Sonic the Hedgehog #181 (December 2007) Yardley!/Hunzeker cover: Enerjak 2.0 unmasked. If you can't tell who it is from the telltale red tail and dreads, shame on you! Nice drawing, still. "Enerjak : Reborn : Chapter 1 : Rising Evil" (Think they could've worked one more colon into that title?) 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: the late Richard Goldwater; SEGA reps: the late Robert Leffler, Dyna Lopez and Cindy Chau Sonic and Tails are off to Angel Island, with Nicole monitoring them from Mobius, while Sally and Julie-Su watch the pictures being sent back from a probe. The first signals come in from the dingo city of "Cavem Canus." OK, if Ian was going for the classic "Beware of Dog" warning (and I do mean classic, since it showed up on an ancient Roman mosaic in Pompeii) he's way off. The true Latin is "Cave Canem," with "cave" (two syllables and with the v pronounced as a w) being the imperative form of the verb "cavea" and "canem" being the objective form of the noun for dog, "canis." "Cavem Canus" is ... well, it's pretty bad Latin, that's for sure. He could have gone with "Cavus Canis" which would roughly be translated as "Dog Hollow," but it still reminds me of the graffiti scene from "Monty Python's Life of Brian." Anyway, Enerjak 2.0 not only disarms the dingo troops present but disrobes them as well, shredding their uniforms. This IS an Archie comic, however, so there are no dingo naughty bits on display. Realizing there's no fun in that, E2 transports the lot of them to the desert, last seen in the Forgotten Tribe arc in the Knuckles comic. We then get half a page of Stryker impotently raving out at E2 before Uncle Jak gets as bored by this as the readers. Taking a page from Knuckles #8, he disintegrates Stryker and the dingo city, whatever its name was. Sonic and Tails, in a page that thanks to Tracy Yardley! is a visual homage to a lot of the old school Sonic platform games (Sonic 3, mainly), get an update from Nicole and head off toward an ominous-looking column of smoke. It appears to be coming from the Dark Legion, which is having as much effect on E2 as those toy tanks had against Godzilla or any other kaiju (Japanese movie monster). Jakko then states that he's putting one of the Legion bosses into rehab, which being Enerjak he can accomplish in a FWASH. Having restored The Echidna Formerly Known As Remington, he then does an encore by stripping every other echidna in the legions of their Borg- like enhancements, something that doesn't exactly thrill Lien- Da. Back at HQ, Floating Head Dimitri wants Nicole to turn the heat up on Angel Island, something Nicole is reluctant to do with Sonic and Tails on the ground. Julie-Su has an expository rant and Dimitri wonders whether it's too late to switch sides. Sally, meanwhile, gets on the horn to G.U.N. but she and Rouge have only two panels' worth of chit-chat before they're cut off. Meanwhile in the Chaos Chamber, Sonic and Tails can't find anybody, even though Dr. Fin is skulking around the place a couple yards away from them. That means either he can make himself invisible or else Sonic and Tails are not what you'd call observant. Meanwhile, Knuckles's mom, stepfather and baby half-sib cringe in terror at the specter of... A COMIC BOOK BASED ON SNACK FOOD!!!! Yes, the story stops dead in its tracks so America's already- obese children can read a comic where the central characters are a particular brand of snack cracker. And I thought the premise of "Sushi Pack" was lame! Turns out that Enerjak 2.0 has appeared to the echidnas and is sweet-talking them into letting him teleport them all to Albion ... like they have any choice in the matter. The Jakmeister then figures he doesn't want what he's doing to find its way onto YouTube so he shuts down the probe from Mobius which gives Nicole a roaring headache. Jakenstein then teleports out of there before Sonic can spin-dash into him, and Sonic and Tails are recalled to Mobius. Back in town, Sally is deploying the Chaotix and the Freedom Fighters, including Antoine and Bunnie who've interrupted their honeymoon to appear in one lousy panel. For her part, Julie-Su fears the worst has happened to Knuckles; guess she didn't read the script all the way through. The Jakster peels away the protective covering from the city (the one which Eggman couldn't even dent, remember?), and after disarming Julie-Su who's ready to blow his brains out he does the big deal reveal. Yeah it's Knuckles. HEAD: A number of posters at the Knothole Village Forum have commented that the plot of this story is tracking with Ian Flynn's "Other-M" fan comic. I suppose I should read it, if only for the sake of Sonic scholarship, but I barely have time to write the reviews these days. But that question aside, this story is notable for being Old School Sonic Comic Book Writing in the Ken Penders tradition. This story in its own way covers the same territory as S101's "Reboot." That's where Knuckles was in his Green Period and he'd just struck a deal with Dimitri in the previous issue's "Welcome To The Dark Side." Once again, Knuckles is somebody else's cat's paw only this time it's Dr. Fin, about whom we'll learn more next month. This is also a throwback in the sense that the story is, in spots, kind of stupid. Sonic and Tails race to Angel Island, connect with nobody, just miss attacking Enerjak 2.0, can't seem to notice Dr. Fin loitering around the Master Emerald, then have to schlep back to Mobius. That's a total waste of fuel IMO; maybe oil on Mobius is still well below $100/barrel. You also have a number of players bursting into exposition at a moment's notice: Nicole, Dr. Fin, Dimitri, Julie-Su. I know that a lot of this is for the benefit of the noobs, but it's still a major hitch in the story's rhythm. That said, Ian does keep the story moving along at a fairly good clip even though it's heading into the wind exposition-wise. The pacing is the equal of Ken Penders and the dialogue is vastly superior, but it still smells like old wine in new wineskins. Head Score: 7. EYE: Yardley! has definitely made himself comfortable with Art Mawhinney's Enerjak model, and delivers some memorable moments of his own: the old school platform Sonic and Tails on page [5], Dimitri and Nicole going almost nose- to-nose on page [8], the understated Julie-Su drawings on page [15] and the Knuckles splash at the end. Eye Score : 9. HEART: Just about the only Heart moment would have to be decoded for the pre-ado boy demographic to which this comic is supposed to be pitched. Julie-Su's preoccupation with re- establishing contact with Knuckles has to do with the fact that she fears the one she loves is dead. Again, this is something the noobs may not pick up on right away, and it's not helped by Ian's failure to use the L- and D-words in her dialogue. This, however, I take to be par for the course when writing for Archie Comics. Heart Score: 6. "Undone" Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Steven Butler; Ink: Jim Amash; Color: John Ray (in the employ of Stingray G. W.); Lettering: John E. Workman Knux has just done the big reveal but we still have 5 pages left in the comic. It thus falls to Ian Flynn to answer the question "How did Knuckles become Enerjak 2.0?" To do so, he enlists a nearly-forgotten character, Archimedes the fire ant, to provide wall-to-wall exposition. Hang on: The Knux development takes a toll on Archy's self-esteem, as his track record of doing for Guardian Echidnas what Jiminy Cricket did for Pinocchio hasn't exactly been stellar. Long story short: the "Destructix" ganged up on Knuckles when he arrived on Angel Island, needed only one panel to beat the snot out of him, then turned him over to the combined Legions of Fire and Frost. He's then shlepped to the Emerald Chamber, whereupon Dr. Fin starts playing Good Cop and inviting Knuckles to join the Legions against Eggman, whose Egg Grapes killed off most of the echidnas in the continuity. Totally ignoring Fin's blabbering away, Knux makes a grab for the Master Emerald himself, as Fin had planned and as Archy had feared, and he gets all glowy, sort of ... it's hard to tell because this flashback is accompanied by the second-worst coloring job in the history of the comic. Fin wants to mentor Knuckles now that he's once again got all that Chaos energy in his system. Hence Knuckles's mantra about "making things right" and his dressing up as Enerjak, a name I won't be using anymore in these reviews since, hey, that's Knuckles! HEAD: In the previous story, when Knux did the big reveal, every storytelling impulse in me said "THIS is exactly the place to end this issue!" But maybe that's why I'm not a comic book editor, because we plow ahead with an exposition- heavy flashback as to why Knuckles has changed his name and job description. Half of it is set-up exposition, anyway, which this comic really seems to need. The other half is basically Fin and Knuckles, with Lien-Da shooting her mouth off and an as-yet- unhealed Remington pretty much just taking up space. Archy takes up less space but he's just as useless. Head Score: 5. EYE: I had a bad flashback to Sonic's Death Egg Special issue #2 when I read this story. For those of you who never read it, here's some exposition of my own: When part 2 of the 3-part Death Egg special went to press, something went wrong at the printer's up in Canada. For one of the page set-ups the red value of the 4-color press was set to double what it was supposed to be; this is called "oversaturation." Because printing in color has been reduced to working with just 4 colors in various combinations (red, yellow, cyan/blue and black), it threw every other color out of whack and gave some of the pages the appearance of having been printed with a mixture of ink and mud. The release schedule was so tight that the comic had to ship in this condition even though one Archie executive confessed that they "hit the ceiling" when they laid eyes on it. This comic, for whatever reason, has not had very good artistic results when dealing with flashbacks, don't ask me why. Usually, this meant doing the coloring in a pseudo-sepia faded-photograph coloration. If that's what they were going for here, something went seriously wrong. It's not that artists can't get good results from a limited pallet of colors. Comic strip artists, who don't work in color except for Sunday installments, rely on gray scale and can get good results. Others can control their use of a single color scale; Adrian Ramos's acclaimed e-strip, "Count Your Sheep," uses a pallet of slate blues, with black and white, to achieve a winning visual effect (sometimes he'll use a burgundy scale when doing flashbacks in place of the sepia stereotype). So what happened here? It looks like Death Egg #2 all over again. I have to wonder whether Josh Ray isn't so wedded to working in 4 colors that the limitation of doing color for a flashback simply got the better of him. It's not like he had to go for a Frank Miller black-and-white thing, but this just looks ugly, I'm sorry to say. The artwork of Steve Butler, coming back after a lengthy hiatus from this comic, was not well-served at all. Eye: 2. HEART: The essence of Heart is to establish an emotional response in the reader through what's happening to allegedly- beloved characters in the story. Not a whole lot of that going on here. Archimedes is all broken up about what happened to Knuckles, but I doubt that the readers will feel his pain, even the ones who were around long enough to have read the Knuckles comic and who know Archy's back story. At least Knuckles wasn't turned into a night light, AGAIN!! Heart Score: 3.