Sonic #19 [Comic date: Feb 1995; Review date: Jan 2002] Manak/D'Agostino cover: We get about a dozen variations on the Sonic theme aside from the real deal, including a Terminator- type Sonic who'll figure prominently in the story inside, a pirate Sonic, a Sonic With No Name who appears to have walked out of a spaghetti-and-chili-dog Western, an astronaut Sonic, an Aussie Sonic with boomerang, and Sonic as Paul McCartney. Well, he IS holding that guitar as if he was left-handed! "Night of 1,000 Sonics" Story: Mike Kanterovich and Ken Penders; Art: Dave Manak and Art Mawhinney; Ink: Rich Koslowski; Color: Barry Grossman; Lettering: Mindy Eisman; Editor: Scott Fulop; Managing Editor: Victor Gorelick; Editor-in-Chief: Richard Goldwater. Also "Special thanks to Stephen Penders" The Knothole gang confront a time portal through which emerges the cyborg version of Sonic a la the Terminator movies. Unlike the T-600 from the first film, the right side of this Sonic's head is peeled away to expose the chrome dome beneath, and his right hand and foot are similarly exposed. Sally wonders about this so Sonic brings her up to speed by summarizing the events in S11's "The Good, The Bad, and the Hedgehog" where Sonic met Antisonic. Not wanting to get left out of the exposition explosion, the T-Sonic goes into "explanation mode" himself: "My universe is a dark and terrible place," according to T- Sonic, where Robotnik finally managed to transform the resident Freedom Fighters into cyborgs. Big mistake. Huge! The T- Freedom Fighters, or at least the T-versions of Sonic, Sally and Rotor, managed to penetrate Robotnik's defenses, forcing him to switch to Plan B: he roboticized himself. With what is now known as Robo-Robotnik getting the better of the T-Freedom Fighters, T- Sonic heads out onto the Cosmic Interstate (Remember the "Cosmic Interstate"?) to round up some help. Sonic Prime (I'm going to have to call him that to keep the players straight in this story) is up for it. We then get a two-page spread that's a nightmare in its own right as way too many Sonic variations crowd onto the page. You know we're still in comic book territory since Wolverine and Hulk versions of Sonic are features most prominently. To put it bluntly, we've got the makings of some really bad crossover fanfics here, though the Robin Hood Sonic would eventually be resurrected in the person of Rob-O-The-Hedge in "Fair Rogues and Foul Villains" (S59) and the Batman Sonic would make a guest appearance in S38's "Bedtime Tails". I do think Samurai Sonic could be part of a believable fanfic if the entire Sonic continuity were set in the Edo Period of Japan. It reminds me of a fanfic my twin brother wrote, putting the Sailor Moon characters in the same period. Maybe the Musketeer Sonic would work as well, though it reminds me of an idea I once had to adapt "The Scarlet Pimpernel" to the Sonic continuity, only with Sally in the title role. But I digress. Sonic Prime lays out the problem: one of the villains of one of the continuities has won. Before he gets much further, we get another space-time portal, heralding the arrival of the Robo- Robotnik Giant Floating Head. Robo, a black-and-gun-metal-blue version of Robotnik Prime, has brought some similarly-colored Shabowbots as back-up. This is not a good thing, and Robotnik Prime doesn't think much of it, either. He dispatches some SWATbots to confront the intruders while we confront blatant evidence that at this point in its history Archie Comics had no expectation that they were reaching anyone other than pre-adolescents. Instead of depicting the confrontation between Shadowbots and SWATbots, we get a panel of bot body parts which we're supposed to cut out using "safety scissors." This not only ruins the value of the comic from a collector's point of view, it would also have meant mutilating a page with a key plot development: after the SWATbots triumph over the Shadowbots, Robotnik Prime puts in an appearance and tells Robo to get lost. Recognizing a common foe when they see one, Robotnik Prime suggests pooling their resources. The Hulk Sonic doesn't see the point, since he thinks he's strong enough to take care of business himself. Four smaller Sonics demonstrate otherwise. Robotnik Prime interrupts this seeming comedic interlude with the plan. Robotnik Prime believes that Robo-Robotnik's next step will be to retrieve The Giant's Hand, "an alien weapon of great power," which appears to be located somewhere off the Cosmic Interstate. He sends a bunch of Sonics after it while Robo-Robotnik plays his ace in the hole: the Antisonic. With a switch to Art Mawhinney for artwork, the Sonic group arrives near where the Hand is supposed to be located, "a colorless void" that must've saved Barry Grossman some work. It all affords Archie Comics yet another chance to invite the readers to "break out your crayons and markers" and lower the collector's value of the issue even more. According to Ken Penders's editorial in Sonic #100, nobody back then expected that Sonic would last very long. No kidding! No sooner do they locate the Hand than the Antisonic, with some Shadowbots as backup, snatches it. The Sonic Pack fights back; at this point, a Police Sonic and a Sgt. Rock Sonic appear in the same panel as the Antisonic, and I couldn't help but think that all we need now are Cowboy Sonic, Indian Sonic, and Hardhat Sonic and we've got the Sonic Village People. But quicker than you can sing "YMCA," Robo-Robotnik teleports the Hand out of there and into his HQ. So what's it do? Seems that it morphs into a mecha called Giant Borg. Back in Knothole, the Sonics are pretty bummed out for losing the glove and knowing that the Giant Borg mecha is on the march. Leave it to Sally to remind them of the comedy interlude 9 pages back and to suggest a solution to their problem. Inspired and united, the Sonics confront the Giant Borg. Robo- Robotnik shakes up the group pretty good, but when he gets ready to stomp the Sonic crowd like grapes, we get a two-page splash of everybody spin-dashing into him while he's off-balance. Not content to leave well enough alone, and STILL insisting that this is basically a kiddie book, we get a "Can you find these items?" puzzle cluttering up what's supposed to be the climax of the story. The Giant Bork promptly falls to pieces. As for Robo- Robotnik, T-Sonic collects his head and takes it back to his own continuity. Any thought Robotnik Prime had of reassembling the Giant Borg is cut short when he realizes he's hopelessly outnumbered by Sonic variations, each one of whom takes a piece of the Giant Borg home with them. Since the mecha was made from what had been the Giant's Hand, I was reminded of a line from the conclusion of "Fast Times at Ridgemont High": "Aloha, Mister Hand." HEAD: If there was any advantage to this comic being treated like a kiddie book back then, it's that you could write a satisfyingly simple story line. In this case, Kanterovich and Penders have taken the notion of the Cosmic Interstate and made it work, if a little too easily. At least there was no Zonic the Zone Cop taking credit for these excursions and basically gumming up the whole idea. That would be Dan Slott's contribution to things in his "Zone Wars" stories in Specials #8 and #12. There isn't really that much to fault here. The plot moves well and the principle characters are well-presented. That includes Robotnik Prime, who takes umbrage at having to battle an alternate version of himself and who still has the chutzpah to entertain the notion of battling the various Sonics once Robo- Robotnik had been defeated. Perhaps the weakest parts of the story were the Random Acts of Management committed in the belief that the audience for the comic still consisted of 8-to-12-year-old boys. Maybe it did at one point, but that's certainly not true any more. The next hurdle is getting management to think that the comic shouldn't be content to recycle teen adventure comics of the X-Men variety. Head Score: 9. EYE: The art is a little schizo, as it usually is when switching between Dave Manak and Art Mawhinney. It's especially evident on page 9 panel 4 where it appears that Mawhinney redrew Sally in an otherwise Manak panel. Of course, this was still in the Age of Primary Coloring thanks to Barry Grossman; things have come a long way since then thanks to Frank Gagliadro and the team of Ray & Ray. Still, the layouts are clear and clean and the characters are on-model. Eye Score: 9. HEART: It's hard to get an emotional handle on this story. The situation on the world of the T-Sonic exists merely as background for the main story, but it had the potential to stand on its own. Reminds me of a story I thought up involving the T- characters in the Mobius of the Prime characters; I got the idea from listening to a live version of "Life During Wartime" by the Talking Heads. There's a core of something real here, as there is with most successful Kanterovich-Penders stories, but this wasn't the time or place to make something of it. As far as Archie Comics was concerned, this was a party, though not a disco, and they're just foolin' around. Heart Score: 7. Sonic-Grams: Scott Fulop leads his Editorial with the greeting "Howdy doody!" From this inauspicious opening he goes on to break the news about the Princess Sally miniseries, without hinting at the storm to come regarding the series and its having to be redone. Letters: Erica Torre asks, rather sensibly, if Sally is a tree squirrel or a ground squirrel; Scott replies that she must be a ground squirrel since she spends so much tie on the ground. Laura Smith identifies herself as a 14-year-old, which puts her outside the target demographic in terms of age and gender. So now we have an idea of when Sonic started acquiring its broad-based audience, and how long Archie management had been unable to read the writing on the wall.