Sonic Universe #7 (Oct 2009)
     Yardley!/Hunzeker cover: King Shadow is back and basking in
his own green glow.  Very impressive.


     "Mobius ... er ... Sonic 30 Years Later: What's Old Is New
Again"
     Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Tracy Yardley!; Ink: Jim Amash;
Color: Jason Jensen; Lettering: Teresa Davidson; Editor: Mike
Pellerito; Assistant Editor: Paul Kaminski (debut); Editor-in-
Chief: Victor Gorelick; Sega Licensing: Cindy Chau and Jerry Chu

     You gotta feel sorry for Sally here; not only does she have
to lug along the knocked-out Silver, but she also has to carry on
a conversation with the Royal Tweebs.  All the while she's got to
serve up the necessary exposition, sound casual about it, avoid
using the p-word ("Panic"), and rein in Sonia when she wants to
give the bad guys a piece of her 4-year-old mind.  Kid obviously
takes after her mother, bless her.
     Meanwhile, Sonic, Lara-Su, and the Prower kids have made it
to Argyll's place, where he receives them while observing as much
of the proper formalities as the situation will allow.  Instead
of refreshments, however, he serves some back-up.
     Cut back to the castle where Shadow is getting a serving of
Exposition To Go from Lien-Da.  She, however, is brought up short
when Shadow doesn't show much interest in reclaiming the throne;
he's got something else on his mind, of which Lien-Do doesn't
approve.
     But we cut back to Argyll's crib where we meet Jacque and
Belle, the D'Coolette kids.  I'll have more to say about them
later.  A LOT more!
     After the round of introductions, and a reminder from the
Prower offspring that they're in this story too, Sonic officially
convenes the Freedom Fighters 2.0.  And not a moment too soon.
     Shadow begins communing with the awkwardly-named "Tikhaos,"
who appears to have the shape of Tikal but lives in a bowl of
day-glow green liquid.  Lien-Da is not pleased with Shadow's
intention to release her.  Shadow then points out an arm-band
device of Lien-Da's that protects her "from the shift in the
time-line."  That was part of the fun and games of Ian's earlier
reset of M:25YL (in S166-167) where it seemed like everybody
appeared to be conscious of changes in the space-time continuum. 
Anyway, it's no longer a concern of Lien-Da as Shadow summarily
destroys the device and banished Lien-Da from the continuity.  On
television they accomplish the same thing by using bullets but
the CCA frowns on that sort of thing.
     While Shadow prepares to liberate Tikhaos, Sonic and the
D'Coolettes barge in through the front gate while Lara-Su and the
Prowers fly through a nearby window, only to learn that Skye is
still learning the fine points of this whole flying business,
like how to control it.  Of course, since Skye hasn't got his
ability broken to saddle yet, Lara-Su sends him into a control
room crawling with Dark Presence members.  That does sufficient
damage and Melody gives Sonic's team the all-clear while Argyll
reports that the Dark Presence is in serious disarray and
something big is going down in the catacombs.
     While Lara-Su shuts down the communication terminal where
they are (think Han Solo's method of break off communication with
the Death Star in the original Star Wars movie   you know, the
FUN one), Argyll puts Sonic through to the Panic Room where Sally
reminds Sonic of Tikhaos.
     Back down below, Tikhaos doesn't look so good; it doesn't
help that she looks like she's been sculpted out of pistachio ice
cream.  As for Shadow, he's in no mood to contest Sonic for the
kingship of anything; he'd rather trash the whole planet by
overloading Tikhaos with "Chaos energy" while the Dark Hands beat
Dark Feet and get out of there.  Because too much Chaos energy +
Tikhaos = Perfect Tikhaos.  Somebody better send out for some
Chaos Emeralds with a side order of Chao.

     HEAD: OK, this story hit a major brick wall for me when we
were introduced to Jacque and Belle D'Coolette, the offspring of
Bunnie and Antoine.  Hey, another set of twins is something I can
relate to, being a twin myself.  I can NOT, however, find any
valid reason for them to take after their mother by having one
bionic arm and one bionic leg each.
     Whatever happened to Bunnie when she was partially
roboticized, it simply could not have affected her at the genetic
level which is where and how it would have affected her kids. 
I've said repeatedly that science isn't my best event, but I DO
know that Bunnie's bionics fall outside the realm of "acquired
characteristics."
     The theory of acquired characteristics has a long history,
going back to Hippocrates and Aristotle.  Closer to our own day,
it was championed by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829), Charles
Darwin (who called his version of it "pangenesis"), and Trofim
Lysenko (1898-1976) who based Stalin-era agricultural policy in
the Soviet Union on it.  Basically, it's the theory that "changes
in physiology acquired over the life of an organism (such as the
enlargement of a muscle through repeated use) may purportedly be
transmitted to offspring" [Source: Wikipedia].
     Which sounds good, but real life just doesn't work that way. 
No matter how many changes happen to an organism, they're not
necessarily translated into the necessary genetic changes that
are passed along to succeeding generations.  Forgive me if the
discussion gets a little coarse at this point but scientific
understanding demands it.  Perhaps the simplest way to disprove
the idea of acquired characteristics is for the men in the
audience to drop their pants.
     If there's one procedure that significantly changes the
physiology of the male human organism, it's circumcision.  And
after thousands of years of performing the procedure in a variety
of cultures, either shortly after birth or at puberty, you'd
think that pre-circumcised males would have started to show up
somewhere on this planet.  But it just hasn't worked out that
way, just as Lysenko's attempts at applying the theory to Soviet
agriculture consistently met with failure (Lysenko's theories
were finally and formally denounced and Mendelian genetics
reinstated in the Soviet scientific establishment in 1964).
     All this is by way of saying that THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO
GOOD REASON WHATSOEVER FOR JACQUE AND BELLE TO BE PARTIALLY
ROBOTICIZED JUST BECAUSE THAT FATE BEFELL BUNNIE!  Sorry to yell
like that, but no matter how fantastic a story is in its details, 
I firmly believe that there's still a need for it to be plausible
... that it still has to play by the rules of its own universe,
no matter how extraordinary that universe may be.
     Unfortunately, Ian failed to establish what happened to
bring the kids to this state when by all rights they should have
been born intact.  I can understand why he didn't try and work it
into the dialogue: it would have brought the story to a grinding
halt.  But dropping them into the middle of this story without an
explanation is not only bad storytelling, it's just plain
offensive.  Up until that point, there weren't any serious breaks
with the Sonic continuity per se.  Things were a little bent out
of shape, but never too seriously, and that's OK.  But this is
way over the line.
     And no, I don't believe in doing it because it's "cool." 
For the record, I firmly believe that just because something is
cool, whether pirates or ninjas or vampires or space aliens or
whatever, that doesn't automatically justify their putting in an
appearance in the Sonic continuity.  They have to make SENSE, and
whatever happened to these two just doesn't make sense.  If Ian
needed someone who could fly, I don't understand why he couldn't
have just brought in the original Bunnie to chaperone her
daughter or something.  Freedom fighting was never just a
youngster's game.
     I kind of felt the same way with Ian's presentation of
"Tikhaos."  It seemed a straight-forward transition at the end of
the first Sonic Adventure game, hinted at in the final piece of
artwork during the closing credits: Chaos 0 and Tikal surrounded
by Chao.  She had become the Heart of Chaos, as the incantation
(which Ian has repeated to less and less effect each time)
stated: "Chaos is power ... enriched by the heart."  This was a
completely satisfactory narrative turn for the game, something
which Archie was unable to do when they tried to adapt the game
for the comic and the result was a monstrous helping of hash. 
Part of the blame for that state of affairs, though, rested with
the anal-retentive game developers who refused to spell out what
the game narrative was for the benefit of Archie Comics.
     Here, Ian takes the game character development, dumps it in
a blender, and mashes the "Liquefy" button.  Perfect Chaos, the
beast whom Sonic has to deal with at the final stage of the game,
now has the same relation to Tikal that the Incredible Hulk has
to Bruce Banner.  This is not an improvement.
     To be fair, the taking of the castle works very well, with
Ian exploiting the humor of letting the novice Skye take over the
control room by virtue of his being a noob when it comes to
flying.  He's easily the most original character in the cast, and
the most likable.  The way Melody relates to him also feels
right.
     I was seriously disappointed when the previous Team Dark
story arc (SU1-4) ended with the taming of the team members and
their turning into dogs of the military by the final panel, thus
dulling whatever edge they had acquired as the story developed. 
Here, even if you're willing to give Ian a pass on Jacque and
Belle, the Tikal-Chaos revisionism threatens to make this story
jump the rails.  I'll be more interested in seeing if he can pull
the story out of the dive it's in than in the fate of Mobius. 
Head Score: 5.
     EYE: Yardley! does great work here, taking advantage of the
cutting back and forth between Argyll's crib and the castle.  His
treatment of Tikhaos, however, is a disappointment.  And even if
one accepts the plausibility of the bionic limbs of the
D'Coolette kids (which I most emphatically don't), these look
like bad action figure add-ons.  Eye Score: 7.
     HEART: Up until now, Ian hasn't let himself wander too far
from the story.  As a result, the relationships between the
characters were pretty self-evident as were the emotional
subtexts.  That, unfortunately, starts to break down here.
     The fate of Lien-Da is a case in point.  In the first
installment we were able to get a fairly good read on her
animosity toward Sonic and his rule even before some of the
pieces (e.g., Rutan) had fallen into place.  Her firing an RPG at
Sonic may have been a shock but it came as no surprise.  This was
fleshed out in the following installment in her extended
exposition as she resurrected Shadow, but it was still within the
realm of acceptability.
     But then we have Shadow simply dispatching her by snapping
off a device that compensates for some kind of time shift, the
provenance of which has gone unexplained.  No sooner does the
reader ask "Wait, what?" than she's out of the picture for good. 
I know that this was an expedient way to get rid of her character
without resorting to cold-blooded murder on Shadow's part, but it
was done so summarily that you almost wish he HAD killed her off. 
It still would have been in character and wouldn't have put a
hitch in the pacing.
     The same problem of pacing and provenance is what makes the
introduction of Belle and Jacque so just plain wrong.  Anybody
who knows Bunnie understands how she came by her limbs, but no
explanation whatsoever is given for these two.  Frankly it feels
like exploitation.  Yet it too is passed over in order to hustle
the story along.
     Me, I WANTED to know what happened.  Was there a problem in
utero that had to be addressed?  If so, how did Bunnie handle it,
especially emotionally?  If not, what kind of weird symmetry
dictated that it would literally cost each of these kids an arm
and a leg?  And at what age?
     These are the kind of questions that come up when dealing
with Heart issues.  And despite Ian's masterful handling of the
relationship between the Prower siblings, between Sonic and Sally
and their kids, and even in the tete-a-tete between Lara-Su and
Dimitri in the preceding issue, this just flat out did not work. 
Argyll doesn't even factor in; he has a few good lines but is
otherwise a cipher.  Still, it's a shame that in a story
apparently as well thought-out in all other respects as this one,
that the readers were more or less clobbered over the head by
Belle and Jacque.  Maybe someday Ian will deal with what happened
... if the fanfic writers don't beat him to it.  Heart Score: 5.


     Off-Panel: And now for something completely different, and
welcome too.  While the father-son interplay in the first strip
has the feel of a good domestic 4-frame gag strip, such as Scott
and Kirkman's "Baby Blues" or Lynn Johnston's "For Better Or For
Worse," the latter strip skips the gentle humor and goes for LOL
absurdity, on the order of "The Far Side."  And it works.

     Letters: Leon is told that the Chaotix will be coming to the
book as soon as the current story arc wraps up.  Jenny writing
from the Old Blighty wants to see more of Silver, who so far has
been seriously underutilized in this story arc and has spent a
good portion of it unconscious.  Terrance thinks Omega should
talk more street; somehow I don't think lines such as "Useless
heaps of metal; I'll eliminate them all" [from "Sonic Heroes"]
would be improved if translated into something along the lines of
"You goin' down, beeyotch!"  He's also a fan of the darker
Shadow-type games, but Editorial wants to keep the edge and have
fun as well; that balancing act is THEIR headache.  This present
story arc actually manages to do a good job of that, mixing old
school Sonic repartee with "24" plotting.  Joshua, another robot
fan, learns that Knuckles (who's had only a quick guest
appearance so far in this arc) will join the Chaotix in the next
arc.  But that will come after we clean our plates of what the
comic is dishing out now.