Talking Points : Sonic #138 WB: Despite some dissonance between the emotional content of the story and the artwork (Max screaming at Sonic on page [1] and Sally doing likewise on pages [2] and [7]), I didn't have a major problem with the artwork here. People have asked about the in- jokes in WB's artwork, and I have to admit that probably half of them went right by me. There were a few small artistic moments that completely won me over, such as the expressions on Knuckles and Julie-Su sharing a seat on page [4] panel 3, the small panel of Remington in irons, and Espio apparently administering a wet willy to one of the dingoes at the bottom of page [11]. "HAIL TO THE AVATAR, FOR HE HAS RETURNED." FUNNY, I DIDN'T KNOW HE'D LEFT: Seems to me that it should have been enough for Knuckles as the former Guardian to have helped clean house. He didn't need this Avatar business from out of nowhere, and neither did we. This is SUCH a throwback, and I'm not even talking about comic books. As usual, someone put it in words far better than I ever could. Tom Wolfe, in his critique of modern architecture, "From Bauhaus To Our House" (1981), cites the experience of various European architects who managed to emigrate to America in the 1930s to escape the spread of Nazism: "The reception of [Walter] Gropius and his confreres was like a certain stock scene from the jungle movies of that period. Bruce Cabot and Myrna Loy make a crash landing in the jungle and crawl out of the wreckage in their Abercrombie & Fitch white safari blouses and tan gabardine jodhpurs and stagger into a clearing. They are surrounded by savages with bones through their noses ... who immediately bow down and prostrate themselves and commence a strange moaning chant. "The White Gods! "Come from the skies at last!" (p46) This book has had a hard enough time trying to articulate the supernatural, whether dealing with the Ancient Walkers in any of their several incarnations or in its all-too-pedestrian treatment of Knuckles's "Afterlife." Unless Karl is planning on using this Avatar business in Part 4 to give Knuckles his glide back, this is just more useless gilding of the lily. But this also points up the most maddening feature of the book's reset of the characters. Neither Sonic nor the readers are given anything like a chance to internalize the changes that have taken place between the end of the world as they knew it and Sonic's return. We're simply dusted off with one-liner explanations. Bunnie and Antoine? "Blame it on the war." Didn't King Max used to be confined to a wheelchair? "He got better." Knuckles as an avatar? "This 'prophecy' should cover it." Gimme a break! These are fundamental changes to the story, and they're delivered with all the finesse and subtlety of an Acme anvil landing on the head of a character in a Warner Brothers cartoon. "LOCATION" vs. "PLACE": The cover story makes use of several locations based on the Sonic and Knuckles game: Marble Hill, Sky Sanctuary, Lava Reef (or, as I like to call it, "Fire and Ice"). Yet they seem to function, as so many locales in the comic do, as mere backdrops; the reader doesn't get a sense of place. Lava Reef is a prime example. In S100's "Welcome To The Dark Side" Ken Penders sidestepped the question of whether Kragok went to echidna Hell when he died in the same impact that killed Tobor and ushered him into the presence of Hawking. Yet the Lava Reef Zone has always struck me as being the most hellacious looking stage in all the game. Here it rates merely a "scary." But since it only figures in the last two pages, it couldn't very well slow down the plot. True Confession; whenever I play Sonic & Knuckles and I get to the end of Lava Reef Zone 1 and eliminate the robotic hand that tries to swat the player, I always recite Sean Penn's line from the ending of "Fast Times at Ridgemont High": "Aloha Mr. Hand." "URP!" OK, knowing this was an Archie Comic, when Ken Penders seemed to be hyping some kind of major confrontation over dinner between Sonic and Knuckles, I figured we weren't going to get any kind of heavy psychodrama on the order of "Ordinary People" or "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?". But I read the story and I'm STILL wondering what all the fuss was about. Then again, I grew up in a pretty ... let's use the word "intense" ... household where you KNEW when you'd been yelled at or worse. I don't blame Ken for underplaying something that might have traumatized younger or more sensitive readers, but this just increases my aversion for hype generally. I'd rather be pleasantly surprised by a good story that comes out of nowhere than disappointed by a hyped-up story that, 99 times out of 100, doesn't live up to the advanced billing. WORD. There are some souls out on the message board who are particularly anti-Ken Penders. I'm not among them. He's spun his share of losers but he's done good work as well. But there is one thing I wish I could change about his writing: his dialogue. On the last page alone of "My Dinner With Sonic" we're treated to "no harm, no foul," "that'll be all she wrote," and "one from Column A or two from Column B"; talk about Cliches On Parade! [For the benefit of you Gen X and Y kids who don't get that last bit about Columns A and B, selecting one item from Column A and two from Column B refers to the way people used to order food in certain Chinese restaurants. Nowadays that system has been largely replaced by All the Crab Legs You Can Eat When the Buffet's Open and No Personal Checks Accepted.] Ken also misused the word "gourmand," committing the common error of using it as a synonym for "gourmet." A gourmet is someone who is a connoisseur, someone who appreciates the delicacies and subtleties of the dining experience. A gourmand might be all those things in his or her off moments, but generally a gourmand simply appreciates good eating. You're more likely to find a gourmand rather than a gourmet at the aforementioned All The Crab Legs You Can Eat Chinese Buffet. And to put a cap on the whole thing, Knuckles gives us the Mike Gallagher Memorial Bit Of Sexual Innuendo: while Knuckles is referring to the necessity of evacuating Mobius in case it starts flying apart, Knuckles's curtain line is "We need a plan to get everyone off!" which makes it sound more like he's putting together an orgy. "When dialogue is right, we know. When it's wrong we also know ... it jags on the ear like a badly tuned musical instrument." Stephen King, "On Writing" I suppose mastery of dialogue has never been one of the hallmarks of writing for comic books. Here, from S103's "Freedom Fighters of the Galaxy: Part 1" by Mike Gallagher, is Hawkhawk's introduction of Silver Snivley: "Behold! It is Silver Snively! He is herald to the greatest menace in the universe and whose arrival here is now a foregone conclusion ... Oh, unkind Fate! Silver Snively's master, Robolactus, the Planet Glutton is coming ... and he hungers!" Not only is this dialogue pretentious, overblown, and self- important, but I get the impression that Gallagher was consciously trying to ape the Marvel Comics house style when he wrote it. Meaning that while this may be a parody of the Marvel style, it works only to the extent that it's a close approximation of the style. Me, I'd have bailed out after "Oh, unkind Fate!" That's why I've always made such a point of telling would-be fanfic writers who ask for advice to get inside the characters first. Understand their thoughts and feelings. Be the light behind the eyes that the comic writers can't seem to find. There's more to writing dialogue for Bunnie, for instance, than getting the phonetics for a Southern accent correctly. There are some things that, up until the reset, certain characters would never have thought much less said. There's no point thinking that the fans won't notice. When dialogue is wrong, we know.