Sonic #24 [July 1995] [Review date: August 2001]
     Manak/D'Agostino cover: At the top of tonight's fight card,
it's Sonic vs. Antisonic; on the undercard it's Tails vs. the
Antitails and Sally vs. the Antisally.  Let's get it on!

     "When Hedgehogs Collide"
     Story: Mike Kanterovich and Ken Penders; Art: Dave Manak
(p1-11), Art Mawhinney (p12-24); Ink: Harvo (p1-11), Rich
Koslowski (p12-24); Color: Barry Grossman; Lettering: Mindy
Eisman; Editor: Scott Fulop; Managing Editor: Victor Gorelick;
Editor-In-Chief: Richard Goldwater.
     The first five pages of this story are taken up with five of
the six Freedom Fighters committing random acts of unkindness. 
The most notable include Sally dunking a squirrel girl in a fish
pond, Antoine with a perpetual wink driving like a maniac, and in
a very well-laid-out page Tails runs down a tortoise and throws
tomatoes at him.
     The five antisocial animals rendezvous somewhere in the
Great Forest.  "Sonic" complains that the Mobians don't have a
lot of smarts; this coming from someone trying to file his
fingernails while wearing gloves.  The trademark dark glasses, as
well as the screaming headline "EVIL SONIC IS BACK!", pretty much
give the game away if anyone was still in doubt by this point.
     We then move on to the exposition portion of the story, and
Mike and Ken get to flesh out the world of the Antisonic last
seen in Mike and Ken's "When Hedgehogs Collide" (S11).  In this
world, the Antisonic and his posse inhabit a clean, orderly, and
rather sparsely inhabited Mobitropolis.  They still look like
they did when they made their one-panel cameo in S11, except that
the Antisally has changed out of her neo-Nazi uniform and has
slipped into a black body stocking.  She wants to kick some tail,
but Antisonic gives her some exposition instead, recapping his
previous encounters with Sonic in S11 as well as S21's "Night of
a Thousand Sonics."  Thus is hatched the current plot: the five
ne'er-do-wells hit the cosmic highway back before Zonic took
credit for all that zone hopping in Dan Slott's "Zone Wars:
Prelude" (SSS8).  Arriving on Mobius, they shed their leathers
and begin impersonating our heroes who are...
     Where are they, anyway?
     We learn this as the team of Mawhinney and Koslowski tags in
for Manak and Harvo.  Seems Sonic, Tails and Antoine, with
Rotor's help, have been poking around space-time trying to get
into the Void to retrieve Sal's father; no luck.  That would have
to wait until S41's "And One Shall Save Him."  Just as Sonic
tells the rest of the gang not to discuss this in front of Sal
and get her hopes up, Sally herself returns from her miniseries. 
But before they can get their heads together, a big, unruly mob
of Mobians shows up.  These are the ones who've been on the
receiving end of the antics of the Antisonic's gang.  In
retaliation, they start serving up tossed salad, one raw veggie
at a time.  Given that their fellow Mobians aren't exactly in the
mood to listen, the group retreats.  Sonic relies on his feet,
with Sally hanging on to him; true, it's close contact, but it's
not like they're hugging so the censors can't complain.  Tails
airlifts Antoine out of there.  As for Rotor, he has to rely on a
jet pack to make his exit.  Once away from the Mobian mob, they
put their heads together as Sally comes up with a plan.
     Fan art: Kelly Turner turns in a cartoony drawing of "M. C.
Sonic" in rap mode, backed up by Tails as DJ and Knuckles on
back-up vocals.  Daniel Pietrzak turns in a drawing of Sonic with
a Chaos emerald; very stylistic with a very Pat Spaziante feel to
it.
     In a change of both strategy and clothes, the Antisonic's
gang isn't bothering to pass themselves off as the real deal any
more, but have put their leathers back on and are terrorizing
some Mobian village or other.  As for the true blue blur, he and
the group have dressed up as ... gypsies?  Doesn't make any more
or less sense than anything else but it helps the reader keep the
players straight.  Sally uses a trip wire to unseat the sleazy
riders as Sonic taunts his conniving counterpart and lands the
first punch.  At this point, the good guys realizes that the
gypsy costumes don't really serve any real purpose any more so
they discard them.  But the point of this little exercise in
crossing space-time was to stage a fight and that's what we get
in an impressive splash page.
     At first things are evenly matched as each of the Freedom
Fighters does battle with his/her counterpart.  Sally realizes
after about two pages that this isn't getting anyone anywhere
and, not wanting this to go on all day, changes strategy by
changing opponents.  With the fighters mixed, the good guys can
now score some points.  I've said it before and I'll say it
again, the panel of Sonic punching out the Antisally alone is
worth the price of admission.  Long fight sequence short: the
good guys win and are forgiven by their fellow Mobians when they
see the doppelgangers.  The Antisonic doesn't seem to mind his
fate that much, as he got the fight he came for.

     HEAD: The first time I read this story I KNEW something was
missing.  Or rather, someone.  Look at page 7, which shows the
Antisonic in his headquarters.  Whether to break up the blank
space or as an internal joke, the following graffiti appears
scratched onto the top of the Antisonic's desk: "Sonic + Sally,"
"Sonic + Bunnie," "Sonic + Nicole," "Sonic + Sonic."
     That little visual aside was the ONLY hint in this story as
to Bunnie's existence! Dave Manak didn't include her in the group
shot in S11, and I can only assume that he did so on instructions
from Kanterovich and Penders.  The two writers continue to regard
discretion as the better part of storytelling and have left
Bunnie out of this story completely.  Ken had yet another chance
to work an Antibunnie into the continuity years later in S44's
"Black and Blue and Red All Over," but once more he took a pass.
     I couldn't.  I HAD to noodle out for myself the status of
this plot point.  If the Dr. Robotnik on the Antisonic's world is
a kindly, benevolent soul, what reason would there be to
roboticize anyone, even partially?  Does that mean that there
WOULD be a Bunnie but that she'd be intact?  Ken has never gone
there, and in the various e-mails we've traded over the years he
never even so much as hinted at what he would have done with the
Bunnie plot point.
     I know what *I* did with it.  I wrote "When A Bunnie Meet A
Bunnie."  My debt to "When Hedgehogs Collide" is therefore huge. 
I realized fully that Archie Comics was probably NEVER going to
address this plot point, and that if I wanted any answers I was
going to have to come up with them myself.  I was satisfied with
the results, and apparently so were the fans.  One, the talented
Rina Tay from Singapore, made a stab at turning the story into a
fan comic.  She was forced to abandon the project by Real Life,
but I highly approve of the progress she did make (her work is on
display at TeamArtail, at http://www.artail.net/comics/rinacat/).
     Up until "When Hedgehogs Collide," I thought mainly in terms
of expanding the SatAM continuity with my fanfic.  With "When A
Bunnie..." I realized that I'm perfectly entitled to grab the
Archie comic continuity by the scruff of the neck, give it a good
shake, and make it better than it was.  It was my first purely
reactive fanfic and it helped nurture the conviction in me that
the Archie creatives do not have all the answers.
     As for the story itself, it's basic action fare and makes
good use of the space-time travel premise that was part of the
continuity at the time.  The fight itself was well-thought out in
both the like-fighting-like sequence as well as the "change
partners" movement.  If there's a weak spot anywhere, it's at the
end where there's no Zonic the Zone Cop to haul the carcases of
the Antis back to their zone of origin.  The story just sort of
ends with a couple jokes and that's it.  Head Score: 8.
     EYE: Surprisingly, even Dave Manak's contribution to the
story is good.  His sequence with the Antitails is what comic
layout should be: the progression of the hapless tortoise and of
the Antitails with its audience POV [point of view] is really
effective and feels like storyboard art as much as comic art.
     That's not to say that Art Mawhinney doesn't turn in good
work.  The art here is some of his best for his entire career
with the book.  Especially impressive are the layouts for page 17
(in fact I bought the original page art for it from Rich
Koslowski at a con), pages 20 and 22 of the fight scene, and even
the last panel on page 19.  Very dynamic stuff that IMHO set the
standard for the book's lesser artists.  Eye Score: 10.
     HEART: Despite the telegraphing of the punch on the front
cover, it was still something of a shock to see the Knothole gang
acting supremely out of character and then seeing their fellow
Mobians turn on them.  Not to belabor the point, we're made to
care about Sonic and the gang.  THAT, brothers and sisters, is
what narrative fiction, storytelling, is supposed to accomplish. 
It's an art that would become rarer and rarer in the comic's
history, but back in the day the creatives proved it could indeed
be done.  Standard procedure at Archie is to give a new creative
the latest four or five back issues before throwing them into the
deep end of the pool.  If I had my way, they'd be supplied with a
select number of the best work of the comic so they could do work
that was THAT good.  Heck, even photocopies of this story would
outshine some of the more recent exercises in stupidity.  Heart
Score: 9, if only to acknowledge the absence of Bunnie.

     Sonic-Grams: Promos for the Sonic and Knuckles Special as
well as S25.  Also, three of the entrants into the "Do-It-
Yourself Sonic Comic Contest" turned out to be MIA.  Wonder if
Archie would have the guts to try THAT again.  This, after all,
was back when Archie was convinced that only pre-ad boys read the
comic.  After having seen a number of fan comics, and also some
hilariously un-Archie fan comics featuring Sonic game sprites,
I'm willing to bet that some entries to the contest now would
never pass editorial muster.  Letters: Quite a bit of interest in
Knuckles before he was given a three-year run of his own.