Sonic Universe #10 [Jan 2010] Yardley!/Hunzeker cover: Worm'S eye view of Knuckles, Mighty and Julie-Su in the Small Room O' Death. Say "Cheesy!" Nice picture, especially the violet highlights at the top, but still .... "Echoes of the Past: Part 2" Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Tracy Yardley!; Ink: Jim Amash; Color: Jason Jensen; Lettering: Teresa Davidson; Assistant Editor: Paul Kaminski; Editor: Mike Pellerito; Editor-in-Chief: Victor Gorelick; Sega Licensing reps: Cindy Chau and Jerry Chu We return to the Small Room O' Death where Knuckles and Julie-Su have a contest to see who has a firmer grasp of the obvious. Knux wins with "Finitevus must have known we were coming." Naw, ya think? Julie-Su volunteers to circumvent the laser grid while providing the verbal cue for the segue to... Vector and Ray spend the next three pages trying to fend off the Wing-Dingoes. They face overwhelming odds and dialogue that doesn't really help the situation. Back at the Small Room O' Death, Mighty does his Hercules impression while Knuckles lets Julie-Su climb all over him to get to the top of the pit. She manages to squeak through despite getting her tail singed. She finds the controls, but by the way it denies her entry I wonder whether she just didn't find an ATM instead. Frustrated, she hauls out a blaster and blasts the controls. And in case anyone missed the point, she yells out "BLAST YOU!" Thanks for the commentary. What escapes comment is the fact that she's in tears when her shooting the console proves to be the way to short out the death trap. She's probably having a flashback to when Knuckles died the first time, in S118's "Ultimate Power" Part 4 or 5, I'd lost track by that time. They snoop around some more until they find a huge warp ring. Back at the Master Emerald, Ray hops on board and puts on a display of powering up which makes me think he watches a lot of "Dragonball" in his spare time. It has the desires effect: Vector is confused and the Wing-Dingoes retreat. Ray then explains that the light show was just that: a show. Ray says that Knuckles told him that the power of the Master Emerald does that, though he adds for Vector's benefit "your mileage may vary." Back at the Warp Ring, Knux and the crew step over to the other side where it appears they're back outside the pyramid. Far outside, as it turns out. They're back on the planet's surface near the gaping hole from which the Floating Island emerged. But before Knux can get his archaeology geek on again, Fin steps out of the shadows. The three take off after Fin and accomplish absolutely nothing. The Doc then pulls some trick maneuvers with warp rings which make me think he plays a lot of Portal in his spare time. His arrogant mad scientist rap is interrupted, however, as Knuckles punches him in the mouth. And there was great rejoicing (Yay!). Unfortunately, before Knuckles can put him away for good, he's interrupted by an Ominous Sound Effect. Don't you hate it when that happens? Back at the Master Emerald, Ray and Vector continue to banter for the sake of the noobs. Vector is all for hopping a warp ring and giving Knuckles the 411, not knowing that he's fairly close by, what with Downunda down unda the island and all. That's when the Ominous Sound Effect strikes again, and everybody realizes that the Island has been harpooned from below and is being held in position by ginormous chains. Dr. Fin gives Knuckles two choices: "cave in my skull now or we can save your precious island." Personally, I'd do BOTH, in that order. HEAD: This story lives up to Ian's Action And More Action Credo, what with Knuckles and his crew surviving the Small Room O' Death and Vector and Ray taking on the Wing-Dingoes. The latter duo definitely comes off the worse here, and not from the nature of the attack. There's entirely too much dialogue going on as they tangle with the robo-canids. But then Ray does his Saiyan imitation and the Wing-Dingoes freak out. OK, how does THAT work? We're talking about bots here. You'd think that their programming would be more, well, linear, and they couldn't be bluffed by Ray's light show. But they were, and they ran away. How convenient! I don't care how jazzy the sequence was, it was all wrong. Now if the power-up had generated a localized electro-magnetic pulse that fried the circuits of the robo- doggies, THAT would be understandable. Or is that asking too much of a comic book in general, not to mention an Archie comic in particular? As for Knux and his crew, they no sooner get out of the Ziggurat of Doom than they have Dr. Fin drop in on them. At which point everybody goes nuts: everybody chases after Fin hurling threats and verbal abuse at him, and then Fin goes into self-serving rant mode as he deals with Julie-Su and Mighty. I usually don't care for gratuitous comic book violence, but I was glad when Knuckles punched him in the mouth, if only because it shut him up! I said that this story was an example of Action And More Action, but at second glance it looks more like Movement Being Mistaken For Action. The story doesn't really GO anywhere until the island is harpooned like Moby Dick. For the most part, Vector and Ray chase off the doggies and Knuckles and his gang chase after Dr. Fin. And is it just me, or does Fin's rap sound a whole lot like Shadow's exit speech in SU8's "Freedom Fighters Of The Future"? There's the same grandiosity, the same paternalism, the same rhetoric about "punishing" those who haven't bought into his outlook. It's not out of character for Fin, but are villains supposed to overlap like that? I can only assume that there'll be SOME development of the story next time, if only by way of explaining why having the Floating Island turn into a Stationary Floating Island is a bad thing. Whatever Knuckles's issues with Fin, his family and echidna society in general, they're becoming even less relevant as this story grinds along. Small wonder that the management figured they could wait until issue #9 until they shoe-horned him back into the continuity. Head Score: 5. EYE: There's nothing to fault in Yardley!'s artwork here, especially the from-the-ground view of the floating island on page [15]. And after her near-breakdown, Julie-Su's expressions are on target. Eye Score: 9. HEART: Those fans who've only recently come on board, especially those who never had to deal with the Knuckles comic while it was still in print, may not get the significance of the tears in Julie-Su's eyes after blasting the console. It might have helped, though, if her words upon slagging the console had been changed. I'm not thinking about changing "Blast" to something a little more understandable and a lot more profane. It would've been better for her to exclaim "NOT AGAIN!" And I'm not being funny, either. As stated above, she's had to go through the business of Knuckles dying once before, when he supposedly cashed in his chips in S118's "Ultimate Power: Part Whatever." I've already gone on record, in my review of S120's "Those Were The Days," that Ken Penders thoroughly mishandled the opportunity for Julie- Su to be emotionally impacted by Knuckles's death. I still think that this was due partly to Ken's preference in story-telling, and partly to Editorial's decision to soft-pedal the emotional reality of death in a book supposedly with a core audience of children. I don't know where Editorial may have gotten their information, but Disney never got that particular memo. From "Bambi" to "Up," it's surprising the way in which mortality hovers around the fringe of the Disney greats. Even when it's soft-pedaled as with the incarceration of Dumbo's mother, or Emily's abandoning of Jesse in "Toy Story 2." But while Ian does well to include Julie-Su starting to break up over what she thinks is Knuckles's demise, he undercuts that by doing absolutely nothing to help the readers, especially the noobs, understand WHY she turned on the water works. It's an understandable moment only if you've been with the comic for the past 6 years. It's a great Heart moment, but unfortunately it isn't played out to the full. Without any kind of context, it just leaves the impression of Julie-Su as an emotion-driven female. That's just a shame, really, and a waste fo a good moment. Heart Score: 6. Fan Art: Janusz does a copy of the Sonic Universe #1 cover, Steve gives us King Shadow with Saiyan washboard abs, Amber lines up Mina, Fiona, Sally and Amy Rose, and Salvatore shows us how a little Blue Blur can turn a jack-o-lantern into a great pumpkin. Fan Funnies: We've already had a continuity joke in S206's Off-Panel, but here Zoek takes a run at it. Yeah, Ash never DID come up in Mobius 30 Years Later. Let's move on. Letter: No misprint; we get one looooooong letter this issue from Mike. He's informed that Tracy Yardley! pitched some story ideas for Sonic X and they were accepted, there's some not-very- serious musing about whether Sonic Prime ever met up with Sonic X (which sounds more like a algebra problem than a story idea), and Mike wonders whether any of the comic characters would show up in a Sega game. You're not the first to wonder that; personally, I'd have rather seen Bunnie tag in to take Big's place in Sonic Heroes.