Sonic The Hedgehog #224 [June 2011]

Peppers/Austin/Herms cover: while Eggman looms large over the design (no surprise), we get a split screen of the major plot threads in this story: Sonic v. Naugus, Sally and the other Freedom Fighters v. Geoffrey, and Snively and Lien-Da v. nobody since they’re spending this installment enabling the Eggman. The use of video screens manages to soften the impression that this is one more wrestling card cover.

“Chaos and the Crown: Part 2: Total Authority”

Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Ben Bates; Ink: Terry Austin; Color: Matt Herms; Lettering: John E. Workman; Editor: Paul Kaminski; Editor-in-Chief: Victor Gorelick; President: Mike Pellerito; Sega Licensing reps: Cindy Chau and Jerry Chu

We start where we left off, with Sonic facing off against Naugus in the Council chambers. “You’re ugly and you’re evil,” Sonic tells him, while missing the opportunity to add “And your mother dresses you funny.” Naugus then sends a shot of flame Sonic’s way, which is then blocked by … turns out Sonic has been wielding the Sword of Light, since according to a text box the Sword of Acorns was snuffed back in S164.

Outside, nobody’s made any progress against Geoff, who’s still running his big mouth over the course of two pages. In addition to the self-serving junk he’s been spewing about Naugus, we also learn that Hershey bought the farm while on a mission. That’s not the short version, by the way. So Geoff/Ian STILL owes the readers a damn good explanation as to what exactly happened to Hershey.

And we then get the first of 4 one-page interludes of Eggman at Mission Control, which are about as interesting as … well, as watching someone count backwards.

In Chambers, Sonic and Naugus are still mixing it up as Elias tags in and wields the Sword for all of one page before Naugus goes all reasonable and says “Let’s just do this my way.” Rotor’s had enough and wants to mix it up with Naugus old school, but Penelope nixes the idea as the Council degenerates into what appears to be some Naugus-inspired squabbling.

Back outside, Geoff is wailing on Tails. That’s the last straw for Sally who tells him that if he’s really in the right then he should stop acting like a jerk. Rather than reply “I’m not bad, I’m just written that way,” he lets up.

But despite the fact that this is an Archie comic book, Naugus has inflicted some collateral damage. Seems the introduction of his brand of magic has managed to kill off the nanites involved, and Nicole is taking it pretty hard. Unfortunately, this development gives Naugus an instant bump up in the opinion polls.

Back in Council, the squabbling continues for another three pages. Four, if you count the one after yet another countdown page. But we FINALLY have lift-off and everyone gets to see what all the fuss is about: the Death Egg 2.0. And yes, it looks at least as ridiculous as the older model.

HEAD: Despite the Council chamber action and the residue of the Geoff plot, the big news this time around is the Death Egg. From the reaction of the citizens, it’s supposed to be fearsome. To Sonic game fans, however, it’s a joke.

Anyone who’s played Sonic 3 and Knuckles knows that the original Death Egg never got very far off the launch pad. During the Lava Reef Zone sequence, we see in the background that it ended up doing the mother of all face plants. And despite the fact that there’s a stage that takes place within the Death Egg itself, it never really lived up to its potential as the Death Star knock-off it was intended to be.

Ian, however, lets the DE 2.0 take center stage in this story. At least, that’s how it feels, because the other sequences feel so flat and empty. I know it’s all a function of shifting the focus onto the DE 2.0 in the all-important #225, but still there should be no excuse for sub-par writing.

As mentioned earlier, Ian via Geoff shines off anything like a real explanation of what happened to Hershey. What we get instead is a very prosaic explanation packing into two measly panels. I’ll save further discussion of this development for the Heart section, but here’s a hint: there isn’t an ounce of Heart in it.

If anything, the only real sign of emotional involvement is the “death” of at least some of the nanites, “the nanites that Naugus crystallized” according to Nicole. That’s clearly not ALL the nanites in the city, but you can be forgiven for thinking so because the writing of the sequence is so ambiguous. Once again, more about this development below in the Heart section.

The action in the Council is supposed to be suspenseful, but feels more like the reader has just channel surfed into C-SPAN. The sequence just never goes anywhere while the characters churn around like the flakes in a snow globe. It becomes obvious after a while that Ian’s heart just isn’t in it, and he’s merely looking for ways to kill time until Eggman and his ride pull up. I get that this is supposed to make Sonic look good by portraying the degeneration of the Establishment when what’s needed is a ‘hog of action, but did Ian have to drag the readers and the story line down along with it?

Of course the countdown is supposed to be as suspenseful as the Council scene, but it turns out just to be as boring. It’s also aggravating because it interrupts the narrative. Maybe there was a good story here that was poisoned in retrospect when the Death Egg was revealed, I don’t know. Head Score: 5.

EYE: Ben Bates’s artwork is usually well done, but there’s something wrong here. He’s at the top of his game when there’s action of some kind going on, but when it stops and there’s simple conversation, Ben feels the need to exaggerate the facial expressions of some of the characters. Rotor, for one, is particularly ill-served. The one saving grace is the depiction of Nicole as she goes into shock as she realizes the fate of the nanites. Even more shocking, though, is how unthreatening and frankly ridiculous the DE2.0 looks. Of course when you have to design something that consciously quotes Eggman’s face, you don’t have a lot with which to work. The take-off itself is impressive, and Bates should get props for that, but that can’t redeem the frankly silly design of the DE. Eye Score: 7.

HEART: Whether he meant it to happen or not, Ian has done something very Postmodern when it comes to the sequence with Nicole and the nanites.

It used to be that in Modernist thought, the world could be divided into Subjects and Objects, much in the same way that a sentence could be parsed. Postmodernism, however, considers the relational rather than the objective. Though not strictly a Postmodern thinker, Marshall McLuhan came close to it in one of his aphorisms: “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”

Something like this happened with Nicole and the nanites. Yes, Nicole was able to do some neat things with them, and that power was perverted by the Iron Queen. But being an AI herself, her relationship with the nanites wasn’t the Modern kind where a person simply uses a tool and that’s the extent of it. The nanites were a Postmodern extension of Nicole, again in the way that McLuhan declared that electronic media are an extension of the user’s central nervous system.

This explains Nicole’s reaction to the death of the nanites, for from her perspective that’s exactly what happened to them. She never uses the D-word herself, and the Mobian onlookers don’t either, saying only that Naugus “beat” the nanites. Either this is part of Archie’s in-house standards or else Editorial doesn’t think that the audience is sufficiently Postmodern to appreciate what happened to them from Nicole’s point of view.

Keep in mind that this actually echoes Nicole’s first major appearance in the comic in the acclaimed one-shot story “Stargazing.” In it, Nicole takes on a temporary body, one that will eventually lose its integrity and decay, which is to say, it will die. Now, in this story, Nicole realizes that the nanites can die as well, though Ian isn’t even in the mood to deal with how many of the nanites were affected, let alone cover the issue of Nicole’s rediscovery of mortality. And just for the record, I get reminded of mortality every workday when I enter author names along with their birth and (where available) death dates. Keep doing that, and you can’t help but think “Who’s going to fill in the blank for me, and what number are they going to use?”

OK, that’s probably darker than the average Sonic comic story gets, but then again Ian opened the door himself when he summarily killed off Hershey and sees to it that Geoff doesn’t bat an eye. Even his “do not belittle my wife’s sacrifice” speech comes off as emotionally inadequate and just plain phony, happening as it does in the middle of another blah fight sequence.

Then again, Ian may have simply been thinking back to precedent. Back in K21, and the Forbidden Zone arc, we learn that Geoff’s father lost his life on the mission that ended up delivering Elias into the stone-cold bosom of the echidna Brotherhood. I had thought that Ken Penders could have found one page to allow Geoff to visit his father’s grave and pay his respects; yeah, like THAT was going to happen! Once again, I can only say that Ian has taken a classic opportunity to make this comic something more than it has been for most of its run and he punted it. Heart Score: 4.

Sonic Spin: Lots of Editorial huffing and puffing about Free Comic Book Day and S225 but nothing useful or enlightening. Reminds me of those times I’ve tried to beat insomnia by watching “Poker After Midnight” or whatever the show is called. It doesn’t help that I don’t know the rules for Texas Hold ‘Em, but I still come away thinking “Well, THAT killed 20 minutes” or whatever.

Fan Art: Nothing says lovin’ like something from the oven, as the TV jingle used to go, and Jesse says SonAmy with cookie dough. Sweet. Or was that too obvious? Kekoa contributes Sonic, and Evie gives us Naugus.

Fan Funnies: As Rotem, known as “Vaportem” on deviantArt, tells it, the moment at the beginning of S223 where Geoff crashes the Forget-Me-Knots concert in order to pimp Naugus came up in a discussion on an Archie Comic message board, and so did the infamous Kanye West incident at the MTV Music Awards where West set new standards for being a jerk. The rest is artistry, and probably the funniest entry in the history of the Fan Funnies feature. If you want a better look, go to the dA site http://vaporotem.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d3fn202 .

Off-Panel: Honestly, I thought the same thing when I first saw the DE 2.0: that she scale was all wrong and … and frankly it just didn’t look all that threatening.

Sonic-Grams: and the flogging of S225 continues, eating up half the Letters page and allowing room for only one letter. Christian laments the closing of Borders book stores which means he can’t pay retail for the comic anymore and will have to save substantial amounts of money by subscribing through the mail. Now wait a minute … Anyway, we learn that Ben Bates set up a Marioesque clone in a crowd scene, what went into the Naugus mix, and that it usually takes a month to finish the art for a 22-page story. Things are way simpler when it comes to drawing manga (no coloring, only black ink and ziptones, with machine-lettering in the speech balloons). That helps account for the fact that the greatest mangaka of them all, Osamu Tezuka, produced something like a quarter million pages during his lifetime. They take breaks too, though, unless the Editor shows up at his or her apartment to hector them into finishing this week’s pages.