Sonic The Hedgehog #210 (May 2010) Yardley!/Jensen cover: The folks that our heroes left behind are literally in the spotlight on this cover, represented by Antoine, Amy Rose, and Geoffrey. Good composition but it looks like Amy's been taking Creepy Face-Making lessons from Rosy back on Moebius. "Home Invasion: Part 1: Breaking and Entering" Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Stephen Butler; Ink: Terry Austin; Color: Matt Herms; Lettering: John E. Workman; Assistant Editor: Paul Kaminski; Editor: Mike Pellerito; Editor-in-Chief: Victor Gorelick; Sega Licensing reps: Cindy Chau and Jerry Chu With one page left over in the budget, Ian and Tracy Yardley! collaborate on an opening page that makes me think it should have been done with receding text while music plays in the background as in the Star Wars franchise. But enough of the text, let's get to the action, or try to, anyway. Amy Rose and Antoine come under fire from the FVW 9000s with which the Legionnaires are armed. The FVW [Fantasy Violence Weapon] now appears to be shooting either projectiles or very short bursts of energy. Both Amy Rose and Antoine realize that their only defense against this weaponry (apart from the CCA) is to keep up a steady stream of exposition. It's not enough, though, to keep from getting surrounded by Legionnaires and ninja bats. This calls for a dramatic rescue courtesy of... Re-enter Geoffrey St. John, looking somewhat ridiculous in his Plastic Army Man Green suit of some kind of other. His contribution is a number of crossbow bolts and a FWASH grenade to blind the enemy troops. The trio then beats feet to the "secret underground bunker." Once inside, they hook up with Bunnie, who has to lay low lest she gets whip-sawed again by the Iron Queen's technomagic. Geoff loses it for a moment when Nicole shows up in her Iron persona, but a quick dose of exposition settles him back down. However, Nicole brings news that not only are the Mobians being herded into the coliseum where this story arc started, but that that's where they'll be turned into cyborgs and dispatched to Dark Legion units across the planet. So of course Amy Rose is up for heading to the coliseum, with Antoine and Geoff in tow. Snively, meanwhile, is in for a nasty surprise as he arrives in detention for another helping of gloat and finds that Eggman's mind has finished rebooting. Of course that doesn't mean he's not still crazy; we're subjected to something like a page of him rambling on about how Sonic the Hedgehog represents "the embodiment of chaos!" and that's why he can't beat him. Uh, no, Doc, you can't beat him because you're the villain in a comic book and he's the hero. Snively, however, is not about to spring his uncle from jail and go back to the way things were, having gotten a taste of his own fantasy life thanks to Regina. This is where Dr. Robotnik morphs into Dr. Phil and gives Snively a reality body-check when it comes to the manipulative Iron Queen and the Snivler's inability to form any lasting relationships. Snively stalks out like an angry teenager (my apologies to any angry teenagers who might be reading this) while the big fella LOLs his head off. At the coliseum, Queenie tells Junk that the show is also part of a trap to get whoever has been leading the local resistance, which has been working a little too effectively for her liking. And our first contestant, being sprung from an old school side-scrolling Sonic game detention unit, is Councilor Rotor. He puts up a fight, but his own bad back takes him down (man, I can SO relate!). Anyway, this is the cue for the threesome to make their entrance. Their entrance is dramatic enough, but Geoff is easily clobbered by Junk whose subsequent shot at him is blocked by Amy Rose. The escape of the prisoners is interrupted, however, by a dose of technomagic from the Queen accompanied by a half-page of her own exposition. As soon as her boasting reaches a crescendo, however, the dome over the city busts and Sonic, Tails, Sally and Khan come back. Places for the final number. HEAD: For a story with a fair amount of action, the incessant and relentless exposition overwhelms it completely. Sure, you have Ant and Amy Rose under fire from the get-go, but it just doesn't feel like they're ever in danger. Because comic books differ from real life in one very important way: NOBODY ever interrupts someone in the middle of an expository speech, not even to try and kill them. This story has SO MUCH exposition I'm surprised that the story gets any face time at all. Amy spends most her time in this story as the primary exposition machine, with the Iron Queen and Snively taking second and third place; Bunnie's two major word balloons, the majority of her dialogue, get an Honorable Mention. Despite all the hammering and shooting, the story feels like it grinds to a halt by the end of the second page, and never really gets back up to speed. This early into the story, Amy needed to do less yammering and more hammering. And it could have been cured rather easily. Instead of making a concession to however many noobs have found their way into the story at this point, the first two pages could have been given over to Amy Rose and Antoine actually DOING some of that "rebel striking" the Queen alludes to in one of her own interminable word balloons. Comics, as I've said before, are a medium where showing counts for at least as much as telling. Then again, perhaps Editorial figured that showing the good guys acting like terrorists might be a little too far out of line, even in the name of resistance to tyranny. And in a class by himself in the exposition department is Eggman. His reassertion of himself should have been way more effective than it was, and Heaven knows Steven Butler gave it his best shot in the panel where Snively glimpses his uncle, but the whole "Sonic is the embodiment of chaos" digression just didn't help the story at all. The only thing Eggman brought to this party was his reality check to Snively, telling him he's got no shot with the Iron Queen. Ouch, man! The Queen's explanation of the trap potential of this "spectacle" should have been enough for her, but no, she HAS to do a half-page recap on her technomage powers on the next-to-last page, putting a hitch in the story pacing as it rounds the final turn. Apparently it wasn't good enough to just simply SHOW her flexing her powers; she had to come down with whatever logorrhea bug is going around. Mind you, I LIKED the idea of the very public "Legionizing" of the Mobians and the way it also becomes the set-up for the (PLEASE let it be the final) confrontation between Sonic's crew and the baddies. If it works out that way, it'll have had several precedents. In "Gladiator," the very public spectacle which Commodus intended to be his triumph becomes his downfall instead at the hands of Maximus. Same thing with the tournament at the end of "Knight's Tale," and even the moment in "A Bug's Life" where Hopper has his Did I Just Say That Out Loud? Moment, declaiming that the ants hopelessly outnumber him and his gang but have been too intimidated to realize it. This story added precious little to the arc; mostly, it was the vehicle that got us closer to the climax. Head Score: 6. EYE: OK, I have NO idea who came up with the suit Geoff is wearing, but it just doesn't make sense. It looks like a flight suit designed by committee. Here's hoping that it isn't in any way high-tech or else the Iron Queen will peel him like a banana. For laughs. In the New York Times review of the film "How To Train Your Dragon," there appeared the following: "The last two Pixar movies in particular Wall-E' and Up' have re-established the importance of silence in animated entertainment. Because the medium allows such freedom to create expressive images, it often renders words superfluous." The same is true of comic books; too bad the Sonic comics creatives don't take it to heart as much as they could. After a brief flirtation with the potential of silence in S203's "Friend In Deed: Part 1," the wall of words has again become a regular feature of this comic. So Butler's artwork doesn't really get a chance to shine here the way it could have. The battlefield banter of Amy Rose in particular at the beginning of the story was annoyingly unnecessary, or unnecessarily annoying, either way. And down in the bunker, the mention of prisoners being "legionized" gets an extremely pedestrian reaction shot in the bottom panel of the page. Butler knows his way around visual effects, such as the light-from-heaven staging of Sonic and crew returning through the New Mobotropolis dome, but much of the artwork here just doesn't stand up off the page. Maybe it's a deadline thing, I don't know. Eye Score: 7. HEART: This ep should have been a natural in the Heart category: plucky Mobians back in Freedom Fighter mode, taking on the ninja bats and Legionnaire forces of the Irons, someone the readers can root for. Instead, they have the readers saying "Shut UP, already!" Sure, Amy goes hammer-to-hammer with Junk toward the end, but that's sandwiched between Geoff's previous page of running off at the mouth and the Queen's recap on her being a technomage. I don't know how helpful ANY of this is to the noobs, but to those of us who've been following the story since S200, it's just deadly. And it could have been fixed so easily. Here, Geoff again is the weak link that needs serious reforging. Let's go back to 5 pages before the end. Geoff spends most of them running off at the mouth, which is mostly turned up in a smirk. The only thing capable of wiping that expression off his face is Junk, and he proceeds to do just that rather handily. The overall impression of the page is that Geoff is being a self- centered windy bore (his line "I don't know which I'll run out of first bolts or quips" defines his character quite neatly; you know that he's basically a one-dimensional jerk). This isn't too far from his roots in the work of Ken Penders as a James Bond- inspired agent. Sure, a writer can get mileage out of that combination in the Action And More Action category, but the Heart potential is so low it barely registers. Yet all that could have changed with one simple switch on the preceding page: suppose that one of the Mobians released from the containment unit by Antoine (I can just hear him saying "I have always been wanting to trying this!" as he CLACKS it open) was Hershey. You remember Hershey? I hope SOMEONE does. Geoff DID sorta kinda marry her in S130's "Home: Part 1: The Blue Blur Returns" but by the time Geoff showed up in the awful two-parter in S187- 188 Rouge was acting as his piece of arm candy. The story was such an embarrassment, coming on the heels of the far superior "Mogul Rising" arc (S185-186), that Geoff dropped out of sight until now. When I saw him and Rouge I couldn't help but think "Maybe Hershey's home with the kid or something." Well, why not? Just as Knuckles's line "I want my father back!" momentarily lifted "Echoes of the Past: Part 4" (SU12) out of the realm of the positively dreary, so the appearance of Hershey might have given Geoff a REAL reason to be in this story and given the readers a reason to root for the big butthead. His mission wouldn't change, and with his wife endangered, he's got way more motivation than he has here on this page ("Smirk, look heroic, reel off clever dialogue; repeat"). If she's got their kid in her arms, bump the Heart score up by a factor of 10 at the very least. But no chance. The story is so laden with exposition and so bogged down with movement disguised as action that Heart becomes an early casualty. Again, maybe it was a deadline thing, but as I said above the Heart factor in this installment barely shows any signs of life. Heart Score: 3. Fan Funnies: Mira gives us a four-frame gag that makes up in slapstick humor what it lacks in artistry. I understand that a lot of comic book writers can't draw much better than this. Fan Art: Madison is a SonAmy shipper, while Dylan does a bravura rendering of Junk. Off-Panel: the joke is weak, but still in keeping with Bean's shall we say "surrealistic" outlook. Sonic-Grams: Rebecca asks about Amy's parents, and Editorial rushes in where Sega has feared to tread. Long answer short: her rents are alive but their whereabouts are unknown. She also asks why Jules is still roboticized, and Editorial flogs the potential of a SalKhan pairing, something that hasn't really happened in the comic itself. The only other letter is from Sophia, who's a SonSally, Shadouge and Silaze shipper. She also asks about Khan's origins, gets a non-answer as to Amy's life in Mobius 30 Years Later, and asks whether Silver can go super. Two interesting comments by Editorial here. In response to her declaration of favoring SonSally, Editorial makes this lame statement: "I sure wish some resourceful fan would come up with a sweet-looking Team Sonic/Sally' logo design and submit it to Sonic Grams...." If Editorial wasn't constrained by professional ethics from searching the Net, they could find plenty of SonSally artwork out there. But it looks like they'll have to get buried by the entries again. The second item is when Editorial makes an off-hand reference to the "Sonic Who's Who Encyclopedia." Again, there's plenty of information available about the characters not only at Wikipedia, but the Sonic News Network's Sonic-based wiki at sonic.wikia.com. One wonders when Editorial will get a clue.