Sonic the Hedgehog #231 (January 2012)

Ben Bates cover: Sonic gets a case of déjà vu as he relives the opening cut scene from Sonic Unleashed where he gets sucked out of Eggman’s flagship. But that’s not the biggest thing on Sonic’s mind as Mecha Sal looms large in his thoughts and on the cover.

“Lost in the Moment”

Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Ben Bates; Ink: Terry Austin; Color: Matt Herms; Lettering: John E. Workman; Editor: Paul Kaminski; Editor-in-Chief: Victor Gorelick: The Droid You’re Looking For: Mike Pellerito

This is one reunion that isn’t doing anything for me, as Sonic meets Mecha Sally. Eggman, however, is amused despite being more than a little banged up. He ignores his first impulse to be rid of both of them, which would have meant that the Doc would be unemployed. Instead, Sal just dumps her old boyfriend, literally.

The Doc’s good mood quickly goes sour when Snively checks in to tell him that their Chaos Emerald is missing. I’m guessing it gave its all and vaporized when Sal had Nicole cross-wire the roboticizer, but that’s just me. As consolation, Eggman deploys the team of Titan and Deadly Cuddles, about whom more later.

To the surprise of absolutely no one who glanced at the cover, Sonic’s free fall is interrupted by Tails flying chase in the Tornado. Sonic isn’t very forthcoming with Tails concerning Sally’s fate. As for Naugus, he’s busy having an episode, about which more later.

Meanwhile, the Death Egg 2 drops what looks like a large basketball. Since it’s “Titan Metal Sonic,” a seriously upsized metal Sonic (not to be confused with Metal Sonic), the ball shape is a hedgehog thing. As much as Eggman isn’t crazy about the name “Mecha Sally,” I don’t care much for Titan Metal Sonic, so I’m going to refer to him as “Hogzilla” for the duration, which won’t be long.

Naturally, the spectacle of Hogzilla freaks out the Mobians. This includes Bunnie who takes to the skies to deal with it. So does Naugus, coming off his episode sounding more territorial than altruistic.

OK, at this point the action gets confusing so here’s what I was able to figure out by jumping ahead a few pages: while the populace flees Hogzilla, Bunnie and Naugus don’t seem to be able to faze him with their attacks. Instead, Naugus unleashes a serious dose of Chaos energy turning Hogzilla into a “crystal golem.” In the course of the attack Bunnie, unfortunately, becomes collateral damage.

On the Death Egg bridge, panic reigns and Mecha Sally appears to be the only one not freaking out. Eggman then orders that the Egg Annihilator Beam be fired up and aimed at New Mobitropolis. The beam is deployed, Naugus tells Hogzilla/Crystal Golem to die like a Mobian then ducks and covers. And the Titan/Hog/Golem goes to pieces after all of 4 pages or so.

Cream spots where Bunnie went down, suffering from a severe case of whatever King Max was suffering from back when his body was partly crystallized. Cream also succumbs to the charms of Deadly Cuddles, aka The Tails Doll, about which MUCH more later.

When the EAB was discharged, it didn’t just write Hogzilla out of the story; it managed to damage both the Tornado and the Freedom Fighter Special. Sonic still wants to pursue Eggman and rescue Sally, but Amy Rose drapes herself all over him claiming he’s in no condition to continue. Antoine, meanwhile, looks like he wants to tear Geoff a couple new bodily orifices.

So let’s review: New Mobitropolis has suffered major damage from the Titan/Hog/Golem and again from its destruction, Naugus took Bunnie out of commission, and what are the Mobians doing? Acclaiming Naugus as their new ruler. It makes about as much sense as anything else that’s happened so far during the Republican primary.

HEAD: It looks like Sally’s getting roboticized is only the beginning of the fun and games. Eggman is still on the warpath, and Naugus is in the game as well. He’s not exactly in concert with the Mobians nor does he have their best interests at heart. Or what passes for a heart in his case. It’s not really clear whether his command “Serve your new master” was his way of ordering Hogzilla to take a bullet for the Mobians, but that was the end-result. Since he is at the center of the back story, we’ll deal more with him later.

I get the feeling that Ian is bringing in all sorts of twists and turns in this story on the way to S250. Example: The Tails Doll.

I needed to go to Know Your Meme to get some background on him. The Tails Doll, which would never have passed quality control at the local Build-a-Bear franchise, started life as one of six unlockable players in the Sonic R game (1997). Unlike his namesake Tails, they couldn’t even be bothered with animating him. He more or less floated limply through the game, accompanied on the soundtrack by a forgettable piece of J-pop, “Can You Feel the Sunshine” which played over and over and over.

Fast-forward to 2005 when Sonic-R was re-released for the Game Cube and the Tails Doll was rediscovered by an Internet-savvy generation of players. The creepiness factor of the limpness of the character combined with the never-ending song nudged the character into associations not so much with J-pop as with J-horror. It became an urban legend or at least was associated with older legends (e.g., “Mary Worthy”). The Know Your Meme database contains a collection of 79 images of The Tails Doll, many of them blood-streaked and dagger-toothed and looking like something out of the Chucky movie franchise. The site has also had 58,000 visits, which is a respectable number. To put it in perspective, however, as of this writing the KYM site for “My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic” has had over 4.9 MILLION visits and contains 35,000 images. But hey, I’m a Sonic fan and a brony so it’s all good. So far I can’t see any reason for The Tails Doll to surface outside of being an in-joke for the fans.

One detail got slipped in near the end which is setting something up for down the road but I’m not sure what. As Sonic and the gang walk past the crystal remnants of the Hogzilla/Golem, Sonic notices something out of place: a tuft of “real grass.” Apparently nanite grass is easily distinguishable from the real deal, a point that hasn’t exactly been belabored before and which belongs to the Blink And You’ll Miss It category here. Whether this means that Gaia/Chip from Sonic Unleashed is going to make an appearance, I don’t know. Whether it means ANYTHING in the scheme of things with this story arc, I don’t know.

Ian isn’t aiming for a swift resolution of anything here. I apologize for the lag in getting these past few issues reviewed, so I know that Bunnie’s fate and that of Hershey will be dealt with in the next few issues. We’re at a dangerous point, however. If Ian throws too much into the plot it could get away from him. The rule for seasoning food is: you can always add but you can never subtract. The comic book corollary to that rule is: you can always add and thanks to loose continuity you can then ignore. But don’t get me started on loose continuity. Head Score: 7.

EYE: Ben Bates’s artwork is good, and it’s nice to see him using little touches like the Sonic logo to designate the pinpoint Sonic falling from the Death Egg. He also relies on an appropriately chaotic page layout during the attack scenes. Eye Score: 9.

HEART: Aside from the Sally Bot’s dumping Sonic, the major Heart moment is when Bunnie got clipped by Naugus and came down with Max Acorn Syndrome. This isn’t exactly a positive development, but nobody outside of the Freedom Fighters seems to have noticed. For the populace, it was enough that Naugus took care of Hogzilla and the Egg Annihilator Beam, with some not-so-subtle digs at Nicole in the process. But Bunnie will be more of the focus in the next issue, in the same way that Naugus is the focus of the next story. Heart Score: 8.

“Haunted”

Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Evan Stanley; Ink: Evan Stanley; Color: Evan Stanley; Lettering: John E. Workman.

Let’s backtrack: As the effect of S225’s reset wears off, Naugus gets a visit from some old friends: the three ugly Ixis wizards who eventually fused to become the Naugus we’ve come to know and dislike. They spend three pages harassing their host before he tells them to keep it down to a low roar. End of episode, end of story.

HEAD: Naugus had no back story when he debuted in the second season of the SatAM Sonic. He wasn’t even a Saruman-grade high-level wizard; instead, he was more of a trickster who got dumped into the Void after telling Robotnik how to get there, and whose idea of revenge on the fat man was giving him a pig’s head in place of his old one. Pat Allee and Ben Hurst never bothered to concoct a back story for him since as it turned out the show never had a third season. That was left to Archie’s creatives, specifically to Karl Bollers in “And Then There Was One” (S66).

Speaking of collateral damage, as we were about Bunnie earlier, Naugus himself became collateral damage with the S225 cosmic reset, particularly his psyche. To understand how, we need to revisit one of the fads of the 1980s and ‘90s: multiple personalities.

Multiple Personality Disorder, now officially known as Dissociative Identity Disorder, has been around for a long time, chronicled in popular works such as “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and “The Three Faces of Eve.” It really captured the popular imagination when the book “Sybil” came out in 1973, alleging that thanks to various childhood traumas a woman developed 16 different personalities.

But after a period when M.P.D./D.I.D. was really hot, psychologists started asking the hard questions, prompted by the number of M.P.D. patients whose personalities weren’t all that separate as a result of clinical testing. Then, too, there was the “false memory” phenomenon where it appeared that therapists were nudging their patients toward a forgone conclusion rather than objectively evaluating their mental state. The result is that D.I.D. became a rare diagnosis, with maybe one new case a year diagnosed.

That didn’t stop Ian Flynn from inflicting this condition on Naugus, who could also be described at this point as a high-functioning schizophrenic. Because the cosmic reset literally dis-integrated Naugus’s three personalities, they’ve re-entered the comic to heckle their host somewhat after the manner of Statler and Waldorf from the Muppets. At least, one HOPES that the three mopes can be as funny. It’s a pretty gutsy plot development that makes Naugus more interesting if not more sympathetic. Head Score: 8.

EYE: Some artistic heavy lifting by newcomer Evan Stanley. The device on the next-to-last page where the faces of the three wizards are overlaid on top of Naugus’s is tricky but extremely effective. Eye Score: 10.

HEART: So it looks like Mobius’s new leader by popular acclamation is mentally unbalanced. This is hardly a new development; in fact, a major precedent is recorded in the Bible.

In the book of 1^st Samuel chapter 8, Israel which had been a tribal confederacy started demanding that they become a monarchy with a strong executive. This was due to the fact that the surrounding monarchies were sending their troops into the country on an irregular basis. The prophet Samuel spoke for the continuation of the confederacy and listed a number of adverse effects of having a monarch, including conscription and slavery. The popular reaction was: “So noted, but we STILL want a king!”

The king they got, who was duly anointed by Samuel, was Saul son of Kish. He was certainly photogenic enough, described as tall and handsome, but when it came time to present him to the people there was a delay because he was hiding “among the equipment” as the New King James puts it.

From there, things went well at first but then Saul started going downhill. It doesn’t take a degree in psychology to read about Saul’s mood swings, insomnia, and fits of rage and wonder whether or not he was bipolar. His tirade against the priesthood in chapter 22 can easily be described as a paranoid rant. In the end, overcome by depression, he committed suicide in battle. You’d think that the Israelis would have had second thoughts about the value of a monarchy at this point. But by the time Saul died there was a hot new political star on the scene: David son of Jesse. And the politics of the Middle East settled into a routine that endures to this day.

So Naugus appears to be in line for the job as new ruler of Mobius, which begs the questions: ”What about the Acorns?” and “How is Eggman going to take this?” A third question that deserves to be asked is: “How will Mobians react when Naugus starts having conversations with his three alter egos?” I picture a lot of Mobians saying “Seriously, I never voted for that guy.” Still, in the annals of mad super-villains, it’s kind of refreshing that Ian takes a stab at giving us one with a somewhat recognizable mental illness other than off-the-shelf megalomania. It’s certainly a step up from his giving Rosy the Moebian an over-the-top case of comic book psychosis. Heart Score: 9.

Fan Art: Brittany M. gives us Mecha Sally, the Other Brittany draws a tame Tails Doll, Angie shows Sonic and Tails, and Kelsey shows Sonic the Non-Swimmer and Sally the Non-Mecha cavorting in an octopus’s garden.

Fan Funnies: Thalia Williams demonstrated why you shouldn’t drink anything at the computer. Unless you have a membrane keyboard. But who’s dorky enough to admit to having one of THOSE?

Off-Panel: Ian and Jon Gray demonstrate what happens when you’re in the same room as the Tails Doll and your back is turned.

Sonic Grams: Just one letter, from Carson in Alberta, Canada. He had the impression that the comic might end with S230; the fact that his letter landed in S231 pretty much addresses that issue. He asks about Bivalve; better he should have gone online to check the Sonic Wiki or the Mobius Encyclopedia. He wants to see more of Archie’s backlog available for media such as the iPod; sorry, but I’m not going to spend that kind of money to look at a comic that’s harder for me to read than it is now. And he guesses that the traitor Silver has been looking for is Patch the Moebian.

Sonic Spin: Paul Kaminski has Evan Stanley come out and take a well-deserved bow. Unfortunately, you need a microscope to see the thumbnails at the bottom of the page; you’re better off going to her deviantArt page.