Sonic
the Hedgehog #163 [August 2006]
Spaziante cover: Return of the Triptych.
Clockwise from the top: Sonic, Naugus, Mano the hand of Eggman, Dr.
Finn, Merlin Prower, the third Ancient Walker, M, and
a horde of ninja spiders preparing to make sushi out of a green fish. Hope they brought enough for the whole class.
“The Darkest Storm: Part 2: Onset of the Squall”
Story: Ian Flynn; Art: James Fry; Ink: Jim Amash;
Color: Jason Jensen; Lettering: John E. Workman; Editor: Mike Pellerito; Managing Editor: Victor Gorelick;
Editor-in-Chief: Richard Goldwater.
A careful reading of the text boxes, which begin with “I am
called Anonymous,” reveals yet another spoiler: Anonymous is bringing these
“major threat[s] to Sonic” forward so he can pick them off himself. Too bad he doesn’t tell Sonic this, or our
hero could have taken the month off. But
as it is, he and the rest of the gang prepare to go 9-against-1 with MM. Armed with not much besides Connery’s overblown dialogue (“You will rue the day you
slew the noblest beings to grace Mobius,” referring
to the late Ancient Walkers; if they were so noble, why didn’t they put in more
of an appearance in the book?), they get ZORTCHed by
MM, who relieves Elias of the Crown.
As Anonymous can’t seem to figure out where the OFF switch is on
the Expositionometer, Eggman
demands that A.D.A.M. let him back into the egg grape chamber. He and M then come face to face with Naugus. Not only
does M’s heat vision NOT work on Naugie, but he ices
over M before telling Eggman he’s going to look for
the Crown, aka “the mate to the Sword.” Then he disappears as M sets herself on
“Defrost.”
But Naugus apparently thinks the Suh-wooooord and a troop of ninja spiders isn’t enough to
get the job done, so he busts the Hapless Half-Dozen out of jail, cutting Nack off in mid-gloat then FWASHing
over to Knothole where he finds MM wearing the Crown. After Naugus and
Mogul both say “Gimme!” they throw huge chunks of
clunky dialogue at each other. Quoth Sonic: “For your sakes, guys, I hope you can fight as
much as you can talk,” which really should have read “…fight as WELL as you can
talk.” Personally, I would have loved to
have Sonic tell his homies: “Maybe we’ll get lucky
and they’ll talk each other to death!”
Cut back to Nack, who is now
irrelevant to the plot. He manages to squeeze himself through the
bars, then delivers today’s Moment of Zen: “I think I’ll hit the kitchen on my
way out and leave my former gang buddies a little ‘gift.’” I sincerely hope that line gets explained
next issue.
And then we cut to the obligatory fight splash page. “Sweet, sweet, discord and strife,” Anonymous
observes.
Chess Master A then decides to take M out of play by having
A.D.A.M. frame her. Instead of sending
her to her room without supper, Eggman orders M to
self-destruct, then tells A.D.A.M. to delete her files and cancel her magazine
subscriptions. “I don’t want her coming
back.” That makes two of us. He also mentions in passing that he doesn’t
want any more henchmen (despite his having recruited Snively
in last month’s “Ties That Bind”) and that Hunter bought the farm back in the
Return To Angel Island arc. While M’s remains are disintegrated, Eggman realizes that Mogul and Naugus
are getting all the action and he needs to throw in some more chips to stay in
the game so he comes up with “a delightful contingency plan.”
Anonymous, meanwhile, still has his feet up and opens a brew
while watching Naugus and Mogul go
ugly head to ugly head. Merlin,
realizing that he’s been reduced to the role of a vulture waiting for something
to die, tells Connery that they need to get the Suh-wooooord;
Connery says “I got your back.”
BTW, was anyone else creeped out by
the Batman frozen pop advertised on the facing page? What’s that gotta
look like when it starts melting?
Somehow or other (Mogul’s hairy butt is in the way so we can’t
see what’s going on), Naugus drops the Suh-wooooord.
Connery tries whomping on Mogul while Merlin
goes for the magical pig-sticker but they’re both tossed aside for their trouble,
only to be retrieved by Knuckles and Sonic (don’t ask me how they got in
mid-air like that).
Naugus then suffers a fate worse than
death: being on the receiving end of more exposition from Mammoth Mogul. Seems that after ol’
Fuzzbutt got over his “ignorant control of my power”
(which I think was more a matter of Kent Taylor’s bad writing in “Don’t Let The Island Hit You On The Way Down”), he mentions
getting further hammered by “the Knights of Aurora,” which is the first I heard
of them. This means something to Naugus if not anyone else:
“Then it’s true! Your
power, your knowledge, it must mean…!”
“Yes, Luke, I am your father!”
Sorry, I couldn’t resist.
What it means is that Ixis, a name which came
out of nowhere when Naugus found his way into the
comic, appears to be a title for members of the “Ancient Order of Ixis.” You’d think
they’d order a better name after all this time, but never mind. Naugus then
willingly hands the Suh-wooooord over to Mogul as all
the bad guys are now on the same splash page.
Quoth Anonymous: “Phase
two: complete!” That, I think, is his
way of saying “Now I’ve got them right where I want them!” Didn’t Custer say that at the Little Big
Horn?
HEAD: Still more set-up than anything else with only one on-page
casualty and one off-page: M and Hunter, respectively. The herd hasn’t been thinned by all that
much, but at least Ian is going for the weakest members by eliminating the
knock-offs.
M, as introduced by Karl Bollers
in the Home story arc (S130-134), was a direct quotation from the Terminator
franchise, specifically T3. Because the
character owed so much to the film series, she/it looked particularly adrift in
this comic. Her appearances in stories
illustrated by Ron Lim at least gave Ron the chance to play to his strength and
draw a humanoid rather than a furry. And
being a droid, she never really developed a personality. No big loss.
Same
with Hunter, who was a different kind of knock-off. He was obviously patterned by Ken Penders on Sergei Kravinoff, aka Kraven the Hunter from the Spiderman series. Created back in 1964 when big game hunting
wasn’t yet politically incorrect, Kraven himself was
a knock-off, inspired by Richard Connell’s 1924 short story, “The Most
Dangerous Game.” Kraven
decided that hunting his own species is the most sublime expression of the
sport, and that hunting down Spiderman would make it even moreso. Kraven spent the
next 23 years pursuing the wall-crawler, finally catching him in 1987. Having achieved his objective, Kraven then killed himself.
Some people just don’t know how to handle success.
So we’re out two knock-offs and three alleged deities, all of
them very weak characters. The question
is: if comic books, like nature, abhor a vacuum, what will take their place?
If you read ahead to the “Sonic Riders” back story, you’ll be
introduced to the Babylon Rogues, three new characters who may not have much
going for them in the way of personality but at least they’re Sega
creations. Sega’s had a checkered
history of character introduction. Some
characters have extremely strong and well-defined characters and have been
instant hits with the fans (Rouge, Shadow).
Some have decidedly less definition and never really got much of a fan
base aside from a vocal minority (Nack, Big). Some started out with hope but promptly faded
into obscurity (NiGHTS). And others got to be more annoying the more
their characters were defined (Cream).
Frankly, I don’t expect much from the Rogues, about whom more
below. Jet, Storm and Wave come off as
the Brain, the Brawn, and the Babe, respectively. They’re archetypes, Central Casting villains,
which means that maybe one day they too will face being written out of the
comic by another writer.
I’ve maintained all along that if you understand the characters
of the story, if you can see and feel the world as they do, then your story’s
half-written. If not, the audience will
eventually come to see that they’re dead behind the eyes, cardboard cutouts
going through the motions. Like “Crisis
on Infinite Earths,” during which a number of useless DC characters were killed
off only to make room for other useless characters, “The Darkest Storm” could
possibly fail in its objective to leave behind a core of strongly-defined
characters, sympathetic or not, around whom to spin stories. I sincerely hope this won’t happen, and since
this installment is all about story development, it’s too soon to say. At this point we can only hope. Head Score: 7.
EYE: There’s nothing to find fault with in Jim Fry’s
artwork. He makes the most of the fight
scenes and splash pages, and lends a certain grim humor to M’s remains getting
swept up by a robo-janitor. Eye Score: 9.
HEART: Again, nobody the readers CARE about is facing certain
doom at this point. Two of the villains have
managed to join forces but their subordinates are as inept as ever. So it all comes down to “Wait ‘til next
month” once again. Heart Score: n/a
“Sonic Riders: Part 1”
Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Tracy Yardley; Ink: Jim Amash; Color: John and Aimee Ray; Lettering: Teresa
Davidson.
There are two things you shouldn’t do while operating an air
board: talk on a cell phone, and taunt the robots who are chasing you. Jet, a green hawk, learns this the hard way
while trying to abscond with one of Eggman’s spare
parts. After a page of exposition, Eggy makes him the proverbial offer he can’t refuse: “You
work for me and rough up Sonic, and I won’t kill you.” So Jet, Wave the Swallow (originally a
sparrow but that got lost in translation) and Storm the Albatross hassle Sonic
for 3 pages before introducing themselves.
That’s Part 1.
HEAD: This is all setup, so nothing much happens. And this is also a tie-in story to Sega’s
latest Sonic offering: a race game.
There IS a back story involving the Rogues, who are supposed to
be a band of thieves from another floating island called
The
Wikipedia article hints at some of the personality of
the characters and mentions possible future developments, such as a rivalry
between Wave and Rouge. I suppose it
wouldn’t be fair to give too many spoilers at this point, and you can read the
article on the Rogues yourself, but there appears to be enough for Ian to work
with should the occasion arise to bring these birds back into the
continuity. For the moment, though, the
story is only half-finished. Head Score:
5.
EYE: Tracy Yardley’s got a great eye for posing the members of
the Babylon Rogues; I have to wonder whether the game developers had the same
liberty. Eye Score: 9.
HEART: As mentioned earlier, we get something of the
personalities of the Rogues in this piece, but just enough to service the
story. Why they’re called “Babylon
Rogues,” for instance, is left unexplained in the article. I suppose the game developers went with a
Middle Eastern motif after having gone Mesoamerican in Sonic Adventure. I’ll leave it to you to divine the
significance of the fact that what was once
Aside from wondering whether Sonic can survive being dog-piled
by three birds on boards (or whether, as in the game, Tails and Knuckles will
show up to even the score), there’s no real emotionally compelling element in
this story. This is in keeping with
Ian’s “action-and-more-action” philosophy.
Of course, there are opportunities to bring emotional elements into a
race story; this was as true for the 1966 anime series “Mach Go Go Go” (better known on this side
of the Pacific as “Speed Racer”) as it is for recent entries such as IGPX
(“Immortal Grand Prix”). The two elements
have never been mutually exclusive but you’d never know it to hear some comic
book writers talk. Heart Score: 5.