Sonic the Hedgehog #155 (Jan 2006; where does the time
go?)

     Sanford cover: like the Spaz cover for S152 this is not
an accurate depiction of what happens in this comic.  Unlike
the Spaz cover for S152, my second reaction is "Who cares? 
This is a great cover!"  It's not often you see Sonic
reverting to type in this comic and rolling himself into a
ball, but it looks like he's headed in that direction after
having received an invitation to the pending nuptials of
Princess Sally.  Great posing, great use of highlight and
shadow.  Look well upon this cover; it's the last bit of
subtlety we're going to see for a while.


     "Line of Succession: Part 1"
     Story: Ken Penders; Art: Jim Fry; Ink: Jim Amash; Color:
Jason Jensen; Lettering: John E. Workman; Editor: Mike
Pellerito; Managing Editor: Victor Gorelick; Editor-in-Chief:
Richard Goldwater

     Our story begins as the AntiAntoine is serving the King a
"nightcap," which would probably be more comfortable than that
crown he's wearing.  Whatever was in that mixture (and we're
supposed to think it's not good) causes Max to turn in early
while still wearing his uniform and crown, possibly in case he
needs to visit the throne in the middle of the night.  And
just in case there's anybody in the audience with the I.Q. of
a toothpick, the AntiAntoine takes the opportunity to drive
home the plot in a series of thought balloon that deserves to
be quoted in full:

"Little does zee King or anyone else suspect zat soon I will
rule over the Kingdom of Acorn and not even zat pig Sonic the
Hedgehog can stop me!"

     As the AntiAntoine looks for some damsel to tie to the
railroad tracks (about which more later), Tails has been
looking in the Great Forest for Sonic.  The good news is, he
finds him.  The bad news is, he finds him swapping spit with
Fiona. The artwork is pretty heavily shadowed but the body
language gets the point across.  Tails then takes this
opportunity to go ballistic and spout bad dialogue: "Sonic!  I
thought you were my friend!  How could you ... with her ...
out of all the foxes?!"  Sounds like a typical eleven-year-
old, doesn't he?  Not wanting to miss out on the fun, Fiona
gets to read some bad dialogue of her own as she confronts
Tails: "What's that supposed to mean?  I have bad breath or
something?"  Tails is finally forced to confess his crush on
Fiona that dates back to his feelings for the Fiona-bot in
"Growing Pains."  Fiona then tries to let him down easy by
telling him that he's a sweet kid, but that's the trouble:
he's a kid, and she wants a boyfriend who's closer to getting
his driver's license.  Tails than quickly cycles through
sadness, rage, tells Sonic "I HATE YOU!!!" and runs off crying
a river.  Since this is presumably the Antisonic (because he's
the only cast member allowed to have a sex drive), he's got to
be wondering whether having kids like Tails overacting all
over the place is worth the chance to score.
     The Royals are heading home, with Dr. Quack waiting in
the wings to tend to Max.  Max gets the once-over and is told
to get some rest.  "What else is there to do?" the bed-ridden
Max asks, prompting Quack to deliver a line that's Zen-like in
its stupidity: "Let's hear you say that when Alicia is
around!"  Quack then puts the AntiAntoine in charge of making
sure Max takes his meds; HUGE mistake.
     "A few hours later," Sally gets more than a little ticked
off to find the AntiAntoine on sentry duty outside her
parents' bedroom.  "Robotnik's treachery knows no bounds, mon
princess," he explains, using the masculine possessive pronoun
"mon" instead of the feminine "ma."  You know, as in
"Michelle, Ma Belle" (about which more later).  Sally finally
gets inside where Max drops a bomb: because of his declining
health he's looking to abdicate.  Apparently it's a package
deal since he tells her "The citizens will need a new king and
queen" and now Sally's required to get married.  And the
aftershock is, she's supposed to marry (Anti)Antoine.  "Don't
I have any say in the matter?!" she asks at the top of her
voice, to which Mom basically replies "Uh, no."  King Max
displays the diplomatic skills that have prevented any other
monarchs from joining his Coalition of the Off-Panel by
telling Sally that it's better than her being married to
Sonic, which is her cue to run out of the room in tears.
     We then get a short interlude where the real Sonic is
practicing guitar at home.  This gives Ken an excuse to engage
in some Beatlespeak, citing a couple of their song titles. 
Those of you who are post-Baby Boomers may not get the joke
here, but Your Mother Should Know.  Bunnie then arrives and
turns on the waterworks as she tells Sonic that Sally and
Antoine are headed for the altar.
     This FINALLY gives Sonic something to do and he heads off
toward the castle, expositing all the way.  But he
demonstrates that he's seriously off his game in the heroics
department because the AntiAntoine stops him at sword-point
before he can even get to the front door.
     Having demonstrated to Sonic that he's got game, Anti-
Antoine once again seeks out "mon princess," and throws in a
"mon cherie" for good measure when he should have said "ma
cherie."   His idea of sweet-talking Sally consists of telling
her that love has nothing to do with their impending marriage;
like James Bond explaining why he shagged one of the female
baddies in "Thunderball," AntiAnt basically tells Sally he's
marrying her for King and country.  "It's just that I was
hoping for the fairy tale!" Sally says, sounding so NOT like
herself.
     I gladly skipped over the HeroScape supplement when I
read that the villain is named Kee-Mo-Shi.  Reminds me of the
summers I spent as a Boy Scout at Camp Mach-Kin-O-Siew in
Wisconsin, NOT the best times of my life.
     By the next morning, Ken realizes that he's within three
pages of the end of Part 1 and needs to kick it up a notch. 
So he sends King Max into a coma, like a soap opera starlet in
the middle of contract negotiations.  This actually galvanizes
Sally into action as she decides to ... go through with the
wedding.  Sonic, meanwhile, is now faced with one of two
options: either bust up the wedding and spirit Sally away like
Dustin Hoffman in "The Graduate," or else turn to an unnamed
third party for assistance.
     Which brings us to the last page's cliffhanger ending at
Princess Sally's stadium wedding.  Maybe Robotnik ... sorry,
Eggman ... will get lucky, notice all the activity with some
spy satellite or something, and try toasting the bride like a
marshmallow.  Can Sonic rescue Sally from A Fate Worse Than
Death?  Tune in next time.

     HEAD: Ken's got a basically good story here.  Heck, if
he'd have opened with King Max already dead and the
AntiAntoine putting the moves on Queen Alicia instead of
Princess Sally we'd have "Hamlet."  Unfortunately, Ken's
compromised his material, whether intentionally or not, by
turning this story into a 19th century melodrama.  Bear with me
for a short history of the genre; if nothing else, maybe some
of you high schoolers will get an idea for a term paper out of
this.
     Ever since the ancient Greeks developed theater into the
art form we know today, one problem has remained: "How do we
sell it to the cheap seats?"  In short, how do you make sure
that a mass medium reaches as much of the mass as possible. 
It's not that the Greeks didn't do their best within the
limits of their technology: they built amphitheaters which
were acoustically perfect, and some of the masks worn by the
players (the ones with the exaggerated expressions of
happiness and sadness which have become the symbols of the
craft) had built-in megaphones behind them in order to better
project the voices of the actors.  But still there was that
striving to improve the delivery.
     Fast-forward to 19th century France and Francois del
Sarte, (1811-1871).  A performer in the comic opera of Paris,
he was on his way to a career in the theater when thanks to
improper training techniques he blew out his vocal chords. 
Faced with a career-ending injury, Francois persevered along a
different line.  He became an embodiment of the old adage
"Those who can, do; those who can't, teach."  He became an
instructor of actors and orators, coaching not only vocal
techniques but also codifying certain gestures to reinforce
the emotion being conveyed, right down to foot placement.  A
number of his pupils carried the del Sartean method to England
and the United States.
     The del Satrean method found its clearest expression in
the 19th century melodrama.  This wasn't just a type of play
with an intermission or two, it was a complete theatrical
package that could last three to four hours.  For your money
you saw a play itself and a number of "olios."  These would
consist of a good deal of music (solo performances, audience
participation sing-alongs), sketch comedy, and even several
oddities that anticipated such entertainment milestones as
"The Gong Show."  One olio interlude was a dance piece with
a title something like "The Decline and Demise of Unrequited
Love," which sounds like the kind of pretentious interp dance
number kids end up seeing at least once in high school.  This
would be danced, not by a flimsy, tutu-wearing ballerina, but
by someone wearing a gorilla suit.
     I learned a little about melodrama in my high school days
when the theater department staged a production of Augustin
Daly's 1867 classic, "Under The Gaslight."  The plot was pure
soap: young Laura Courtland, an uptown girl in the New York
City of the post-Civil War era, at the beginning of what
became known as the Gilded Age, finds her life and engagement
unraveling when rumors spread about her questionable
birthright (something about being switched at birth with an
infant of a lower social station).  To seek the truth, Laura
heads for the poor neighborhoods of New York, where she
confronts the class prejudice of the era and learns that
things are not always what they seem.
     The play is remembered, when it is remembered at all
these days, for turning Being Tied To The Railroad Track into
a theatrical threat and a cliche waiting to be born.  It
actually wasn't the FIRST melodrama to feature this; a British
melo titled (aptly enough) "The Engineer" did it first in
1863.  But Daly brought it to America and into the theatrical
vocabulary.  In an interesting bit of gender-bending, it was
NOT Laura who was tied to the tracks by the villain William
Byke, but the second male lead, Joe Snorkey, a one-armed Civil
War veteran.  Laura, locked in a signal man's wooden shed,
must get out of there and rescue Joe before he's mowed down. 
She does, and the rescue is followed by The Line, the dialogue
spoken by Joe that not only gives you an idea of the kind of
overacting involved in melodrama but also includes a
passionate plea for women's suffrage: 

"Victory! Saved! Hooray! And these are the women who ain't to
have a vote!" 

Nowadays we have to settle for an ironic one-line aside
delivered by Bruce or Ahnold or the Bond-du-jour.
     Yet there was more to melodrama than whether someone got
tied to the train tracks.  The form had several defining
features:
     MUSIC.  There was always music, as mentioned above.  In
our high school production of "Under the Gaslight" there was a
concession made for time's sake and the audience participation
sing-along medley of patriotic songs was cut back to one song:
"Battle Hymn of the Republic."  I assume the other patriotic
songs had become so obscure they would have been as unknown to
a 20th century audience as the song that opened the show,
"What's This World A-Coming To?".
     EMOTION: The melodrama was a haven for overacting,
pitching it to the back of the house, and emotional expression
was no exception.  Feelings were FEELINGS, always way over the
top.
     COINCIDENCE: While even Charles Dickens wasn't above
breaking the law of averages in his stories, melodrama
consistently defied probability.  Was Laura locked in the
signal man's shed?  Good thing there was an ax in there with
her so she could chop through the door.
     CLIFFHANGERS: The audience had to be kept on the edge of
their seats.  Thus the peril of being run over by a train or,
in the actual climax of "Under the Gaslight," the spectacle of
a fight between Hero and Villain in a rowboat after Laura has
been thrown into the river.
     VIRTUE TRIUMPHANT: Good always triumphs over Evil, and
virtue always triumphs over vice.
     Hey, what part of "always" are you having trouble with?
     So what happened to melodrama?  The short answer is,
something better came along.  Beginning in the late 19th
century, European playwrights began looking beyond the
dramatic forms in common use, as well as the theatrical
conventions to which they had to conform.  They knew that the
world of the theater was NOT the real world, where Good does
not necessarily triumph over Evil.  Writers such as Henrik
Ibsen and August Strindberg in Scandinavia, Anton Chekov and
Leo Tolstoy in Russia, Emile Zola in France and George Bernard
Shaw in Great Britain began writing complex and compelling
plays that took drama to the next level.  American playwrights
were slow to catch on, but by the 20th century they came into
their own.  Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams, Edward
Albee and Arthur Miller, Neil Simon and David Mamet have all
made stunning contributions to the American theater, at a time
when another theatrical form, the Broadway musical, was coming
into being.
     But in the same way that the genetic legacy of
Tyrannosaurus rex lives on in the DNA of the humble chicken (I
don't buy it myself, but I'm sure the thought gives comfort to
the chickens), melodrama left a residual legacy in other forms
of popular culture.  Its most direct heir was the silent
motion picture.  Due to limitations of technology (no sound,
hence no speech) and imagination, silent motion pictures
featured the same exaggerated gestures as acting in
melodramas.  It also featured music, even if it was only some
guy playing piano as the film unreeled.  And it should come as
no surprise that "Under the Gaslight" was itself released as a
silent movie in 1914.  Even as late as 1956, veteran silent
movie director Cecil B. DeMille's "The Ten Commandments"
featured scenes of Hebrew slaves striking del Satrean poses
while in Egyptian bondage or watching the Red Sea parting.
     Another descendant of melodrama was the continuing daily
serial drama, also known as the "soap opera," a name invented
during its radio days because of the kind of sponsors it
attracted.  It inherited from melodrama the importance of
emotional content (sometimes carried to extremes) and wild
improbabilities of plotting that would be an embarrassment in
any other medium (coughEvilTwincough).
     And then there's Children's Theater.  In pitching theater
to an audience of preschoolers, Children's Theater has kept
alive a number of melodramatic conventions: exaggerated
characterization, Good and Evil as absolutes embodied in the
Heroes and Villains, and a tendency to burst into song to
reinforce the action and/or the moral.  If you don't have
access to a Children's Theater troupe in your area but you
have television, "Lazytown" on Nick Jr. is the best example of
Children's Theater-as-melodrama on the air today, with its
hyperactive hero Sporticus, its totally villainous villain
Robbie Rotten, and its songs about getting enough sleep,
brushing your teeth, and laying off the video games.
     The most obvious access point to melodrama, though, is
through parodies of the genre itself.  While the "Dudley
Doright" cartoons made by Jay Ward Studios in the 1960s are
the most obvious example, there is a cartoon that's less well-
known but a shining send-up of the breed: the 1942 Chuck Jones
cartoon for Warner Brothers, "The Dover Boys of Pimento
University, or The Rivals of Roquefort Hall."  Yeah, titles
could get pretty busy back then.  It features the three Dover
boys, their mutual girlfriend (they apparently share her or
something) Dora Standpipe, and the villain Dan Backslide,
"coward, bully, cad and beast of Roquefort Hall."  There is
much overacting in the cartoon (for comic effect, but the
exaggeration is relatively slight) with Dora and the boys
striking del Sartean poses when necessary.  One rather
laudatory essay at
http://www.stomptokyo.com/badmoviereport/reviews/C/chuck-jones
.html claims that this animated short turned del Satrean
excess into the "dynamic posing" that would be the hallmark of
modern animation.
     Or you could simply reread "Line of Succession: Part 1."
     This story features SO many melodramatic conventions it's
incredible, and I mean that on several levels.  The
AntiAntoine has been reduced to the kind of one-dimensional
overacting villain that the audience can boo and hiss at every
appearance.  I got the feel of that as soon as I read his
opening thought balloon monologue cited above.  It HAD to be a
thought balloon; you can't just SAY the line out loud and NOT
sound like a Snidely Whiplash imitator, the scene is such a
mustache-twirler.  It is classic Bad Ken Penders Dialogue:
obvious, overblown, and as heavy as a canned ham.
     Emotionally, everybody's over the top.  I expected this
from the AntiAntoine.  Villains in a melodrama are SUPPOSED to
overact.  One of the defining moments of "The Dover Boys..."
is when Dan Backslide decides to steal an automobile parked in
front of the saloon, declaiming his intentions at the top of
his lungs: "A runabout.  I'll STEAL it!  NO ONE WILL EVER
KNOW!!!"
     No, I expected overacting from the villain.  But who knew
that TAILS was such a little drama queen?  I was afraid that
Ken would blow it when it came to the discovery by Fiona of
Tails's crush on her, and I wasn't disappointed.  This is in
the same league as the Smack Heard 'Round The Fandom in "Say
You Will."
     As will be explained further in the Heart section,
there's a difference between sentiment and sentimentality. 
The latter is oversized and taken way too seriously, and
sentimentality definitely rules here, from Tails's blow-up at
Sonic to Bunnie's lachrymose reaction to Sally's impending
marriage.
     And speaking of Sally, aside from her own emotional
outburst (which is somewhat justified, given her concern for
her father's health), we find that she's facing a 19th century
attitude toward women to go along with the 19th century
theatrical conventions that have infiltrated this story.  This
is the first I've heard that Knothole is such a thoroughgoing
patriarchy that queens are little more than royal arm candy. 
All the good work of Romy Chacon's "The Royal Signet," which
helped to turn Queen Alicia into a viable character in her own
right, goes into the dumpster as she more or less accepts her
fate as Max's accessory rather than his successor.  Sally not
only has no say in WHOM she'll marry, she has no say in
WHETHER she'll marry.  Like her 19th century sisters, she
"ain't to have a vote."
     Even Ken's brief bout of Beatlespeak, which is usually
his way of signifying to the Boomers in the audience, can be
seen here as a cue for an audience participation sing-along. 
I said in my review of "More Than Meets The Eye" that Ken had
thrown himself on the mercy of Stan Lee in writing that story;
after reading "Line of Succession: Part 1" I was left with the
impression that here he was channeling Augustin Daly.
     But this IS only Part 1 after all.  It remains to be seen
whether Ken can get over the fever that seems to have been
upon him when he wrote this.  As it stands, the only true
"actor" in this story is the AntiAntoine.  Everybody else is a
reactor or, more accurately, an over-reactor.  We have Tails
over-reacting to (Anti)Sonic making time with Fiona, Bunnie
over-reacting to Sally's marriage, and Sally over-reacting to
news of her impending nuptials.  Maybe one of the cast members
will actually get around to DOING something about their
situation in the next installment, and earning the title
"hero."  Head Score: 5.
     EYE: Jim Fry takes the material and runs with it and does
it well, despite the occasional frame where the AntiAntoine
looks a little too bishonen for the script.  Better than
wearing a cape and draping it across his face in the classic
melodramatic villain manner, I suppose.  Still, I'm reminded
of the line from the Rolling Stones song about "your father's
still perfecting ways of making sealing wax."
     If Jim and Jason had REALLY gotten a feel for the
material, Jim would have drawn a series of sepia-tinted
tableaux with the dialogue appearing in alternating panels in
old-fashioned type.  Hey, if the material PLAYS like a silent
movie, maybe it should have been DRAWN like a silent movie! 
Eye Score: 9.
     HEART: Ken deserves credit for trying.  His stories have
always born a strong resemblance to early James Bond movies:
Forget about character development, let's cut to the action! 
The Good/Bad/Unknown story arc was very much a case in point.
So he tried to increase the emotional content of this story
beyond what he usually does.  Trouble is, he tried too hard. 
By playing his emotional notes quadruple-forte, especially
Tails's scene in the beginning, he undercut his objective and
we lose the chance to feel what the characters are feeling. 
It's so broad and so obvious it feels false.
     This was a lesson I learned when I tried reading shojo
manga, girls' comics, back in the 1980s when I discovered both
manga and Japanese bookstores in Chicago.  I couldn't speak or
read Japanese, but that wasn't the challenge.  The challenge
was: can I read a manga and pick up on what's happening
without benefit of the language, sort of like watching an
anime on mute.  I found that, when "reading" shojo manga, I
was able to pick up on the emotions of the characters, even
when I was only guessing at their motivation.
     One such story, a one-issue short story of "first love"
by Hideko Tachikake, was "Urara's Forecast of Love" which ran
in the April 1985 issue of Ribon magazine.  It's about a
schoolgirl, Urara, and her feelings for a boy in her class, a
usually-serious kendo student named Atsumu.  It doesn't help
that, when walking her dog in the park one day, she runs into
Atsumu and learns that he has an irrational fear of dogs,
something she actually thinks is "kawai."  This all comes
together in the course of the story, which goes for 43 pages
and covers subplots which include her thinking Atsumu is gay
for a time because she sees a feminine-looking boy, a
bishonen, holding his hand.  A good number of tears are shed,
including tears of laughter by Urara's friend, Mika, who at
first teases her mercilessly about her feelings toward Atsumu,
and eventually tells her "Your heart isn't messed up, it's in
love.  I think you should listen to it."
     When I had a chance to read the actual script after my
brother translated it, I realized that the emotions in the
story may sometimes have been exaggerated, but they were also
honest.  Urara was never simply twitter-pated about Atsumu: he
preoccupied her thoughts, even when she wanted any kind of
boyfriend BUT him.  Atsumu was also more than a one-note kendo
player.  In one incident he carried her home piggy-back after
she twists her ankle, and she's stunned when after she thanks
him he smiles at her, actually the first time the reader sees
him smile as well.  Then there's a scene after Atsumu loses a
kendo match practically when it begins; Urara later sees him
soaking his head under an outdoor faucet.  This may resemble a
time-honored Japanese purification technique of standing
beneath a waterfall, until Urara and the readers realize that
Atsumu's also masking the fact that he's crying.
     I've dwelt at length on this story because it succeeds
where Ken's story fails.  There's nothing as dramatic as a
dying parent or entering into a bad marriage or having your
crush crushed in the story, but Tachikake didn't tell a story
with larger-than-life emotions.  These were real emotions, as
anyone who's felt them would attest, which were accentuated by
the story.  Whatever intensity was expressed about them was
due to their reality; the writer didn't need to concoct a
story featuring stadium weddings and evil twins to find
reasons for the feelings of the characters.
     Here, I think, is where Ken needs to continue doing his
homework as a writer.  And writers do their homework by
reading.  I don't know what his reading habits are these days,
but if he wants to sharpen his depiction of emotions in
characters he can do worse than read translations of shojo
manga available in the Graphic Novels section of Border's or
Barnes & Noble.  It's not just about the tears, it's about
getting in touch with the anger and the sorrow, the
frustration and the laughter, that prompt them.  Put too much
emphasis on the emotions themselves, with either no context or
with a patently phoney one, and you have the kind of self-
preoccupied, melodramatic sentimentality of "Line of
Succession: Part 1."  Heart Score: 5.

     
     "The Price of Flame: Part 1"
     Story: Mike Gallagher, Art: Art Mawhinney, Ink: Mike
Higgins; Color: Jason Jensen; Lettering: Mike Higgins

     And now, for a cleansing of the pallet, an inventory
story about Dulcy, last seen in a bad relationship in the
"Crouching Hedgehog, Hidden Dragon" arc.  You can tell it's an
inventory story because Sally's head fur has gone back to
being short.  At a "surprise pep rally" to show their
appreciation for Dulcy, the guest of honor chokes at the
prospect of breathing fire and flies off.  Time to cue the
flashback:
     Seems that one day Dulcy was away from the colony, which
appears to be Mike Gallagher's term for a group of dragons. 
She returns in time to watch her mother (named "Sabina" in the
SatAM series) and others get captured by SWATbots, but then
discovered that several other members also managed to elude
capture.  Under the leadership of an oldster named Glint, they
trek to "the ancient draconian city of Vesuvio," which here
bears more than a passing resemblance to Devil's Tower
National Monument in Wyoming, the site Steven Spielberg chose
for the close encounter of the third kind between humans and
space aliens.  Inside the not-so-solid mountain the remnants
of the colony meet up with other dragons and a No Sightseeing
rule is imposed.  Guess who eventually broke the rule.
     Dulcy then discovers Sonic and Sally, and becomes a team
player.  This earned her a sentence of permanent banishment
from the colony, but at least she now had somewhere to go. 
After a point, though, she decided she'd logged enough Freedom
Fighter miles to confront Glint about her status within the
colony.  Unfortunately, she's been on Eggman's Watch List and
once she reveals the doorway to Vesuvio she's zapped by his
"army of mecha-dragons" who plan to take over the whole
shooting match.  In order to remember all this, she must not
be as unconscious as she looks.

     HEAD: FINALLY someone in the Archie organization gets
around to supplying Dulcy with some kind of back story.  Too
bad it wasn't more compelling.
     The last time we had a major dragon sighting in this book
was the "Crouching Hedgehog, Hidden Dragon" arc, where Zan the
Chinese fireball (this designation is taken from Newt
Scamander's "Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them," a
textbook in use at Hogwart's) turns out to be an abusive
butthead.  Needless to say, this doesn't flesh out our
understanding of Mobian dragons.  Then again, neither did the
SatAM series.
     Humans have mixed feelings about dragons.  They're
generally regarded as fearsome and malevolent, a fact played
upon by the knight-dragon pair in the motion picture
"Dragonheart."  They're regarded far more benevolently in the
East, though their outward aspect may be frightening.  The
Hayao Miyazaki masterpiece "Spirited Away" is a case in point;
I'll say no more about it in case anyone hasn't seen it yet.
     Of course, the absence of canonical information has never
stopped anyone from Making It Up if they needed to.  This is
pretty much what happened in my fanfic "Homecoming" where
Dulcy faced the threat of return to the realm of dragons and
never seeing the Freedom Fighters again.  I ended up
concocting four distinct races of Mobian dragon inspired by
the classic Four Elements of Ancient Greek thought: earth,
air, fire, water.
     We don't get anything nearly as cosmic here.  Instead, we
get a visual quote from CE3K and a weird bit of business about
black singe rings and Dulcy trying to deny her banishment by
overpainting her gold ring.  This is the kind of detail that
can totally derail a story if you dwell on it.  I say she
painted it black on the days she was feeling Goth.
     I'm nowhere near conversant enough about dragon lore to
examine all the variations on the theme, such as the
"Dragonriders of Pern" series of books by Anne McCaffrey.  But
at least Mike Gallagher tries to bring us up to speed.  In
this comic, where the continuity is so loose the wheels fall
off at regular intervals, that's worth something.  Head Score:
7.
     EYE: I would LOVE to know whether the face of Eggman
inserted into the screen of the mecha-dragon in the final
panel is a late edition.  I'd bet money that it is.  After
all, Sally's wearing her hair in the old pre-S125 style, and
there's something just ... off enough about the drawing of
Bunnie in the first panel that I'm guessing it's a late
addition as well.  While the artwork works, there's something
flat and uninspired about Jensen's coloring that makes
something that should be mysterious and wonderful simply comic
book-routine.  Eye Score: 7.
     HEART: Mike Gallagher never got around to explaining WHY
Dulcy might have needed an affirmation rally.  Personally, I
like to think it was their way of being there for Dulcy
considering what she went through in the "Crouching
Hedgehog..." arc.  After all, in the course of that story we
learned that Zan has been beating up on Dulcy, and at the end
of the Arc Zan is killed off by GUN.  That's gotta take its
toll on a girl, no matter how big of a jerk the guy was.
     But Mike didn't have that many pages in which to tell the
story he tells here, so he keeps the focus on Dulcy.  Even
here, he more or less glosses over the capture of Sabina by
Robotnik (in the SatAM series she's eventually freed by Sonic
and the gang).  Throughout the focus is on the action, except
during the ring exposition.  It works as a story, but there's
still a feeling that something is missing here, some bit of
magic that would have transcended the material and hinted at a
sense of wonder about the realm of dragons.  Or maybe I'm
asking to much from this comic, I don't know.  Heart Score: 5.