Sonic the Hedgehog #215 (September 2010) Jamal Peppers-Jim Amash-Jason Jensen cover: I honestly thought this was a Tracy Yardley! cover when I first saw it. Very impressive. Rotor's uniform gets all raggedy from his doing nothing, but he's got the back-up blubber to keep him warm. He's accompanies by Sonic and Silver, aka the Smirk and the Jerk. "Family Matters : Part 1" Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Steven Butler; Ink: Terry Austin; Color: Matt Herms; Lettering: John E. Workman; Co-Editor*: Paul Kaminski; Editor*: Mike Pellerito; Editor-in-Chief: Victor Gorelick; Sega Licensing reps: Cindy Chau and Jerry Chu (*see below) As if building New Mobotropolis from scrap and nanites and maintaining Bull King-proof domes weren't enough to have on a resume, Nicole has branched out into astral projection. Seriously, she uses herself as a conduit for the Arctic Freedom Fighters to send a situation update to the Council of Acorn. Since we come in in the middle, we only learn that someone is building something that looks like a refueling station (insert BP joke here) and that the locals including Rotor's family have been drafted to work security on the project. Well, whoever it is (Do we really have to wonder?) at least isn't using them for old school slave labor. The whole projection thing kind of unnerves Dylan the porcupine, though it looks to me like he'd be unnerved by a day-old egg salad sandwich. But then again who wouldn't? Anyway, Sonic is ready to volunteer himself and Rotor for the assignment, but Councillor Hamlin, who appears to have become the resident Dr. No of the Council, stifles the idea of Rotor's going freelance. Rotor says it's cool, but then wants to meet up with Nicole at his place after the meeting is over. Cut to the Great White Mobian North as we brace ourselves for 2-3 pages of re-introduction to the Arctic Freedom Fighters and the inevitable exposition to "go over the plan," seasoned with a slight amount of tension between Guntiver and Erma to keep this ancient stew recipe interesting. Short version: because the totem pole-looking device (which of course bears the mustachioed likeness of You-Know-Who) has both surface and underwater components, Sonic will team up with Guntiver and Erma to take out the former while the more marine-friendly members (Augustus, Seala and Flip) take care of business down below. Don't worry about the "akhlut" reference on the map; I'll cover that below in the Head section. Sonic also brings the group up to speed on Rotor's suffering a back injury in S175 caused by falling debris thanks to Snively in a lame-o super suit. Speaking of Rotor, guess what he wants Nicole to whip up for him? If you said, "a lame-o super suit," you're thinking like a comic book reader. Nicole is a little spooked by the custom order ever since her stint as Iron Nicole, but Rotor tells her to keep it under her head fur. He's going rogue for the sake of his herd and kin, and his show of deference to Hamlin was just to get him to shut his hog jowls. And at least Rotor and Nicole have both observed the "No capes!" rule. Because it's a long and probably boring flight to the Arctic region, Rotor supplies over a page of thought balloon exposition to pass the time. Seems that during Sonic's absence as part of the Tossed In Space arc, Rotor let his weapons-building mojo get the better of him, but came down with a case of the guilts when he started toting up the collateral damage. Sonic and the AFF arrive at their objective, and Sonic admits to coming down with a feeling of deja vu. Since the plot device of mind-controlling the walrus herd was used before in S85's "Home and Back," we old-timers know how he feels. Erma suggests one reason why this seems familiar: that the walrus are "the most prominent species in the northern tundra." One lame quip by Sonic later, we and they scope out the objective. It looks like a high-tech totem pole surrounded by a herd of walrus whose eyes are glazed and whose minds are blank; maybe they've been watch Fox News en masse. Rotor, for his part, isn't having a good day as someone manages to pull the plug on his super suit and bring him back down to the ground. And it turns out that his assailant is none other than Silver who accuses him of being a fake and "not the real Boomer." Where did he get THAT idea? Stay tuned, dear reader. HEAD: The word for today is "Akhlut," as seen on the diagram of the "psionic signal booster" that the AFF rolls out for Sonic. Far cooler than the booster, an akhlut is an Innuit legendary creature that takes on the form of both a wolf and an orca. This represents the comic's second effort to incorporate some mythology into the continuity, the first being the Aboriginal Australian bunyip in several of the Downunda Freedom Fighter stories. That may be an akhlut Sonic is riding on the thumbnail of the next issue. Or it could just be a Legionized orca, it's hard to tell. Even if the plot point goes nowhere, they get points for trying. The story structure here pretty much mimics that of the "Reigning Cats and Dogs" arc we just finished: Sonic hooks up with a Freedom Fighter unit in an exotic locale to thwart trouble while a co-starring Freedom Fighter from New Mobitropolis is captured and faces a separate threat. With only a few variations, this plot outline also served the comic in good stead during its old pre-Endgame days. Increasingly, the Council is becoming a complicating factor in this continuity, with Hamlin becoming the designated jerk and the Member Most Likely To Either Attempt A Takeover Or Do Something Stupid That Will Jeopardize Everybody. Unfortunately, that also means he's the only one with anything like a stand-out personality. We never do figure out what's eating Dylan, and the rest of the Council members have receded so far into the background they can understandably be mistaken for pieces of the scenery. It hasn't gotten to the point where they can be described as Dead Behind The Eyes, but unless Ian figures out how to make better use of them it may come to that. I especially wouldn't want to see that fate befall Prince Elias or Rosemary Prower. Rotor, in addition to his brief bout of heroics, gets a major back story makeover here, and it works for me. I especially appreciated Ian's negating Rotor's flirtation with designing weapons; I didn't appreciate it the first time around and it's a plot point best left forgotten. Still, despite the title, Rotor has never had a very convincing family life in this comic. In "Home and Back," Rotor's happy family life with the herd was shoehorned onto the same page as a recap of the Arctic Freedom Fighters, only to have Rotor's herd succumb to that issue's mind control device one page later. Which makes me wonder why the herd keeps getting its collective brains blasted. That can't possibly be the only strategy Eggman could come up with, but the writers seem to have gotten stuck in the permafrost. For Karl Bollers in "Home and Back" and now Ian Flynn in "Family Matters," it seems there's only one way to deal with a walrus herd: make zombies out of them. It might be amusing to see them waddle their way through the dance steps from Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video, but let's see some imagination here! I'll hold off on commenting on Silver until his own back story. For now, I'm left with a mere sense of deja vu, wondering why Ian couldn't come up with something ... else. Head Score: 5. EYE: Steve Butler gets off to a strong start with his drawing of Nicole doing some astral projection of Guntiver for the benefit of the Council members. He doesn't manage to top that, though, especially when it comes to the design of Rotor's super suit. But since it was just supposed to get Rotor to Silver and then konk, no surprise there. Eye: 8. HEART: Rotor is the Heart factor in this story. Unfortunately, when he has a chance to demonstrate his affection for his family in a flashback he instead homes in on the most boring subject possible: himself. Starting off with the line "This is just like the old days," Rotor takes a frankly useless trip down Memory Lane in a series of flashbacks that bring nothing to the plot and that prove ultimately to be an excuse to update the noobs with a lot of exposition. I don't dare call this "character development" because there's precious little character to develop. Rotor has always been a one-note character, and past attempts to broaden his personality have been disastrous (pairing him with Tommy Turtle in an Odd Couple situation, for instance). Maybe next issue things will get traction. Heart Score: 4. "Future Tense" Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Jamal Peppers; Ink: Terry Austin; Color: Ray Dillon; Lettering: John E. Workman With Silver standing in front of a portrait of the Next Generation Freedom Fighters (see the Mobius: 30 years Later arc), Silver finds what he was looking for in an abandoned library: an even OLDER portrait of Sonic, Sally, Antoine and Rotor aged 5 done some time after the initial take-over of Mobius by Rotbotnik (in this continuity, Bunnie wasn't a part of the group yet and Tails was still a newborn). Reading that the young walrus in the group is named "Boomer," he puts 1 and 1 together and doesn't even get close to 2. We then slog through almost 4 pages of Silver vacillating until he looks around at his dystopian home world and finally decides to try showing some initiative. HEAD: I remember an old Peanuts comic strip where Lucy gives Snoopy a balloon on a string to hold with instructions not to let it go. Snoopy holds it in his mouth, gets bored with his assignment, yawns, and is almost asleep when his eyes open wide at the realization that by opening his mouth he let the balloon float away. The final panel shows him acting like a hobo carrying a bindle staff and thinking "You make one mistake, you pay for it the rest of your life." I get the feeling that this description could apply to Silver. OK, he's another hedgehog in a continuity that was running over with them even before he showed up. He can manipulate the power of Sol Emeralds, and he's telekinetic. But because he mistook Sonic for the problem with his world instead of the solution and misidentified him as the Iblis trigger, he seems to be doomed to be portrayed as being perpetually not-too- bright despite his coloration. The comic certainly hasn't been kind to him in that regard. When he joined the hedgehog scrum in S195's "Hedgehog Havoc: Part 1" he fingered Sonic as the traitor. Now he's going 0 for 2 by mistaking Rotor for Boomer. Or something. This is why I think the comic shouldn't meddle with continuity errors from the past that the newbies don't know about, and possibly couldn't care less about if they did. So what's with the Rotor/Boomer mix-up? The short answer is that in the first few issues of the comic the creatives didn't have the final versions of the SatAM Sonic character models to go on from DiC (now known as Cookie Jar Company). This was also the genesis of the infamous Sally coloration problem, which the comic addressed with an outrageously bogus chemical spill cover story. And now the issue of Rotor's original name, Boomer, is being exploited in this story. It's hard enough to try to iron out the continuity wrinkles that have accumulated in a comic in the course of many years (Crisis On Infinite Earths), but it's actually pointless to bring up old errors and push them into the spotlight because you need a plot device. It was kind of interesting to see Silver put himself in the position of Tom Cruise's character in Steven Spielberg's 2002 film "Minority Report." In that film, Cruise plays the head of a Pre-Crime unit which relies on input from a trio of psychics to stop crimes that haven't been committed yet. That raises the question: if you stop a crime from happening, is the would-be perpetrator still considered to be a criminal? Once Silver takes a look around his home world, though, his mind is made up. It takes him some time to do it, though. Despite his white coloration, he does as much temporizing as the black-clad Hamlet does in Shakespeare's play. We're meant to look at this as Silver's way of making a decision; if it had gone on for more than five pages it could easily have been mistaken for a mere padding out of the story. Yet it didn't feel as if Ian was just marking time. Not a whole lot happens here, but what does happen is handled well. Head Score: 8. Eye: The team of Peppers-Austin-Dillon does some amazing work here, especially with the sky scenes and back-lighting (as in the very first panel). Anyone who's played Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) knows that for the most part Silver's world was dark and stormy, and the clouds parted only after Blaze sealed Iblis inside her body; sort of like when Tikal in Sonic Adventure became the Heart of Chaos and stopped him from destroying the world in that game's back story. That the art team was able to do work of this level without resorting to shortcuts (Can you say "Photoshop lens flare"?) says a lot. Impressive. Eye Score: 10. HEART: It's a small matter, but it really makes a difference in the story: balloons. I don't mean the "Up" variety of balloons. I mean the fact that Silver starts out the story talking to himself in classic thought balloons. But it's only when he looks over what's left of Onyx Island does he switch over to speech balloons with the simple "No" which signals that he's come to a conclusion. This, after all, is what Silver is about in this story. Having made a discovery about the original Freedom Fighters (and having demonstrated the old computing principle of Garbage In, Garbage Out), he demonstrates the willingness to act upon what he knows without excuses. There's really nothing else by way of a plot here aside from Silver developing the resolve to act. And in this story, that's Heart enough. Heart Score: 9. *And now the Archie news. In a recent shake-up on the Editorial floor, Paul Kaminski gets to drop the "Assistant" from his job title and is now the Sonic comics Editor. This leaves former Editor/Managing Editor Mike Pellerito as just plain Managing Editor "doing all sorts of stuff" like, well, like writing the one-page press release called "A Letter from The Editor." Or should that be "Managing Editor"? Fan Art: Metal Sonic by John, non-metal Sonic by Keith, and Nicole by Eileen. Fan Funnies: the pot calls the kettle pink. And while purple is the complimentary color of green, it's still not a good color for Scourge. Off-Panel: Another way to rag on Silver. Or maybe he should change his name to "Shiver." Sonic-Grams: Tony is told that the Wolf Pack is going back into hibernation for the foreseeable, and he suggests an adventure for the pack's junior members, lupine and human. Fanfic idea there. Donovan is told that a Mighty-Ray story is coming (no clue when), something involving Merlin Prower is also in the works, and we get the least amount of back story possible about Sir Connery. Turns out Donovan and I have something in common: the first STH comic I ever read featured the death of Sally's old mentor, Julayla. Speaking of S18, that's when Michael started collecting. The letter asks some honest questions, but whoever wrote the answers to them used old-school interjections that are ... well, Barfing Batman! And Tanner wants to know about the Sonic/Geoffrey clash; the answer mentions the fact that they were originally part of a romantic triangle concerning Sally (about which Pat Spaziante did one of his greatest splash pages ever as the frontispiece of S43) but omits the part where a black-and-white cat named Hershey crossed Geoffrey's path and he never looked back.