Sonic Universe 29 (Aug 2011)

Yardley!/Hunzeker cover: green hedgehog on the Green Mile. Scourge is looking at the world through striped sunlight, though from the overdone expression on his face he really needs to be shunted off to whatever mental institution Rosy is calling home these days. Good artwork but it feels seriously over the top.

“Inside Job Part 1: Rock Bottom”

Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Tracy Yardley!; Ink: Jim Amash; Color: Steve Downer; Lettering: Phil Felix; Editor: Paul Kaminski; Editor-in-Chief: Victor Gorelick; Warden: Mike Pellerito; Sega Licensing reps: Cindy Chau and Jerry Chu

It’s exposition-a-go-go from the get-go as we back up to S11’s “The Good, The Bad, and The Hedgehog” and the “origin” of Evil Sonic, told in the first person. That’s always a bad sign. Then we fast-forward to Scourge taking over his former home world and being able to go Super, though he forgets to mention that it really wasn’t such a hot idea because it allowed Sonic to get the better of him once the post-Super fatigue set in, sort of like when those caffeine-in-a-bottle shots wear off.

Anyway, fast-forward to the Zone Jail, which looks more like some weird grade school playground. Even worse, Scourge’s exposition light is still burning, which means he gets to narrate his own beat-down by Anti-Lupe, Anti-Sleuth Dog, and … I assume that’s Anti-Drago but someone forgot to tell newbie colorist Steve Downer that Drago was a WHITE wolf. Meh, rookie mistake.

Then to make matters worse, we get a page of Horizont-Al and Verti-Cal, who seem to have gotten over their case of mecha fever from back in S59’s “Opposites Detract” and have been brought in as comic relief derps. Trouble is, they’re not all that funny, they’re just annoying. And when Al breaks out in a song that was first featured in “Monty Python’s Life of Brian” and later recycled as part of “Spamalot,” I wanted to walk out on this movie. But since Scourge himself is denied that option I decided to stick around.

In any event, a new batch of prisoners arrives and they’re greeted by the Warden Zobotnik, who…

And there it is: we get to overhear a conversation the Warden has with the prisoners as well as with Zonic the Zone Cop, something that Scourge could never possibly know. That breaks the first-person narrator conceit after a full … ooh, not even five pages.

But back to the conversation. After some quick plugging of the Sonic: Genesis arc (in progress) we learn that the prison not only houses prisoners of both genders, which explains the earlier appearance of Anti-Lupe, but that Zonic has just brought in Fiona and her crew from the Prime Zone.

And for a change of pace we get two pages of Scourge being abused, three if you count the Al and Cal reprise in the mess hall. He then starts getting picked on by Anti-Big, whose name here is “Smalls.” OK, Is Ian TRYING to be lame here? Did someone take a copyright out on “Tiny” or what? “Smalls” … Worst. Name. Ever.

No sooner does Smalls make sure Scourge gets up-close and personal with whatever gruel they’re serving in the mess hall than the Destructix clear the table and Fiona enters. She dips her tootsies in the exposition pool herself but Scourge blows up at her: “That’s MY job!” and storms off as we get a throwaway panel with Anti-Mephiles and Anti-Void from the Sonic Shuffle game for the Dreamcast. Shout out to Brian “Sonic Whammy” Sapinski for setting me straight; I originally thought it was a Cosmo recolor.

Scourge heads back to his cell, I think. Doesn’t really matter where he’s headed because the point of getting him out of the mess hall is to have him meet up with … OK, deep breath, fight the nausea … “Geoffrey St. Croix.” I don’t know what’s worse: that name or his new DA hairdo which makes him look like an Elvis devotee. At least he doesn’t waste much time on exposition because he and a couple of enforcers have come to take him to “King Maxx.”

We then get two pages of exposition from Maxx, demonstrating once more that it’s good to be the king, even if Scourge was the one who deposed him in the first place. And it seems that since Maxx thinks Scourge is indeed putting a posse together then that constitutes a violation of their turf agreement.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the beat-down: Maxx’s goons are clocked by the Destructix. Fiona tells Maxx to keep his royal hands to himself. She then escorts Scourge back to his cell for what would appear to be a conjugal visit.

What follows instead are three pages of non-conjugal exposition. And we start out by FINALLY being told why Scourge has been acting like such a wuss: he and everyone else have been fitted out with “inhibitor collars.” They never seemed to inhibit the other prisoners from beating the crap out of Scourge all through this comic, but never mind. We also learn that Scourge never really took over Moebius; he just ACTED like it after beating up some guys in middle management. There’s nothing like contradicting the narrative to keep the readers on their toes; even Maxx never hinted at this state of affairs during his scene. And we find out that Fiona thinks that friends are liabilities and that a gang is nothing more than cannon fodder, which means she’s never going to get a guest shot on “My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic” with that attitude. But it’s enough to get Scourge out of his funk, just in time for the chapter to be over.

HEAD: The primary flaw in this story is on full display on the cover: it’s a Scourge story, which means that you already have to start out with a certain amount of sympathy for this devil to want to stay with it. Which is one thing, but then there’s the fact that it’s also a prison story. Well, let’s call it Prison Lite.

I was reminded of what a REAL prison story can be like when I decided to re-subscribe to cable. I considered getting a satellite dish, but the installer who came out to the house was honest enough to tell me that in order to get any kind of reception he’d have to install the dish about 25 feet from the house on the line between my house and the neighbor’s, and even then the trees in another neighbor’s yard would grow tall enough in a few years to mess with whatever reception I could get. So, having met the Diogenes challenge and found an honest man, I had to get in touch with the cable TV pirates. But I digress.

Having gone back to cable after several years, I should not have been surprised to find “The Shawshank Redemption” still playing in heavy rotation. It’s a great film, don’t get me wrong, but it is as far removed from the prison story in THIS book as an Archie comic is from real life. For one thing, there’s no such thing as a coed prison, ANYWHERE! I mention this because it demonstrates the lengths to which Ian has gone to reunite Scourge and Fiona, even if it means defying convention, logic and biology. Then again, trying to depict a prison with two gravitational axes is defiance enough for me, thanks.

Second, as already mentioned, there are the inhibitor collars that don’t seem to inhibit anyone but Scourge. It allows pretty much everyone else, from the seasoned inmates to the newbie Destructix, to throw punches. Scourge doesn’t have a chance, which may be the idea. More on this development later.

Then there are the other inmates, and I’ve never seen a sorrier collection of retreads and recolors. In an inversion of the old joke about how “The food there was terrible! And such small portions!!”, Ian has overpopulated this story with characters whose sole purpose for existing is to beat the crap out of Scourge and guards whose sole purpose for existing is to look the other way. Going back to “Shawshank,” at least Andy Dufresne only had Bogs and his gang with whom to contend. By the time of the mess hall scene in this comic you need a scorecard to tell the (bit) players apart, and the story exceeded critical mass by the time we were ushered into King Maxx’s presence. Less would definitely have been more here.

Basically, the story alternates between Scourge getting beaten up and characters talking. The end result is that Fiona and her crew are looking to bust Scourge out of there, which is better than watching Scourge getting turned into pancake batter. But we’ll see where this goes. Head Score: 6.

EYE: Nothing to fault with the artwork. Eye Score: 10.

HEART: As you probably know, “The Shawshank Redemption” is the story of Andy Dufresne, a man convicted of murdering his wife and her lover even though he professes his innocence. His innocence makes him a sympathetic character in a not-so-innocent environment.

So the big question here is how to generate any kind of sympathy for the decidedly unsympathetic Scourge. Absolutely nothing about his back story, after all, makes him sympathetic.

So what does Ian do? Cue the retcon!

It’s so easy to try to flip this character it’s ridiculous! Did Scourge take over Moebius? Only in his dreams! He just “beat up a bunch of regional warlords” and assumed the role. His fighting skills? Fit him with a plot devise that lets everyone beat up on him but makes him unable to fight back, and lather rinse repeat, no matter how illogical it seems. Then for contrast throw in some characters who are at least as nasty as he would be under normal circumstances. Voila!: one gratuitous short-order retcon.

What Ian gives us are reasons to treat Scourge with a measure of sympathy (I’d guess an eighth of a teaspoon), but they just aren’t GOOD reasons. Nothing about his character has changed, only his circumstances, and that by way of writer’s caprice. After all, why weren’t we informed until now about Scourge’s not really truly having deposed King Maxx? Because Ian needed Scourge to be that much of a badass in the past. For the purpose of this story he needed to dial it back a little to get the readers to care enough to stay with it for three more issues. I’m sorry, but I’m not going to waste any emotional energy on this guy. He doesn’t deserve it, because he hasn’t earned it, despite Ian’s best efforts. Heart Score: 1.

Sonic Spin: Unfortunately, this has become one of those stories where it must have been way more interesting in the planning stage than in the final execution. In fact, despite Tracy Yardley!’s interesting drawings for the Zone Jail, which show some imagination, the jail we see in this comic looks really stereotypical and uninteresting. His ideas never made it into the comic.

Fan Art: Hannah from Oz shows Scourge getting beaten up (What, again? We just had 22 pages of that!); Melanie, aka MeltyMole, gives us Dr. Fin-as-a-Prelate (if you want a really good look, go to her dA page at http://meltymole.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d3cxjv3) , and Craig reminds us of the Enerjak 2.0 arc.

Fan Funnies: This reminds me of Amy’s tendency to glomp anything shaped like a hedgehog. It looks like they can’t even tell themselves apart on a good day.

Off-Panel: and ANOTHER Sonic variation heard from: it’s the Were-Sonic from Sonic Unleashed (anyone remember that game?). Frankly I wish I could forget it; I can’t even get Sonic to make any progress on the practice area. Then again, RL has been keeping me busy.

Letters: Brian wants to know when Blaze will be back and is told nothing useful, but IS told that the Babylon Rogues will return. He also thinks that Jet makes a good foil for Bean, and Editorial tries to come up with a Unified Hedgehog Theory to explain the varying accounts of Sonic’s origin. Ibrahim writes from Dubai, where he relies on his iPod to read the comic digitally. He’s confused by the Bunnie and Antoine recolors from the Shattered Mirror arc, conflating them not only with the originals but with their offspring from the Mobius: 30 Years Later arc. Like I said, Ian throws characters into the mix like logs on a fire. And another Metal Sonic is on the way, though whether the Super-Sized Silver Sonic in S225 qualifies is unclear. And frankly, there’s nothing really newsworthy about yet another Metal Sonic anyway.