gives Nack his cue to launch into Nate Morgan exposition mode for the benefit of the readers. This whole kidnaping scheme is an attempt to separate King Max from his wealth; with any luck, it didn't all go into the rebuilding of Knothole in S94's "New Order." Sally then proposes a more long- term marketing strategy which impresses the easily-impressed weasels. The plan: Sally will "defect" and spin out the ransom demands for as long as possible. When Sally and Nack go to shake on the deal, though, Sally introduces her kneecap to his groin. Well, it must've left NACK shaking! We then get a scene more appropriate to "Pulp Fiction" than to Sonic the Hedgehog: Sally threatens to perform .38-caliber dentistry on Nack if either of the other two opens fire. After letting himself and Mina into the place (I'd have thought he would have spun through the door rather than kicked it in with those scrawny legs of his), Sonic promptly forgets what he told Mina about "back-up" 3 pages ago and suggests that they split up. Mina, however, is not exactly what you'd call focused. Sally, meanwhile, makes a break for it with the two weasels in pursuit. She finds herself trapped at the end of a hallway, but then Sonic shows up and demonstrates the principle of disarmament to the weasels before punching their lights out. This cues the Reunion Scene between Sonic and Sally: good news for them, because it gives Sally a chance to take Bunnie's advice from Part 1 and confess her feelings for Sonic, returning the favor from when he did the same at the conclusion of "Endgame." Bad news, however, for Mina who watches the two lip- locking and FINALLY gets the message that she has no chance with Sonic. In the midst of all this, Nack has sufficiently recovered to draw a bead on Sally. Mina sees this and gets the chance to demonstrate that she's not only a good loser, but also that she's literally faster than a speeding bullet as she takes one intended for Sally. Mina survives the shooting; either her sports top is made out of Kevlar (registered trademark of DuPont) or she managed to avoid getting hit near anything vital, which is a neat trick. Maybe the bullet passed between the pieces of her heart after it had been broken. Sympathies, very belated, to Karl Bollers on the death of his grandmother, Minerva Ifill. HEAD: I have to ask again: Why would Sonic kick a door down instead of spin-dashing through it? And what's the deal with the use of projectile weaponry, aka handguns? The last time we saw anything like that was way back in Sonic #72's "Shot Heard 'Round the World" by Ken Penders. According to that story, Mobians swore off that kind of weaponry after the accidental death of Prince Emerson; I guess the weasels didn't read that issue. Sally plays to her strength, convincing the weasels that she's got half a brain; I doubt that Nack and his two whatevers could scrounge up that much between them. But this story belongs to Mina, who once and for all concedes the non-contest between she and Sally for Sonic's affections. Think we can finally give it a rest now? I was prepared to move on to something else after "The Crush" (S109). But Karl's managed to get a bit more mileage out of the plot point. Not that it wasn't well-done at the end of the day. The pacing is good, and Mina retains her good kid credentials by taking the bullet for Sally. Try to imagine either Betty or Veronica doing THAT! Head Score: 8. EYE: Axer's work is great as usual, but page 8 is a minor masterpiece, capped off by Mina's going to pieces, as it were. I've seen variations on that theme in numerous animated cartoons, one of the more spectacular being Bart Simpson's heart getting ripped out of his chest and kicked across the treehouse floor by a babysitter he's got a crush on. Let me know if page [8] ever shows up on e-bay. Eye Score: 10. HEART: As I said earlier, this is Mina's story, and her characterization is perfect. Most telling is her paying half- attention to Sonic on page [5], so that his words of caution sort of go right past her. But sorry all you Mina fans, the Sonic-Sally combo has always been something of a foregone conclusion. It's just something we're going to have to live with. For one or two more issues, at any rate. After S125, who knows? [See below for rampant speculation] Heart Score: 10. "Afterlife: Part 3" Story: Ken Penders; Art: Art Mawhinney; Ink: Ken Penders; Color: Jason Jensen; Lettering: Vickie Williams; Editor: Justin Gabrie. Knuckles is still in flashback mode. In quick succession we see him seeing himself meeting a young Princess Sally (SSS9), being schooled and then abandoned by Locke (Super Sonic v. Hyper Knuckles special), reaffirms his friendship with Vector (last issue), encounters Sonic and Tails for the first time (S13), settling the "Chaotix Caper" (K15) encountering Dimitri/Enerjak (Rites of Passage miniseries), confronting Kragok (Dark Legion miniseries), meeting Julie-Su (K4), being reunited with his mom (K4), being taken apart molecule-by-molecule by Enerjak (K8), and in the company of the Forgotten Tribe (K11). HEAD: A Ken Penders story often follows the classic pattern of Set-up, Development, and Conclusion. Occasionally there's a side-trip, as in the infamous "mid-logue" from the "Ultimate Power" arc (S116) and the Rob-o-The-Hedge digression (S58) during the Forgotten Tribe arc. Still, "Afterlife" has just about got all the pieces in place for whatever conclusion Ken is working toward. It's the NATURE of the conclusion that's going to be telling. There was a major controversy the last time Ken held a chat session and let slip the fact that a major reboot of the Knuckles continuity was in the works. The implication was that Knuckles was destined to be reset in a mode closer to when he first appeared and also to the way he's depicted in the Sonic Adventure games: as the last echidna, lone occupant of the Floating Island, and sole Guardian of the Chaos Emerald. That carried with it numerous implications, the biggest one being character death. Bye-bye, Julie-Su; so long, Mama Lien-Da; at ease, Constable Remington; Auf Wiedersehen Von Stryker and the rest of the dingoes. Ken caught a certain amount of flak for that and Justin Gabrie did a rare decloaking on the Message Board to try to smooth things over. In the midst of all that controversy, however, nobody went ahead and denied that it was going to happen that way. And I now have reason to believe that the reboot is only one or two issues away at least; see below for details. Head Score: 5. EYE: Art Mawhinney provides the visuals for Knuckles's little time trip. He not only gets the kid proportions right for Sally and Knuckles at the beginning of the story, but gives the impression at the top of page [3] of the extent to which Locke's abandonment of Knuckles must've hurt the young Guardian, an impression that never came through in Ken's storytelling until now. It serves as a reminder that Art provided the defining look for Knuckles's own comic until Manny Galan took up the task and made it his own. Eye Score: 10. HEART: In Charles Dickens's "Christmas Carol," which involves another bit of time travel, Ebenezer Scrooge starts feeling nostalgia/sadness as soon as he first lays eyes on his childhood self, left alone at his old boarding school with no real home he'd have wanted to return to during the Christmas holidays. Throughout the entire Afterlife arc, there has been a restrained display of emotion by all of the characters; even at Knuckles's funeral nobody really goes into anything like a meltdown to show that they really cared about Knuckles. And Julie-Su certainly didn't get the chance to show how much she cared in last issue's installment. This has been the state of affairs in the Knuckles continuity for so long now it comes down to one of two options; either Ken can't do this level of emotional storytelling, or else Editorial is doing such a good job of maintaining an emotional firewall that Ken couldn't tell an emotional story if he tried. I can't help feeling that the original Princess Sally miniseries, the one Sega and Archie both strangled in its cradle, would have had far more emotional content than what we ended up seeing. As it is, the only feeling I came away with from this story is one of nostalgia for the day when Knuckles had his own book. Heart Score: 4. "The Last Robian" Story: Karl Bollers; Art: Art Mawhinney; Ink: Pam Eklund; Color: Jason Jensen; Lettering: Vickie Williams; Editor: Justin Gabrie. At this point I'd provide a story synopsis, but Karl beat me to it. Pull back from the story and look at the layout. It's almost all text boxes until page [4] of this 5-pager; then of the 15 word balloons that appear in this story, 12 of them are on the final page! This IS the story synopsis! Karl has gone right to the Cliff's Notes(r) version! To summarize the summary: less than a month after all the roboticized Mobians disappear, they start returning in deroboticized form with no idea what happened to them. Jules is the last MIA to return, but he's still roboticized. Sonic accuses Robotnik of doing all this; Robotnik basically replies "What're ya, goofy?" HEAD: This isn't a story, it's a set-up. And if you want to know what Karl is setting up, read the article on Sonic #125 in the recent Comic Shop News. I was inclined to dismiss the piece as just some idle promotional puffery about the issue, though I did notice that Karl took a dig at yours truly when he complained of being "criticized by older readers for not writing Sonic as if it were Watership Down" [I blush]. Close reading of the piece, however, sent my spider sense into overdrive. Karl informs us that S125 will be about "the true history of ... Mobius." This may be good news for the fans who hold to the Mobius-as-Earth theory. But that's not the big news. We'll also get an appearance by space aliens, possibly the same ones who did the ol' switcheroo on Sonic, Tails, Robotnik and Snively in "Robotnik's Return" (S118). These are given the name the "Xorda." OK, read that name out loud. So, how did you pronounce it? I could come up with at least 6 variant pronunciations: "Korda" [X as k, as in the Greek] "Sorda" [X as s, as in the Spanish] "Zorda" [X as z, as in "Xena: Warrior Princess"] "Shorda" [X as sh, as in the name of Brazilian entertainer Xuxa] "Zhorda" [X as zh] "Ksorda" [X as ks, as in most English usages] You know you're in trouble when you're confronted with a name with this many variant pronunciations. I can only hope we don't end up pronouncing it "Ecchorda" with an emphasis on the "Ecch!" But that's not the big news, either. We're also going to get a classic comic book set-up where "Sonic and the heroes (and villains) of Mobius must team up to beat a giant cosmic foe." The last time we saw THAT hoary old scenario was in the "Freedom Fighters of the Galaxy" digression (S103-104) where it was more or less played strictly for laughs and "Robolactus" came off less like an imposing devourer of worlds and more like a pouty Homer Simpson who didn't get to eat the last donut in the box. But that's not the big news, either. The BIG news is buried in the following comment by Karl about S125: "It was great hearing from Steven [Butler] after he'd finished pencilling [sic] the issue, telling me that it reminded him of Crisis on Infinite Earths.... Crisis was one of the series that inspired me to pursue comics as a career." A brief history, courtesy of Tom Knapp at http://www.rambles.net/dc_crisis.html: in 1985, DC began a twelve-issue story arc, "Crisis on Infinite Earths," written by Marv Wolfman and drawn by George Perez. The DC universe had existed for almost half a century by this point; remember that Superman, Batman, and most of the classic superheroes began their careers in the late 1930s during the Great Depression. In the course of those years, there had been so many developments, digressions, and crossovers that they threatened to spin out of control. The DC continuity at that point more than lived up to the words of the late Fred Rogers: "Life is deep and simple and what our society gives us is shallow and complex." Wolfman's method of dealing with this shallow complexity: elevate a minor villain, the Monitor, to the Anti-Monitor who begins destroying the positive-matter universes one after the other and drawing power from them. The Monitor and some new heroes take on the Anti-Monitor's "shadowy minions" and eventually the Big Guy himself. At a time when story arcs were designed with short attention spans in mind (even Sonic has never done a story that's gone beyond 4 installments, with the exception of "Reunification" and its "mid-logue"), spinning out an arc for a year was what Tom Knapp calls a "bold stroke by the publisher to redefine its focus." Even bolder was how Wolfman went about hitting the Cosmic Reset Button. "Crisis" resulted in wholesale slaughter: Supergirl died, Superboy died, the Flash as portrayed by Barry Allen died. This caused no end of discussion among fans whose faves bit the big one; Ron Bauerle called "Crisis" "the beginning of the end of my superhero comic reading ... a poorly executed attempt at fixing IMHO not-all-that-bad continuity issues (which I personally think the writers/editors were too lazy to keep track of)...." What tends to be forgotten in much of the subsequent and ongoing debate is that "Crisis" didn't even succeed in what it attempted to do: as Tom Knapp tells it, "DC writers have, since 1985, created a few too many NEW alternative universes, which rather defeats the purpose of Crisis in the first place" [emphasis supplied]. DC, according to Ron Bauerle, tried again some years later with the "Zero Hour" story arc "and since then has more or less given up" trying to impose any control on what appears to be a terminal case of loose continuity. I really don't want to see anything like that happen to Sonic. I mean, is this trip even necessary? Sonic's only been around for ten years rather than fifty, and the alternative realities have been kept in their place via the Zonic the Zone Cop character. The confluence of Karl's invoking "Crisis" as a good thing plus the possibility of a Knuckles reboot leaves a very bad foretaste in my mouth. And the fun won't stop with S125: according to the same CSN piece issues 126-129 will feature the "Tossed In Space" arc wherein Sonic is "stranded in a distant galaxy" and will have to "face his darkest inner demons" and "learn that he's responsible for the destruction of countless planets." And Justin only knows what kind of Mobius it will be to which Sonic will return. I hope I'm wrong, but the next half-year for the comic could be a real run down the highway to Hell. Head Score: 3. EYE: Too bad this set-up was never executed as a proper story: Art Mawhinney's one-shot depictions of mourning and reunion only hint at the emotional satisfaction that this embryonic arc could have developed. The panel featuring Lupe's return to the Wolf Pack is especially telling; when first depicted by Sam Maxwell, the wolves with cornrows for headfur looked like they were wearing sausages on their heads. And Art completely won me over with his panel of Jules draping a blanket over the sleeping Uncle Chuck, worn out from trying to figure out how to deroboticize his brother. There have been some grumblings about Jensen's coloring mistakes, but they're small potatoes in light of what may be coming down the pike toward us. Eye Score: 10. HEART: The roboticized Mobians have been deroboticized. This is supposed to be a great moment in the history of the comic, though not a new one. There has been a mass deroboticizing before, in "The Day Robotropolis Fell" (S37). And I'd be the first to say Amen and Hallelujah at this turn of events, but Karl's spin-dash approach to the story not only blunted its emotional aspect, it's also a dark piece of foreshadowing in its own right. I'm afraid that this feel-good development is simply the prelude to a half year-long belly drop. Any emotion I might have felt for the situation in this story was like a match flame: brilliant in the beginning but going cold too soon, because this story only serves as the curtain-raiser for whatever Editorial and/or Management has in mind for the book. And I'm NOT anticipating that. Heart Score: N/A. Off-Panel: You guys can stop sucking up now: Karl's figured out a way to work everybody and their dog into S125 if only (probably) for a brief cameo. It will feature art by Butler, Lim, Mawhinney, Axer, Manak and Best. The only question is: will the end product resemble "Endgame" where the whole was less than the sum of its parts? This Justin: Congrats to Steve and Christy Butler on the birth of Aaron Dale Butler. Thank You For Sharing Dept.: Steve informs us that his wife went into labor while they were shopping at Wal-Mart; gives new meaning to the phrase "Clean-up in Aisle Three!" For treatment of a similar situation see one of the October 1999 "Sabrina-Online" e-strips at www.sabrina-online.com. Sonic-Grams: the only letter this time around come from Rob the Red Scar, a die-hard who's been reading the comic longer than I have. In his reply, Ken Penders mentions the "Sonic X" anime series which recently debuted in Japan. Late news: the 52- episode series [and I'll bet the production company, Tokyo Movie Shinsha, does not believe in loose continuity and wanted an end- to-end synopsis of all 52 eps before green-lighting the project] will come to the Fox Network's SatAM lineup in September. Maybe Tails can apply to be the network's mascot.