Sonic #128 (Dec 2003) Spaz/Ribeiro/Ray cover: S.T.H. goes E.V.A. and finds E.V.E. Extra-vehicular activity suit courtesy of the first Star Trek movie. Very simple, strong design by Spaziante. Axer/Jensen frontispiece: Sonic, feeling conspicuously underdressed as he's surrounded by some leftovers from the Star Wars barroom scene. Clockwise from da hog: a Gollum clone (nice codpiece, stud!), what looks like a Naugus wannabe, an alien having such a bad hair day he's hiding his face behind an iron mask, Bagbar Breeblebrox (about whom more later), a flap-eared desert dweller with an insect-like familiar, and a lizard lady wearing a Zorro outfit. In other words, your average mercenary crowd. "Tossed in Space: Starmada" Story: Benny Lee; Art: J. Axer; Ink: Michael Higgins; Color: Jason Jensen; Lettering: Michael Higgins; Editor: J. F. Gabrie; Managing Editor: Victor Gorelick; Editor-in-Chief: Richard Goldwater. Sonic is bopping along through space and keeping an eye on the instruments of the Azurite ship. I guess the Universal Translator Sonic shoved in his ear last time allows him to read Azurite as well. Come to think of it, the same little gizmo enabled him to SPEAK Azurite, too. But he's got enough on his plate at the moment because not only has his destination, Taragosa 6, been reduced to debris, he's no sooner clear of the floating gravel pit than a fleet of ships is telling him to heave to and strike his colors. Sonic greets the frontispiece aliens, who most certainly do NOT all look the same this time around, unlike the D'Novulans in the last issue. His huge host, the Jabba-esque Bagbar Breeblebrox, informs Sonic that Taragosa 6 was wasted a few hours ago by an old plot point from the past: E.V.E. To recap: waaaaaaaaaaay back in S21, Robotnik invented an Exceptionally Versatile Evolvoid which only managed a couple of changes; hence the story's title: "The Three Phases of E.V.E." Sonic neglects to mention in his exposition that in the course of that story Robotnik himself bit the big one, only to be returned to Mobius at some point in the future ... somehow or other in the following issue. It's pretty confusing, but Ken had to promise he'd do it because Sega "had a cow" when Buttnik got killed off in that story. I never really was satisfied with the explanation in Ken's "The Return" (S22), but let's let that sleeping dog lie. Bagbar's band of mercenaries decides that since they don't have E.V.E. in custody they can compensate by wasting Sonic, who beats feet before that can happen. You have to wonder at how bright the mercenaries are when looking at page [5] panel 3; those random SPINGs must mean they're shooting at Sonic inside their own ship, which strikes me as high-risk behavior. Also, Sonic is able to bail without much trouble; then again it could be because Lee has to rush to the end of this part. I usually don't say much about the ads, but I actually did see a couple of episodes of "Super Duper Sumos." I remember looking at it and thinking repeatedly: "Somebody please tell me this is some kind of joke!" Fan Art: Knux gets his props from Ryan DaVia and Kevin Hinton, and while Sasha Yeganeh-Rad draws the main men in the continuity, Maddie Highland gives a shout-out for the ladies. "Tossed in Space: E.V.E. Ill" Artist: Dawn Best; Ink: Jim Amash; Lettering: Jeff Powell. OK, it's only been one ad page and the fan art page, and I know that a new artistic team has tagged into the story, but WHY recap the story up to this point? I don't think even the pre-ado boy core audience has THAT short of an attention span! So we could have just cut to Xenocanaris Prime, home to a race which I would guess worships Jay Leno. Unfortunately for this idyllic world full of redshirts, E.V.E. shows up and sucks the metal off the planet. Twice we're told that the time it takes to destroy the world is "fifteen solid minutes." As opposed to, say, fifteen gassy minutes; if you want to know what that's like, go to the school cafeteria when they're serving bean burritos. Sonic shows up after the damage has been done, but doesn't get to indulge in more than two panels of misplaced self-loathing before the titled Starmada closes in on him. By the time they catch up to him, though, they're all in the presence of E.V.E., which looks like a floating junk ball. E.V.E. then does to the Starmada what the patrons of an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet do to the crab legs, only without the use of crackers. Speaking of crackers, that's what Sonic has to be because he takes a suicide run at E.V.E. Of course, Lee avoids using the S-word and he avoids any actual tragedy as Sonic's ship penetrates the outer hull of E.V.E. So Sonic puts on his EVA suit and goes exploring. E.V.E., however, makes first contact and informs Sonic that Magna Dolo-10 is next on the menu to be assimilated. I'm sorry, "incorporated." Proceeding on, who should Sonic run into but ... Sally, who tells Sonic that they have to get back to the wormhole that brought her here. But Sonic still remembers the SatAM ep "Sonic and Sally" where it was a small detail that gave the game away and exposed the false Sally. In that ep, it was a flaw in her performance of the Freedom Fighter hand jive; here, it's her insistence that they have to leave before stopping E.V.E. The game up, the pseudo-Sally disappears as E.V.E.'s robotic octo- sentries show up. Sonic makes short work of them, penetrates the CPU, and interfaces with E.V.E., who's looking way better than the bulging-eyed brainazoid from the past. Apparently, space traveling has been not as broadening for E.V.E. as Sonic had hoped. Not only was E.V.E. getting harassed by aliens, she objected to all that artificial intelligence she was encountering serving at the whim of various organic species. So she appointed herself a one-being liberation front to assimilate ... sorry, incorporate ... these AIs. Sonic then points out that the AIs simply traded one master for another. This stops E.V.E. cold. She tells Sonic, in effect, "Do not pass Go, do not collect $200, go straight to Argentium, aka Wheelworld." Sonic then has to beat feet to the ship before E.V.E. immolates herself in a nearby star, thus tying up one of the longest loose ends in the history of this comic. HEAD: BagBar Breeblebrox. A name to be reckoned with. So was the original, Zaphod Beeblebrox, from which it was obviously ripped off. Zaphod Beeblebrox: the two-headed three-armed party-crashing Galactic president from Betelgeuse Five, "inventor of the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, ex-confidence trickster ... and recently voted Worst Dressed Sentient Being in the Known Universe for the seventh time," who was once quoted as saying "If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now," aka "Phil," was just one of the creations of Douglas Adams, whose "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," along with "The Restaurant At The End of the Universe" and "Life, The Universe, and Everything" brought a much-needed shot of humor to science fiction, a genre which on the whole tends to take itself way too seriously. Douglas's "Hitchhiker" trilogy is just one of a number of inkwells into which Benny Lee dipped his pen when writing this story. From "Star Wars" he borrowed the ideas of space mercenaries/bounty hunters and the destruction of an entire planet. But "Star Trek" in several of its incarnations provided most of the inspiration/source material for this story. We've got the world-destroying device ("Doomsday Machine" and Star Trek IV) which assimilates artificial intelligences (the Borg) and which has at its center a partly-mechanical AI entity (V'ger from the first Star Trek movie) whose logic is overwhelmed by that of an organic (which is what happened to the M-5 in the original series ep "The Ultimate Computer"). This comic has done its share of mining pop cult in the past; S67's "Tomb Raider" was little better than a "Raiders of the Lost Ark" ripoff. It can be argued that just as the fairy tales chronicled by the Brothers Grimm have been recycled for each new generation, so reworking pop cult is what could be expected to reach the comic's alleged core audience who may not know the source material. It's not a new argument; if I might slip into nepotism mode, my brother Patrick maintains that "The figures of [Japanese] folklore and legend have changed from year to year in order to retain their power ... [Hayao] Miyazaki's movies have proven his ability to adapt the past to serve the needs of the present." [From "Anime Explosion," p297, n13]. He cites such examples as the Japanese creation myth featuring the goddess Amaterasu being "retold" in the opening chapter of Rumiko Takahashi's "Maison Ikkoku," the extremely loose adaptation of the story of the Monkey King to provide the plot for Akira Toriyama's "Dragonball," and the use of a 12th-century Japanese story, "The Girl Who Loved Insects," to furnish the environmentalist subplot for Miyazaki's "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind" [Note: if you've only seen the English dub of the anime titled "Warriors of the Wind," this entire subplot was cut from the film]. Of course there's a difference between using what's cozily familiar to the reading audience to build a story and simply falling back on someone else's work to keep you from having to do your own. There's something oddly disengaging about this story. It works, but that's about all that can be said for it. Perhaps I've been spoiled because I DO know Lee's source material. I also know that Lee's one good idea, the Starmada mercenaries, was wasted on this story. I really liked some of the creatures in the group from a design standpoint, but none of the crew had any lines that amount to anything, and in the end they're just phaser-bait, someone for E.V.E. to destroy. Pity. Head Score: 6. EYE: Talk about contrast! You couldn't ask for two more differing visual styles than the killer detail work of J. Axer and the more open drawing style of Dawn Best. And yet the two styles are entirely appropriate for each of their respective segments. Sonic on board Breeblebrox's ship demands well- rendered aliens and odd details such as the corridor on page [5] which looks like it's been sort of neglected. Dawn, in contrast, doesn't labor over E.V.E.'s interior, and even Sonic's EVA suit is little more than a body stocking compared with the cover art suit by Spaziante, but she delivers where it counts in the character modeling. Axer's design for the aliens, though, is the real centerpiece of this story, and you can get a sense of their respective personalities from the modeling alone. My favorite designs are the guy with the face mask with the robotic ant sidekick (somehow I can't help but think of them as a team) and the leather-clad lizard babe. Unfortunately, the script is no help at all and these aliens end up as set dressing, waiting around to be written out by E.V.E. Too bad; I thought they had the most potential of anything in the story. Eye Score: 10. HEART: I cringed when I first read the plot synopsis of this story, which made it sound heavier on the self-loathing and angst on Sonic's part than it actually turned out to be. It was a false issue, anyway, since Sonic didn't give E.V.E. any instructions about going out and destroying other worlds back in S21. Sure, Sonic has to stop E.V.E.'s destructive rampage, but you end up with the sense that it's on the same emotional level as his rescuing the Blodex from Super Sonic's destructive acts two issues ago in "Hog and Superhog." He's the hero and he's doing what we the readers expect of him. At least E.V.E.'s motivation is clear enough. After getting dumped on by other life forms and detecting so many kindred mechanisms out there, she took it upon herself to assimilate them Borg-style into her own self regardless of the consequences to the other lifeforms of a given planet. You've got to wonder, though, whether that's a good long-term goal: E.V.E.: "The act of incorporating their tech into my carapace has given rise to a higher organism." Dr. Phil: "At the cost of life on the rest of the planet ... How much fun are YOU to be with?" The only real surprise in this story is the encounter with the pseudo-Sally. It worked for me in the sense that Sonic didn't see through it immediately. He wanted it to be the real deal, and so did the reader. I know *I* did; I think I've been going through Mobius withdrawal. And the small touches by Dawn Best really put it over: I don't think Sonic's wagging his tail when he's with Sally has ever been depicted before, but it's still a nice touch. So is the mutual blushing when they both realize that their helmets won't permit them to do any facial interface. That whole scene, right up to the pseudo-Sally's pose as she disappears, was one of the best parts of the whole story for me. Heart Score: 7, on the strength of the Sonic-"Sally" segment alone. This Justin: J. Fred yields the floor to Steve Butler in proud papa mode before he goes on to make vague but positive noises about Sonic X. Coming Attractions: OK, I have to get this off my chest and I can't wait for the issue to come out. In what looks like a throwback to the "magazine cover" style, Sonic #129 shows our hero appearing to shake hands with ... my first guess was "Prince Elias and Queen Alicia," but the "prince" didn't look quite right. And the lady standing next to him didn't look quite like Queen Alicia, either. I finally realized what was wrong. These two are supposed to be Amadeus and Rosemary Prower, parents of Miles Prower, aka Tails. These two were first (and last) seen in SSS9's "Eve of Destruction." What threw me was the coloring. They're SUPPOSED to have been more tawny-colored like their offspring. Instead, someone's blessed them both with Sally's auburn head-fur. That's what made me think they were members of the Acorn family rather than relatives of Tails. But you know what? I'm tired of having to point this stuff out. You're the art director, Fred; you're supposed to keep this stuff straight. Sonic-Grams: Brandon E. brings no expectations to the comic and isn't disappointed; FlamMan.exe invokes "Cyborg 009," which is actually a retread of an older manga/anime series by Shotaro Ishinomori, one of the first generation of manga artists while the reply promises flexibility in the future in terms of content and story page allotment; Henry Moore (not the famous British artist and sculptor) raises the issues of "Mobius : 25 Years Later," the role of Mina vis-a-vis Amy Rose (who has slipped into undeserved obscurity), and Robotnik's modeling; Dale is as much as told that "Better Read Than Dead" was Mike Gallagher's idea; Sami is told why asking the readers to submit ideas for fan charas would be a Bad Thing (the writers' inability to do justice to the host of existing secondary characters bespeaks a serious imagination deficiency); and ex-pat Christy documents from Japan how she's stayed with the comic from the second grade through high school, once more reminding the Powers That Be as to how the fan base isn't exactly what they thought. This was one of the hardest reviews I've ever had to write. I wanted at time to just walk away from having to do it, not to mention wanting to walk away from the comic. The last time I felt that way I had read S97's "To The Brink" with its Tails- isn't-Tails abomination of a plot. But this is different. Sonic has been plucked from Mobius and has been stuck doing predictable space opera for three issues now, and while it isn't as infuriating as the Tails-isn't-Tails business it IS getting incredibly BORING!! The Sonic "reunion" with Sally reminded me of what I miss about this comic. I just want this sci-fi diversion to be over with. I want Sonic back on Mobius. I want him and Sally to REALLY get together again without BMPing space helmets. I don't want a Mobian retrofit. And I really REALLY don't want Justin to green-light something like this again!