Sonic the Hedgehog #232 (Feb 2012)

Ben Bates cover: Straightforward portrait cover with Sonic and Knuckles in full and head shots of Naugus, Eggman, Geoff and Mecha-Sally in the background.

“Dark Tidings”

Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Ben Bates; Ink: Terry Austin; Color: Matt Herms; Lettering: John E. Workman; Editor: Paul Kaminski; Editor-In-Chief: Victor Gorelick; Naugus’s Campaign Manager: Mike Pellerito; Sega Licensing reps: Anthony Gaccione and Cindy Chau

Sonic, Amy and Antoine arrive at a Naugus For Monarch rally with Elias in attendance. Naugus then requests that Elias make things easy for everyone and hand over his crown. After assessing the situation, Sonic asks his fellow Mobians “Have you lost your minds?!” When Geoff then tries getting the crowd on his side, Sonic drops the bomb about Sally’s condition. Elias, of course, shows more concern than Geoff over what happened; Geoff appears more concerned with keeping up appearances and sticking to whatever agenda he’s keeping to himself. As for Naugus, he finally puts two and two together and connects Eggman with the events of S225, something the posse in his head has already figured out. Recovering quickly and taking the advice of his inner lobster, Naugus turns on the kind of charm usually associated with a can of 10W30. Geoff then snatches the crown and claps it on Naugus’s misshapen head while pimping the wizard in the tradition of Grima Wormtongue from Lord of the Rings. In Wikipedia, Wormtongue is described as a “sycophant, flatterer, liar, and manipulator,” and Geoff appears to be touching all the bases.

Amy then mentions that Bunnie became collateral damage in the previous issue, at which point Naugus suggests adjourning this meeting to the hospital. After Naugus invades Bunnie’s room, Sonic makes the suggestion of opening up the outside wall so the folks in the street outside can see what’s going on. Nicole complies, and one FWASH later Bunnie’s got her old deroboticized bod back. Naugus has a Did I Just Do That? moment which passes quickly while Geoff tells him to dummy up and Sonic tells Tails and Amy to bring the Council up to speed while he make tracks.

Sonic heads for the old Freedom Fighter HQ where he tries to engage Nicole in conversation, but she’s in no mood to do anything except some quick IMing. Promising to go F2F later, Sonic books himself on the next warp ring portal to Angel Island.

After bringing Knuckles up to speed, the echidna reacts by screaming his dreads off at Sonic. No less argumentative, he then tells Sonic in excruciating detail why trying to bust Sally out of the Death Egg using a warp ring isn’t a good idea. Julie-Su pitches in by recounting the problems they had using a warp ring to rescue the Brotherhood. At this point, Sonic turns tail and heads back through the warp ring where Tails is waiting with news that Geoff has formally been arrested and charged with treason.

Rather than getting to see Geoff do the perp walk, we cut back to the Death Egg where Snively is trying to deliver a damage report. Eggman, however, is too busy playing with his life-size Mecha-Sally Action Figure to really focus. He then tells Snively he’s got everything covered so “hakuna matata.” As Snively slips closer to the edge, Eggman prepares to make some modifications to Mecha-Sally that will probably void the warranty.

HEAD: The most obvious feature of this story is Naugus, and how different he is from the Naugus currently on display in the Babylon Rising arc now playing over at Sonic Universe. Here, he’s articulate and adroit enough to know how to work with the shifts in public opinion and even to cover his own confusion concerning whatever he had expected would happen to Bunnie. Over in the other comic he basically lets His KuKuness beat the crap out of him and that’s all. Talk about multiple personalities!

The most obvious reason for the difference is that there are two different writers involved: Ian Flynn for this book and Tracy Yardley! for the Babylon Rising arc. Even so, some basic editorial oversight is all it would have needed to blend the two versions of Naugus together into something like a coherent and consistent character. Something else has to explain the difference.

Myself, I believe that it’s due to different storytelling agendas. Over in Babylon, Tracy’s main objective appears to be depicting the bird-brained Battle Lord as the baddest of bad birds. This has led not only to an out-of-left-field upgrade of his powers but to the unspoken rule that NOBODY is more powerful than he is, Naugus included. For Ian, however, Naugus is the one with all the skills, whether intentional or not. I don’t know WHAT Naugus was expecting to do to Bunnie in the hospital room, and to a certain extent Ian lets us know that it doesn’t matter so long as her getting her bunny bod back is the end result.

While I’ll say more about Bunnie later on, since she’s the focus of the back story, I’m beginning to think that Eggman and Sonic’s screwing with reality didn’t stop with S230. Ian has been sprinkling clues in recent stories that not everything is back to normal: the tuft of “real grass” in the last issue, the disappearance of Eggman’s Chaos Emerald, and now Bunnie’s return to a state of nature. Sonic may have been satisfied that preventing Sally getting shot up was enough of a restore point, but I find myself wondering whether he may have opened a Pandora’s box.

This story is starting to remind me of the episode “Parallels” of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” where Worf experiences shifting realities due to a case of quantum flux (I’ll spare you the explanation). I really don’t know where Ian is going with all of this, but that strikes me as a possibility, anyway. Head Score: 8.

EYE: There’s a lot to like when it comes to the artwork. My favorite moment is the Elias facepalm at the bottom of page [6]. Eye Score: 10.

HEART: This story had two potentially strong Heart moments, and managed to give short shrift to one of them. The first was Bunnie’s restoration, which was squeezed into all of two panels. Yes, she’s going to be featured in the back story, but that story takes place after the transformation is a done deal. The haste with which the story hurried on just drained the Heart out of what should have been a more engaging moment in the story.

The other Heart moment, however, works much better: the painfully one-sided conversation between Sonic and Nicole. The fact that she doesn’t appear in any form and communicates only in short sentences before shutting up all together puts the emotional weight for the sequence on Sonic. Thanks to Ian and Ben, he is more than up to the challenge. He tries to engage her, but she is seriously not in the mood; I don’t blame her. The whole scene is underplayed at just the right level. It’s a very effective counterpoint to the hasty treatment of Bunnie’s transformation. Heart Score: 7.

“Fragile”

Story: Scott and David Tipton; Art: Jamal Peppers; Ink: Terry Austin; Color: Matt Herms; Lettering: John E. Workman

Bunnie has managed to get herself some alone time, but we join her just as Antoine does the same. Seems she’s not completely jazzed about being normal and keeps flashing back to various action sequences where she made the most of her being a cyborg. Antoine then assures her that even though she no longer has buns of steel she’s got a heart and mind of her own, something Bunnie said in the “Sonic and Sally” ep of the SatAM series.

HEAD: Scott and David Tipton are veteran writers for IDW comics, particularly their Star Trek series. One upcoming series features a crossover of ST:TNG and the latest incarnation of Dr. Who. I’d be very surprised if they didn’t eventually script another crossover story titled “Q Who?” But I digress.

If this story shows any Trek influence, it’s the very Data-like way it fills its 5 page budget. Four of those pages are effectively spent with Bunnie telling Antoine and us about her mixed emotions. She gets the good news out of the way first: “I’ve wanted this for so long … I’ve dreamed of it.” She then moans about her now being useless and weak. Antoine reassures her for four panels, after which she snaps out of it. Paxil should work so well.

I wanted to believe this story, I really really did. Bunnie has always been my favorite character to write for in my Sonic fanfics. I’ve said before of certain stories that misfired that the writer knew the words but not the music. In this case, it feels like the music track was dropped out entirely. Bunnie and Antoine both say the right things, but for some reason it just doesn’t sound convincing. I really should leave any further discussion along these lines for the Heart section, where it belongs.

The story does what it set out to do, which is about the best that can be expected. I don’t know the extent to which Tipton and Tipton are Archie Sonic fans. This is their first such story, limited to five pages in a back story where what happens won’t have any real impact on the continuity (which in this comic is the equivalent of driving with a learner’s permit). As a first attempt it works, but lacks the transcendence of Tania del Rio’s “Stargazing.” Head Score: 8.

EYE: Jamal Peppers does excellent work on the characters of Bunnie and Antoine. That’s only right because they’re the focus of the story. As for where this is happening, they’re still in Tommy Turtle Memorial Hospital, given the statue visible through the window in the first panel on page [4]. I’ve seen visitors’ lounges that look like that. Eye Score: 9.

HEART: In trying to figure out where this story fell short emotionally, I realize I answered my own question when I invoked “Stargazing.” This was, you’ll remember, the story that introduced the current manifestation of Nicole, even though at the time she was still in beta and the particular form who spoke to Sally was going to die. The poignancy of that situation was undeniable and powerful. This story needed something of the same caliber, and it just wasn’t there.

I said earlier that Bunnie was suffering from mixed emotions. That may have been generous. For most of this story she’s down in the dumps about the return of her bunny bod, and only perks up for the final page. After the first two pages of her moaning about what happened to her, we got the point; the other two pages were just overkill. I can understand her feelings, but she cycled through them so fast it detracted from the effect. I know that when you’re writing a 5-pager you have to shift on the fly, but this hurt.

Speaking of hurt, it occurred to me that another way for her to get out of her funk would be for her to stub her toe. Seriously; now that she’s back to normal, something like that would put her feelings in perspective. She might even get a chuckle out of it, because it would be a reminder to her of what’s real and that she’s not so “fragile” after all. In the words of C. S. Lewis’s demon Screwtape, "five minutes' genuine toothache would reveal the romantic sorrows for the nonsense they were." But that’s just me. Heart Score: 5.

SONIC SPIN: The subject is Bunnie’s transformation, but the column really doesn’t add anything beyond what’s in the comic.

FAN ART: Rafaela gives us a vectored Sonic and Sally, Susy salutes Bunnie and Antoine, Brandon sends in a Metal Sonic, and Marissa has Super Sonic with an unfortunately-placed Chaos Emerald looking like a faceted fig leaf.

OFF-PANEL: Strange little cartoon on the subject “Ignorance is bliss.”

SONIC-GRAMS: Matthew is told that Mighty and Ray will be back (assuming the Off-Panel doesn’t count), learns the difference between Mecha-Sally and Steel-Belted Sally from S29, and gets non-answers concerning Thrash, Matilda, and the possibility of a Mario-Sonic crossover. Cody wants to know where to get back issues. And Stephanie is as close to a SonicxAmy shipper as you can get without wishing for Sally to die in a fire, which is the fate someone actually wished upon Big the Cat in the June 2011 issue of Nintendo Power.