Sonic the Hedgehog #172 (Apr 2007)
     Pat Spaziante cover: Looks like Spaz hasn't entirely let
go of Sonic.  That's the good news.  The bad news is, we get a
flashback to the era of "magazine covers."
     Back at the beginning of 2003, from issues 118 to 124,
the Sonic comic ran so-called magazine covers: covers with
white backgrounds and a single drawing.  It was usually two
characters: Sonic and Robotnik, Sonic and Tails, Sonic and
Mina ... you get the idea.  There would be text on the left-
hand side teasing the cover story, with other drawing and
teasers running along the bottom.  This describes the layout
of magazine covers, all right; specifically, women's magazines
such as Redbook or Ladies Home Journal.
     This time around, we get a jarring splash of pictures,
primary colors, and screaming headlines: "Amy vs. Fiona!"
"Sonic in Hot Water" "Bunnie & Antoine Back Together But Will
It Last?" "Scourge's Secret Date : The Real Story."  This
isn't a magazine cover; this is a tabloid cover, the sort of
thing you'd find in supermarket check-out lines.  I hope
Archie isn't planning to make a habit of this.

     "Truth of the Heart"
     Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Tracy Yardley!; Ink: Jim Amash;
Color: Jason Jensen; Lettering : John E. Workman; Editor: Mike
Pellerito; Managing Editor: Victor Gorelick; Editor-in-Chief:
Richard Goldwater

     Last time, we left Sonic resolving to confront Fiona but
Amy Rose beats him to it, and almost beats Fiona herself with
her hammer.  Fiona is all "What's this all about?" and Amy is
all "Don't play dumb with me" as she launches into the
exposition; the noobs get an update on the Scourge-Sonic-Fiona
triangle and Fiona delivers such carefully-worded prose she
could be the next White House Press Secretary.  But to show
that Sonic is more than speed he lets it be known that he's
been taking in the last three pages of girl talk (BTW, though
reduced to about a square inch on the comic page, the drawing
of Fiona in the last panel on page 3 is priceless!).  He tells
Amy to do her breathing and goes one-on-one with Fiona.
     Sonic confronts her with reports from Amy and Tails that
she's been two-timing with Scourge.  Unfortunately, Mean Green
shows up and casts aspersions on Sonic's sex appeal ("Any guy
after me is gonna be bland").  But this party's just getting
started because Tails drops in and pleads with Fiona not to go
over to the dark side.  For his trouble, Fiona gives him a
backhand across the chops that would impress Venus Williams. 
Tails is thoroughly cured of the infatuation with Fiona he's
been carrying around since S28's "Growing Pains: Part 1," and
Sonic decides to avenge his little bud which sets up the now-
ritual Sonic slugfest.
     After some verbal sparring along with the running and
dodging, it's actually Fiona who lands the first blow with a
boot to the hedgehog's gut.  But then Amy shows up and the
odds become 3 against 2.  Being on the short side of the
equation, Scourge and Fiona hop a warp ring out of Knothole. 
Tails runs home to Mommy, now that he has a Mommy to run home
to.  You think that would be enough for one story.
     But NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!  
     Antoine shows up on the final page and is brought up to
speed on the Fiona departure.  All of a sudden Antoine the
nebbish is filled with resolve; just WHAT he resolves to do
must wait for S173.

     HEAD: Fiona's ... let's be nice and call it "rejection"
of Tails's affections puts to end one of the longest
unrequited love affairs since that between Charlie Brown and
the Little Red-Haired Girl.  To recap:
     WAY back in S28, Tails storms out of Knothole complaining
about how everyone treats him like a kid.  Using a minisub he
gassed up on the sly, he sails off into a trap laid by
Robotnik and baited with a female fox-droid, Fiona.  After a
one-page romantic interlude, Tails is trapped at the end of
Part 1.  It's a promising beginning by Mike Gallagher which
effectively builds on several stories that have gone before,
but in Part 2 in the following issue everything goes wrong. 
Tails's escape from the roboticizer is ridiculous, as is
Fiona's shorting out when wet (which I think Tails would have
noticed earlier).  The plotting is bad and the dialogue is
worse, but mainly the story exists to set up the Tails
miniseries, "Southern Crossover."
     This should have been the last we'd ever heard of Fiona
Fox, but the strangest thing happened.  The fans, the actual
FANS, took a liking to Fiona as a character and thought she
and Tails should have stayed together and that she should have
been salvaged and reprogrammed.  Maybe it's because the
character of Data from "Star Trek: The Next Generation" got
people used to an android as a protagonist, maybe it's because
the fans liked Tails so much that they wanted to see him
happy, I don't know.  But a pro-Fiona groundswell got under
way.
     Whether to feed the fan reaction or to smother it, Ken
Penders then worked the "real" Fiona into the Mighty back
story in Knuckles #26-28, and she's NOT the kind of girl Tails
would have brought home to Mother.  Then again, if your mother
had read the story arc it would only have reinforced her
notion that "You're wasting your time reading that garbage!" 
It was a train wreck of plotting involving a younger Sonic who
didn't look it, zones within zones, and a Fiona originally in
league with Nack the Weasel.  Or, as I put it in my review of
K28: "OK, just WHAT purpose did she serve in the plot of this
story? Nothing essential, as far as I can see. If Ken was
trying to explain how she came to have a droid double of
herself made by Robotnik, surely there were better ways of
doing it. For the most part she was just along for the ride!" 
But even this unruly mess of a story didn't kill off the pro-
Fiona feeling among the fans.
     Her next appearance was due to simple gimmickry.  For
S125's "Sonic Adventure 2.5 Omega," Karl Bollers got the
bright idea to bring in ABSOLUTELY EVERY CHARACTER who had
ever appeared in the comic.  That included Fiona, who was one
of many on hand to witness Sonic's death cheat.  This led to
her doing what is referred to in professional wrestling as a
"face turn" where she goes from bad to good.  She went along
for the ride in several more stories (the Good/Bad/Unknown arc
and "Sonic's Angels") where her personality was once again
treated so generically by Ken Penders that you had to wonder
if she had any personality at all.
     That, apparently, was the problem facing Ian Flynn when
he inherited her along with the responsibility of writing for
the comic after Ken's dismissal.  His solution it now appears
was simplicity itself: a "heel turn" where she goes from good
back to bad.  And let's face it, nothing says "bad" like
backhanding a lovesick child in the face.  This might not
exactly delight those who still hoped that the Tails-Fiona
pairing would finally get traction, but it represents a
definite improvement in the comic's coherency.
     Looking back on it now, Ken's scripting of the comic had
become progressively more vague and deceptive, and not just
with regard to Fiona.  Did Tails really see Fiona snogging
with Sonic (or Sonic's evil twin), or were they just drawn
that way?  Did Sonic (or Sonic's evil twin) and Bunnie do more
than just sleep together?
     Enough already!  Ken might have thought that he was
nursing the interests of the readers along with these cute
little twists, but what he was doing turned out to be not so
much nursing as euthanasia.  Before loss of patience could
translate into loss of readership, Ian came on board. 
Whatever you think of this change in Fiona's personality, at
least it's clear she finally HAS one!
     And once again, Ian gives us three pages of the
characters fighting among themselves, as Amy and Fiona join in
the Sonic-Scourge scuffle.  Tails takes a swipe at Scourge
that barely counts, but then again he already got clobbered by
Fiona.
     And that's the point of this story: to repurpose Fiona
and to break up the one-sided relationship Tails had with her. 
This probably could have been done just as easily without
bringing Scourge into the story, but such is Ian's style. 
Head Score: 8.
     EYE: Tracy Yardley! does some very impressive character
modeling here, especially of Fiona trying to keep from getting
hammered by Amy Rose.  Tails's facial expressions when
confronting Fiona, however, harken back to the melodramatic
excesses of "Line of Succession: Part 1" (S155).  Eye Score:
9.
     HEART: For a story where Heart and heartbreaking is at
the center of the action, it feels, I don't know, out of
place.  Maybe it's because Ian sets the table with the
catfight between Fiona and Amy Rose, and after Fiona's
backhand to Tails we get another fight scene.  That's all well
and good; Ian promised action and he delivers.  I just wish
he'd left room for something else.
     I'm thinking particularly of Tails's exit from this
story.  Since it took place on the final page Ian had to wrap
things up fairly quickly, so he had Tails slip in some
exposition about checking in with a Boy's Best Friend.  Now
THAT I would have liked to see!
     It's weird, actually; now that Tails has parents, the
first time he could USE one of them we're denied the
opportunity of watching.  If even one additional page had been
at Ian's disposal, I could see Tails leaving Sonic without a
word, heading home in silence, and only then breaking down
when trying to talk to Rosemary about what just happened. 
Because "ain't no pain like from the opposite sex," to quote
Will Smith's "Just The Two of Us."
     Come to think of it, the character of Tails has drifted
all over the road.  Mike Gallagher in the Tails "Southern
Crossover" arc and its immediate precursors seemed to have a
grip on him.  But in the various anime including "Sonic X,"
Tails became some kind of techie, a point Ken Penders picked
up on when he lumped Tails in with the Brain Trust.  And don't
even get me started on how clueless Sega has become; his
dialogue in Sonic Heroes was so childish it might have been
written for Cream!  So maybe Ian can be forgiven for not being
able to zero in on the character of Tails, since nobody else
seems to be able to make up their minds, either.  Still, we
had an serious Heart moment in this story and instead of
really following up on it, it seemed to fall off the page once
the fighting resumed.  Like I said, space limitations may have
dictated that, but here's hoping that Ian doesn't make a habit
of it.  Heart Score: 7.


     "Worth The Effort"
     Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Tania del Rio; Ink: Jim Amash;
Color: Jason Jensen; Lettering: Teresa Davidson

     Morning in Knothole, and Julie-Su shows up to act as
personal trainer for a not-ready-for-morning Amy Rose.  But
she's there in body only and manages to drag herself into the
river as a wake-up call.  They move on to do some Meihuazhuang
(Plum Blossom post) training and Julie-Su does the same land-
on-Amy's-hammer maneuver that Fiona was so adept at in the
previous story.  Amy Rose gives it up that her training is all
about Sonic, comparing their "relationship" (however one-
sided) with that of Knuckles and Julie-Su.  Julie-Su tries to
set the record straight without once invoking the Soultouch
plot point Ken Penders cooked up, but it looks like Amy Rose
isn't listening anyway.

     HEAD: This story can be seen as an antidote to "I Wanna
Be A Freedom Fighter" (S142), wherein Amy Rose gets a medal
for ... well, I was never sure of that.  One of the professors
at the uni where I work had been an Army Reservist and he made
reference once to what are unofficially known in the military
as "Breathing Awards": i.e., there's not a whole lot of skill
required to get one besides breathing and not deserting.
     In THIS story, however, Amy Rose is actually expected to
DO something to earn her keep, and she's not exactly up for
the training regimen.  At the beginning of the story she's not
exactly awake, either, and much of her dialogue is limited to
saying "Uh-huh" about 5 times in a row.
     I've seen the pole business before in kung fu movies and
cartoons, but didn't understand it until now.  The training
with Plum Blossom posts (I have enough trouble saying "Plum
Blossom posts" three times fast!) is to develop "balance,
strength, endurance, speed, accuracy, and awareness ... Plum
Blossom post training begins by placing five posts in the
pattern of a plum flower, though other geometric patterns are
used, with the beginning height starting out at around six
inches and progressing to around nine feet in height for the
advanced training levels, the width of the posts will become
less as a practitioner advances in skill as well."
(Information copied from the forum of martialartsplanet.com) 
If you don't have access to serious lumber, stumps made by
filling coffee cans with cement can be a substitute but are
frowned upon by purists.
     Ian managed to turn the business about Amy Rose's wet
feet (thanks to her pratfall into the river) into something of
a running gag in this story, but there's a reality behind her
complaining about her feet being wet that's no joke.  The
following is an excerpt from Bill Mauldin's "Mud and Guts," a
short book he wrote at about the time of the American
Revolution Bicentennial about America's own freedom fighters:

     "Trenchfoot is the result, simple, of chronically wet,
cold feet.  It starts out as the kind of harmless discomfort
you feel after walking through slush without galoshes.  Back
home you can usually warm your feet and put on dry socks soon
afterward.  But you can't do that if you're a soldier in a
mudhole, with no fresh clothing, no chance to build a fire,
and you are even unable to restore some circulation by moving
and stamping about, for fear of getting a musketball out of
the nearby bushes.  What happens then is that your feet
literally begin to rot.  If it goes on for a few days, which
it often does, gangrene is the result.
     "Trenchfoot is a deadly serious matter for commanders of
troops in static winter conditions.  It decimated American
units in France in 1917-18 and Italy in 1943-44, until it came
to be recognized as a major military threat.... [W]hat
probably saved a lot of our distinguished forefathers [in the
Revolutionary War] from having to march to victory on their
shinbones was the fact that they lacked proper footgear in the
first place and were often forced to wrap rags around their
feet.  This allowed a certain amount of air circulation and,
because cloth doesn't last long when walked upon, necessitated
frequent changes."

     OK, so maybe Amy Rose had a right to whine about her feet
being wet.  But there's not much else going on in this story,
except for Amy Rose contextualizing everything by her
determination to win Sonic's affections.  I'd thought Sega was
going to start downplaying that based on some of her lines in
the first Sonic Adventure game about needing to be more self-
reliant, but they must have figured that they shouldn't change
the Amy Rose formula.  So she's swinging the hammer more but
she's still one love-struck puppy.
     Ian didn't have Julie-Su invoke the Soultouch.  For the
newbies out there, Ken Penders invented the Soultouch as a way
for the emotionally dysfunctional Guardians to fall in love
with someone and have another Guardian to keep the hereditary
line going.  Ken never questioned the plot point since he
introduced it in the course of the Forgotten Tribe arc
(specifically in Knuckles #11).  I get the sense that Ian
isn't really determined to keep that particular plot point
going, thank Aurora.  Still, in spite of the thin material,
Ian is able to cobble together some kind of narrative.  Head
Score: 6.
     EYE: OK, I went back to S151's "Stargazing," which was
Tania del Rio's debut in this comic, and looked at the
artwork.  Then I looked at her artwork here, and found myself
asking Steve McQueen's exit line from the film "The Sand
Pebbles": "WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED?"
     It's almost like the old Sonic art curse has kicked in
again.  When Manny Galan worked in the Sonic comic the results
were flat and awful; only when he transferred to doing
Knuckles comic art did he get traction.  Here, the lyrical
quality of del Rio's "Stargazing" work is gone.  The
characters are on-model but that's about the kindest thing
that can be said about them.  Of the two female leads, Julie-
Su comes off better than Amy Rose, who looks like a caricature
of herself.  And the worst of it is, the appearance of Sonic,
Tails and Knuckles at the very end of the story are spot-on. 
I don't know if she just didn't get a feel for the characters
or what, but it's a serious disappointment.  Eye Score: 4.
     HEART: I shouldn't be surprised that Amy Rose's romantic
notions about her and Sonic (the point of being a better
freedom fighter is "so Sonic will notice me!") sound like
those of a 12-year-old, since after all she IS a 12-year-old.  
Julie-Su doesn't have that excuse.
     She's got quite a back story.  Having been part of the
Dark Legion, she found herself attracted to Knuckles (see the
"Soultouch" discussion above).  But she also had to live with
his Green Period when he became a living Chaos Emerald as well
as dealing with his death cheat.  And that's even before you
factor in some presumed biological "maturity" on her part.
     Yet all that Julie-Su can tell Amy Rose about her
relationship with Knuckles gets squeezed into one rather
unconvincing word balloon: "We do enjoy being sparring equals,
but we also enjoy just hanging out.  And he's the only guy I
can be mushy around and not feel weak."
     Maybe Ian wants to retool the Knuckles/Julie-Su
relationship and feels the need to start from zero, because
that's pretty much how he sums up their relationship here. 
It's a cipher, next to nothing, and the situation is not
helped by Tania del Rio's artwork.  In the pastiche of K/J-S
moments, I honestly couldn't tell in one drawing if Julie-Su
was cracking up at a joke Knuckles made or crying her eyes out
over something insensitive he said.  And the expression on
Knuckles's face is no help.
     This story is supposed to be one of those action/humor 
stories leavened with emotion, the kind you find in the best
manga/anime.  But the emotions here are all wrong: from Amy
Rose we get Disney-style infatuation (they used the term
"twitter-pated" in "Bambi" and that describes Amy Rose
perfectly), while Julie-Su's feelings for Knuckles aren't
communicated well at all.  There's a detachment about her that
leaves her (and the reader) cold, while Amy Rose takes up more
than her fair share of the spotlight.  Like her soggy toes in
those wet boots, the feeling by the end is one of cold
discomfort.  Heart Score: 3.