Sonic The Hedgehog #133 [Apr 2004] Spaz/Ribeiro/Jensen cover: Sonic, with background appearances by (clockwise from top), Robotnik, Mecha, Tails, Bunnie-as-a-wookie, and Shadow. "Heroes! Villains! Anti- heroes! This one has it all!" the cover screams. I'd settle for coherency. Text page frontispiece: J. Axer. "Home, Part 4 : Finale" Story: Karl Bollers; Art: Steven Butler; Ink: Jim Amash; Color: Jason Jensen; Lettering: Jeff Powell; Editor: Justin F. Gabrie; Assistant Editor: Mike Pellerito; Managing Editor: Victor Gorelick; Editor-in-Chief: Richard Goldwater. OK, so Mecha has eye beams. Why doesn't Karl just rename her Cyclops and get it over with? And why "golf-cam"? It appears to be way bigger than a golf ball, if that's what Karl was going for. Besides, when they were referred to as "orb-bots" back in the SatAM series it made perfect sense, something of which this comic has often run short. We then get a page of Robotnik facing off against Shadow, who gets no farther than threatening to kill Robotnik. Nothing else happens. Tails, meanwhile, is still playing Ask Me Another with A.D.A.M. Back in the Badlands, we get a nice two-page depiction of Knuckles and the crew engaging the line of SWAT-bots. In the midst of all the threats and mayhem, Mecha finally connects and by leading her shot (if you're a skeet shooter, you know what I mean) hits Sonic in the shoulder. Before Sonic can say, "It's all right, it's just a flesh wound," Sally freaks and, no doubt having a flashback of events a year ago, runs from the room in tears. This is NOT the Sally I've come to know and write about! Meanwhile, Mecha is about to give Sonic the boot but is interrupted by Bunnie, who apparently has been spending the past year watching Westerns on American Movie Channel until her brain's been warped. What I'd thought was an Indiana Jones hat now looks like a Cavalry number, and she's got a pair of pistols strapped to her metallic thighs for no particular reason. Sonic then tells Bunnie that she and Antoine have to stop Robotnik's missile launch. Awkward moment: Fiona, who's done absolutely nothing in this story so far except dress Sonic's wound, informs him that the twosome broke up six months ago. But just as we're digesting that bit of information, Karl serves up a heaping ladle full of lumpy gravy. In my review of the Prologue for "Mobius: 25 Years Later" (S131), I wrote: "I don't mind that Ken [Penders] uses pop cult references in his stories, but I do wish they were better integrated and less recognizable as having come from other sources. Perhaps it's a function of short deadlines, but Ken really needs to work more of the lumps out of his gravy." And that REALLY applies to Karl as he gives us such a direct quotation from the exhausted Terminator franchise it made me gag. "Lumpy Gravy" is my new shorthand reference to any such reference, and M's emergence from the rubble is a prime example. Tails is STILL playing Ask Me Another with A.D.A.M., who guesses one of Tails's riddles and is either so exhausted by the effort or so self-satisfied that he shuts down and takes the SWAT-bot horde offline with him. This allows Knuckles et al. to trash the becalmed bots. A.D.A.M. also stops the countdown for the missile launch at 30 seconds. Shadow gives Eggman the back of his glove just as Bunnie and Antoine arrive. Eggman boards a submarine (given Robotnik's girth you couldn't call it a mini-sub), he has words with A.D.A.M. and the countdown resumes. With the countdown back under way, Shadow drags Antoine's sorry carcass off the ship while Bunnie pulls off a move I think I saw Popeye and/or Mighty Mouse do before cartoons went to color: she punches so many holes in the carrier it sinks, thus polluting the water of the bay with the radiation from the missiles. After Espio and Hershey do less than spectacularly against M., Sonic runs rings around her/it in order to drop her/it into the sewer system below where all that water shorts her/it out. "And everybody's happy," says the final caption box; you wouldn't know it from Steven Butler's artwork. HEAD: WHAT THE HELL IS BUNNIE DOING PACKING HEAT?!? This is just wrong on three levels: 1). Bunnie, of all the characters in the book, is the LAST one who needs weaponry of ANY kind. Looking at her striking cheesy superhero poses during the sequence when she scuttles Eggman's ship, I'm reminded that I was afraid something exactly like this would happen when I read "Upgrade" (SSS11). It was one thing for Bunnie to be a likable character who'd been mechanically compromised by Robotnik and who had to live with a partially roboticized body. There was nothing wrong with that situation. It even had a certain unmined poignancy to it. But why gild the lily this way? Why outfit the last character who needs a weapon with weapons? Bunnie isn't alone in this. When it was announced that Irwin Toys would be bringing out a line of action figures based on the characters from Akira Toriyama's "Dragonball" series, and that those figures would be given weapons as well, it prompted this observation from Chris Psaros at http://dbzoa.net/dbzuncensored/misc/irwin.txt: -------- Good Sweet Kami. I'm not sure how many of you have heard about this, but it's pretty horrifying. The bad news goes a little something like this: Irwin Toys will be including *weapons* with a new line of DBZ figures, to be released in the next few months. Piccolo will have a sword. Trunks will have a rocket launcher. And, as if your worst nightmares had not yet been realized... Freeza will come with a machine gun. Whew, and I thought those stupid cotton candy looking balls that Bandai included with their (now thankfully out of print) figure line were stupid. This is just disgusting, and it goes against everything that DBZ is about. It's a complete insult. Weapons of pretty much any type are a _joke_ in DB. They are used very sparingly in the series, and even at that, their purpose is generally nothing more than comic relief. No weapon is a threat, on any level, to any of the principal characters. If Freeza pointed his "big bad machine gun" at Goku, he would get a blank, confused stare in return. I think Raditz pretty much summed it up in episode one when he simply grabbed the farmer's shotgun blast out of the air and threw it back at him at about 5 times the speed. Giving the DBZ characters guns is literally no different than equipping G.I. Joes with rubber bands and crumpled up wads of paper. No one who had anything to do with this decision could have possibly ever seen the show, or even known anything about it. Irwin needs to understand that the fighting in DB is beyond anything in the normal human realm. The "weapons" are the characters themselves, and the abilities that they possess on their own. The power of mind and personal strength are what they utilize, not [...] machine guns and rocket launchers. If I ever see a Goku figure with a GUN in the package, I will buy the thing and burn it.... Weapons don't belong anywhere NEAR him. If they're going to disgrace the characters like this, they might as well package them in their underwear. -------- You get the idea. Thanks to Matthew Jones for bringing this piece to my attention. Never mind that weapons have NEVER been a major part of the Mobian scene, never mind that it was already established in S72's "Shot Heard 'Round The World" that Mobians have eschewed the use of projectile weaponry (a fact that Karl already ran roughshod over in the "Hearts Held Hostage" arc), if Karl and/or Fred Gabrie want Bunnie to carry a piece then by Charlton Heston she's going to carry a piece! 2. If there's one piece of advice that I always give aspiring fanfic writers who ask for pointers, it's to get inside the character's head and heart. When you can think the way they do and feel the way they do, that's half the battle right there. Know your character well enough and the story half writes itself. I speak from personal experience on this. Bunnie, as depicted in the SatAM series and voiced by Christine Cavanaugh, became an instant favorite of mine, and it was easy to get inside her fur and look at the world through her green eyes. She was one of my favorite characters to write for: she was the center of "When A Bunnie Meet A Bunnie," along with her counterpoint from the world of the Antisonic, and I had fun reuniting her with her family in "Runaway." And this I can say with conviction: the Bunnie I know and write for would NEVER use a gun. That's not to say she can't take care of herself. One plot point Karl never picked up on from the SatAM series, specifically from the otherwise forgettable ep "Fed Up With Antoine," is that in addition to the raw strength granted her by her robotic prostheses Bunnie is also adept at martial arts. Some other fanfic writers, especially the team of Tolbert and Brown, have taken this plot point and run vast distances with it, to the extent of giving Bunnie her own dojo in the Great Forest. But nobody else ever hinted that Bunnie is so homicidal that she'd carry a gun. By arming Bunnie Karl Bollers edges the comic away from the games and even the previous comic incarnation and toward the kind of Sonic darkfic which seem to have been inspired by the Matrix franchise. The Mobius in those fics is a world in eternal urban night where Sonic wears a Columbine High School trench coat and dark glasses, curses like a Marine, and shoots like one as well. That genre got very old for me and has left such a bad taste in my mouth that I avoid it where possible. I can only trust that Editorial will never let the comic wander down THAT street. If it ever does, I am so outta the fandom! 3. With "Finale," Sonic the Comic takes a giant step toward turning into an unambiguous boy's comic. "In the world of comics, men are superheroes and women are superficial." So wrote Andrew Arnold in a short piece in Time magazine (2/16/04) about the growing popularity of shojo manga in the U.S. After reading "Finale," I think that last word can be changed to "superfluous." What Karl has done, with or without prompting from Editorial, to the female members of the cast is enough to turn anybody feminist: Sally has been reduced to a crying machine. Bunnie has been masculinized by being turned into a superhero (see above) with a pair of phallic symbols strapped to her thighs. Fiona's only contribution to the story is to dress Sonic's wound and to bring him up to speed on the Bunnie-Antoine relationship. Queen Alicia's only contribution is to comfort the distraught Sally. Amy Rose gets to do her Mighty Thor impersonation. Rouge is never shown taking part in the clash with the SWATbots except as a delivery system for Knuckles. Julie-Su throws some punches. And then there's Mecha, who could just as easily have been a genderless oil drum-type bot after the manner of the Gamma series from Sonic Adventure. But whether because Karl was one of the few people who bothered to see "Terminator 3" or because Editorial wanted some eye candy, she/it was depicted as a major babe. Can you say "castration anxiety?" Of course it may be that Editorial has decided that, rather than integrating the book and making the characters, male and female, complex and engaging enough to interest readers across the age and gender spectrums, it'd be easier to go the King Solomon route and cut the book in half. Let the stories in the front be the boys' stories full of action and not much else, while leaving the table scraps of halfway decent storytelling to please the female readers and the older hardcores to the back stories represented, for the forseeable future, by Mobius: 25 Years Later. I hope I'm wrong about what this means for the book's future, and the "Epilogue" slated to appear in the next issue may clarify things, but it feels like all the good writing that went into the first part of this arc has been squandered. Speaking of squandering, just what purpose did Shadow serve by appearing here? He verbally threatened Robotnik and smacked him upside the head, but that was about it. Maybe if it had been established that HE'D rescued Sonic from near-drowning in the previous story with a well-timed "Chaos control!" that bit about Sonic not being able to swim and then apparently swimming/drifting toward shore and salvation would have made more sense. As it is, Shadow is one more wasted natural resource in a comic that's had a long history of that. Head Score: 3. EYE: I've always believed that a good story can transcend bad art while even great art can't change a mediocre story. This is your proof. Butler does a great job here, but unfortunately it's in the service of a weak and derivative story with two- dimensional characters. Eye Score: 10. HEART: Karl had an opportunity and missed it. With the odd rare exception (Mina), he's never really developed any of the characters in the book, development implying the kind of growth and change that would lend stories more plausibility. And even if we get some of the developments in this Mobius spelled out for us next time, Sally is still the one who gets the short end of the stick. What makes this so galling is when I think about what Sally could have been in the right hands: she could have been Kamiya Kaoru. Kaoru is the female lead in Nobuhiro Watsuki's manga "Ruroni Kenshin," which along with its anime was a crossover hit with plenty of action for the boys while offering girl readers a drop- dead gorgeous hero (if you forget about that facial scar) who isn't "a stoic, honor-driven killing machine," as my brother put it. Not that Kaoru is a slouch herself. A teenaged orphan, she is keeping the family dojo in business and passing on the family's fighting style, Kamiya Kasshin Ryu. She's also the materfamilias to the people who live at the dojo during a time of intense social upheaval in Japan as the country emerges from centuries of isolation. And then there's the romantic tension between her and the spikey-haired Kenshin. Sound like anybody we know? Sure doesn't sound like the Sally in THIS story arc. Karl has a LOT of explaining to do: why Bunnie and Antoine broke up, how King Max got back on his feet, etc. But the changes he put Sally through are the most noticeable and the least forgivable. This is not my idea of Heart. When Sonic returned things were hopeful and I was totally juiced and waiting for what was to come. What came, unfortunately, was a series of reasons to stop reading this comic, or at least to stop feeling any sympathy for the characters, which would have amounted to the same thing. I wouldn't be surprised if Karl's car has a bumper sticker which reads "I'd rather be writing X-Men," because his dislike for the Sonic continuity is palpable on every page of this story. Heart: 2. "Mobius: 25 Years Later : Midnight in the Garden" Story: Ken Penders; Art: Stephen Butler; Ink: Ken Penders; Color: Jason Jensen; Lettering: Vickie Williams; Editor: Justin Gabrie. Changing out of his tux and into his work clothes, Knuckles meets up with Rotor in the park. Rotor not only indulges in a bit of Beatlespeak, but quotes the end line from the celebrated sci-fi film "The Thing From Another World" (1951), also known simply as "The Thing." Rotor warns that the freaky weather signals "the beginning of the end," and Knux earns the Dense as a Box of Rocks Award by asking "The end of what?" With that, we cut away to Julie-Su and Lara-Su having a mother-daughter moment. Lara-Su is complaining that she had to come home after the party, probably because her folks knew that when Lara-Su says "My girlfriends got to do it after their Unveilings" ... well, let's just say it depends on what your definition of "it" is. And Ken almost brings up his anti- marriage hobby horse before Julie-Su advises "Let's not go there." Favorite bit of dialogue: LARA-SU: Don't I have a say in the matter? [Pause] JULIE-SU: No! Back at the park, Rotor's broken the apocalyptic news to Knuckles and begins to speak of a joint effort between Angel Island and Mobius. Meanwhile, let's see how Rutan is making out. OK, bad choice of words, but that's what's happening. He's just rounded first base with a cute chameleon named Salma when he overhears Knux and Rotor and decides that this bit of news is too juicy to ignore. HEAD: Pretty basic development here: the meeting between Rotor and Knuckles is the centerpiece, with digressions to the two Su's and then to Rutan on the make. Nothing feels contrived, and Rutan's presence in the park is disturbingly plausible; one wonders if Editorial had to call for revisions of the drawing at the top of page [6]. The dialogue between Lara-Su and her mom also has a ring of truth to it. And at least they talk, which is a good thing even if Lara-Su doesn't get her way. Gotta wonder about those bunny slippers, though. Head Score: 9. EYE: Here's a question I'll bet Lara-Su's heard more than once: "Hey, how come like your mom is so completely hot?!" Probably has something to do with her being drawn by Stephen Butler. Nothing to complain about from me, just an observation that very few 40-year-old mothers of ANY species look THAT good. Rotor's pretty much the only character showing his age in this story. Overall, everything looks good. Eye Score: 10. HEART: The only real Heart moment is the mother-daughter talk. Hey, at least they DO talk! I've read where in some families kids and parents have gotten into the habit of text- mailing each other on their cell phones even if the other party is right in the next room. I was struck by Julie-Su's ... I don't want to call it "serenity" in the face of her teenage offspring, but she definitely has the upper hand in the relationship. She also never raises her voice to Lara-Su when the latter speaks in bold type and balloon bursts. Now THAT'S strength, and it has nothing to do with bionic implants or mechanical limbs or weaponry. The sequence says a lot about Julie-Su and it's not bad. Unless you're a teen and totally empathizes with Lara-Su. But I passed that point a number of decades back myself. Heart Score: 10. Off-Panel: Gallagher/Manak back again. Thank you, we've been reminded that you're still alive and we've missed you. Now go away so we can miss you some more. This Justin: The full quote is: "The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves." Frankly, I prefer the Doc Brown version from "Back To The Future 3": "It means that your future hasn't been written yet. No one's has. Your future is whatever you make it. So make it a good one, both of you." In response to questions about M:25YL being canonical, J. Fred answers with a definite Maybe. At least the Freditor admits that this version has SOME grounding in the past, but he sidesteps the issue of whether this means Karl can't kill off Sally or marry Sonic to Mina in his stories so long as the Blue Blur is married to Sal in Ken's stories. Yes, Fred, anything CAN happen in the future, but as Editor it's up to you to spell out for your writers what WILL happen. That's why they pay you the Editor money. And Fred wants to know what we think of the "Home" arc. I hope I've made myself clear, and I will continue to do so in the next issue's apparent epilogue. Next issue features the artistic debut of Jonathan Gray, known on Ken Penders's message board as the WB and as creator of the e-strips "Chip and Walter" and "Time Trouble." Check him and them out at http://diversions.toonzone.net/chipandwalter/ , which also features some character model sheets for his work on the comic. Sonic-Grams: Aaron Main stakes his claim to fandom. Nina_21 is told that a story about "Bunnie going back home" is in the works. Sounds like a GREAT idea for a story, and since I actually did something about it and wrote such a story ("Runaway") back in 1998 I'll be interested to see how Archie's pros from Dover tackle the subject. T. J. Libby in Maine is having trouble finding back issues. Well, if T. J. ever gets tired of waiting, she/he can read something else to pass the time. There's an author who lives up that way named Stephen King who does good work.... Fan Art: Lara-Su gets her due from Connie Stanton, though the hair like her mother's must be a dye job. A. J. Langley shows Sonic about to book. Ellery Guest gives us Hyper-Knuckles, and Karim Mahmoud from Kuwait (!) shows Sonic with a letter S on his forehead. Don't know if it stands for Sonic, but it's safe to assume it does NOT stand for "Saddam."