Sonic the Hedgehog #234 (April 2012)

Fry/Austin/Herms cover: it’s a dynamic design, but the rendering of the saber and Sonic’s left hand makes me think that someone has been watching too many 3D movies. This is as close as you can get without a pair of freaky glasses.

“Unthinkable”

Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Steven Butler; Ink: Terry Austin; Color: Matt Herms; Lettering: John E. Workman; Assistant Editor: Vincent Lovallo; Editor: Paul Kaminski; Editor-in-Chief: Victor Gorelick; Bomb Disposal Robot: Mike Pellerito: Sega Licensing reps: Anthony Gaccione and Cindy Chau

After a one-page recap, we find the Acorns loading up the Royal SUV and ready to relocate to Feral Forest. That’s the cover story, anyway, as Sonic and Elias stage whisper to each other. Among other things, Elias fears that his continuing presence will further polarize the populace; yeah, as if the sham of a trial involving Geoff didn’t matter. So, with Sonic, Bunnie, Antoine, and Tails and Amy overhead, they move out …

Just in time for the Death Egg to re-emerge from wherever and poop out a half dozen escape pods loaded with EggSWATS. Everybody gets into the act, including Bunnie, despite the fact that nobody issued her so much as a plastic shield and she’s fighting au naturel, relatively speaking.

Back at the Death Egg, Eggman unleashes Metal Sonic and Metal Sally. Using some serious blades in her arms, Sal clips the wings of the Tornado. We then cut to the surface where the Metals start knocking Sonic and Bunnie around. Eggman’s next trick is to shoot lasers at the Acorn SUV, but they fail to hit the target because the vehicle is equipped with a “target scrambler” (which comes as standard equipment).

At this point, Eggy gives the order for Metal Sonic to “latch on and self-destruct.” While Sonic tangles with Sally, and not in a good way, Antoine intercepts Metal Sonic before it can make like a hood ornament on the Royal SUV. But since there’s no more CCA to stop him, Eggman gives the order to blow up Metal Sonic.

And despite the fact that he blowed up REAL good and that we get a slew of reaction shots of horrified good guys, Antoine appears to be in one piece and we don’t see a drop of blood anywhere. Al Qaeda is going to want to have a long talk with Eggman.

For his part, Eggman orders the op to be suspended because he figures that with Sally compromised, Bunnie normalized and Antoine possibly turned into roadkill, the effect on Mobian morale beats merely assassinating the Royals. Lien-Da feels the situation calls for a face palm. Snively objects more strenuously and is told to go away because he’s killing Eggman’s buzz. And THIS, as it turns out, is the point where Snively goes over the edge and engineers his escape in “Scrambled: Part 1.”

Back in the moment, as the shock continues to set in, the Royals are told to haul their tails out of there while Sonic hauls what’s left of Antoine to a doctor. I honestly didn’t plan it this way, but I happened to start writing this review on Memorial Day.

HEAD: On the one hand, this is the biggest development in the comic since Tommy Turtle got the hint and left the continuity. On the other hand, despite the impressive turn of events, Ian doesn’t clear the bar that was raised on April 21, 2004. That was the date that one of the charter members of the comic strip “Doonesbury,” B.D., lost a leg in the Iraq War.

The nature of war, and of war wounds, had changed since the strip began during the Vietnam War. In Iraq’s counterinsurgency, you didn’t run the risk of getting cut in two by machine gun fire. Body armor had evolved considerably. Unfortunately, a rocket-propelled grenade packs way more of a punch, and so does an IED. The Improvised Explosive Devise played David to the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV or Humvee for short) Goliath of the US. An unarmored model cost about $65,000 while the up-armored model cost $140,000, and either one could be knocked out by a roadside bomb that could be put together with $50 worth of parts. This was how B.D. lost his leg. Garry Trudeau, with exemplary dedication to his craft, accompanied wounded soldiers when they were evaced to get an idea of their medical care. Trudeau also created another Iraq soldier, a wirehead nicknamed Toggle, to exemplify another major type of casualty: traumatic brain injury.

What Antoine’s condition is, I don’t know, and the comic appears to be thoroughly content to be ambiguous about it. This is pretty much a situation where Ian and Archie have their cake (Antoine meets Metal Sonic at Ground Zero) and eat it, too (his death-cheat is as sanitized as the demise of any Disney villain).

Yes, I said “death-cheat.” What else could it be? There are still seventeen issues, practically a year and a half’s worth, for the comic to drag this out until they reach #250, to which Paul Kaminski has alluded more than once in his Sonic Spin columns. The practical implication, of course, is that nothing means anything so far: Sally’s roboticization, Geoffrey’s machinations, the missing Chaos Emerald, even Naugus’s very existence could all be undone if the high point of S250 is that the Cosmic Reset Button gets one more shot. Then we could find ourselves back before “Endgame” even.

I’ve dwelt on the explosion because, let’s face it, everything else about the story is merely a way of teeing it up. Antoine got in harm’s way because he was helping escort the Royals out of town, and when your main story is The Acorns Go Into Exile that really doesn’t contain much in the way of Action And More Action. So throw in a couple of preliminary fights before the Main Event: Antoine gets blasted.

That may explain what Ian had in mind for this story, but it neither explains nor justifies his use of text boxes that appear to be excerpts from the journal we never knew about that was being kept by Antoine. This of course is the comic’s way of doubling down on the poignancy of a character possibly buying a couple acres of the harp farm. But it just doesn’t work.

For the diary device to work, and for the writing to take more of a cue from the epistolary novel (i.e., a novel that consists of letters or diary entries and such), they simply can’t settle for explaining in words what’s happening in picture form in the same frame, as on page [5] where we’re both told and shown that Amy is riding on the wing of the Tornado. Since all the information is in the artwork, the text box is superfluous. If you’re going to have these kind of text box entries in a comic book, they should enrich the narrative by adding something other than what’s going on visually, whether humorous miscalculation or irony or cynicism or just plain contradiction. The only place where it comes close to working is on the last page, and the text used is so generic that it brings nothing to the party. The gimmick is thus totally wasted. Head Score: 6.

EYE: Steven Butler does good work here, but he is also a party to the conspiracy of silence concerning Antoine’s fate. Some of the reaction shots in the story, particularly from Bunnie and Snively, are seriously overdone. It’s as if Steven is overcompensating for the implausible survival of Antoine in one piece after Metal Sonic does its impersonation of a suicide vest. Maybe the preadolescents were fooled; this old man was not. Eye Score: 7.

HEART: I can really relate to this story; after all, I took a turn at killing off Antoine myself.

In “Mobius Apocalypse,” I didn’t resort to a dramatic explosion. Instead, I took care of business off-stage as Antoine rescued Tails when an earthquake caused a roof beam in a hut to break. Antoine pushed Tails out of the way, but the beam broke Antoine’s neck. It wasn’t flashy but it was effective; as one character said, “I believe he died quickly.”

The difference is that I wasn’t going to fool around in this story; this was going to be a dark ride and I wasn’t going to lie about it. Antoine died, there was a funeral for him, and later on he met with Princess Sally. Now I wasn’t going for an off-the-shelf zombie angle where he tries picking her brain, literally, but I was turning Mobius inside-out as if it were in its slow-motion death throes. This wasn’t a death cheat in the comic book tradition, but an example of that horror staple, the Dead Who Won’t Stay Dead, used in stories from “The Monkey’s Paw” to “Pet Sematary.”

Emotionally, Ian tries for tragedy here with Antoine exploded on by Metal Sonic, but what should have been simplicity itself (death by random violence) is gummed up by a number of hedged bets: Antoine remains in one piece, there’s no blood or gore, and he’s (improbably) still breathing at story’s end.

Worst of all, we never get to see his face. If you don’t think that’s important, remember the opening sequence of “WALL-E.” That film’s opening, with its from-space-to-earth pan accompanied by a Broadway show tune, took its time revealing the “face” of the robotic hero. That was, of course, deliberate. As limited as it was in its expressiveness, those camera eyes were a supreme example of character animation; in some ways, WALL-E was actually even MORE expressive than many cartoon characters and a good number of human actors.

In the case of Antoine, we are denied this, for good or ill. He wasn’t pronounced dead, but to keep the face turned away from the reader comes pretty darn close because it distances him. This works in Ian’s favor by playing up the ambiguity of Antoine’s fate, but still the stench of a death cheat hangs heavy on this story. Heart Score: 4

“Dark Hearts”

Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Ben Bates; Ink: Terry Austin, Color: Matt Herms; Lettering: John E. Workman

We start by Naugus blowing in a call to Eggman on a Chaos Emerald. “To what do I owe the displeasure?” Eggy asks; that’s what I want to know. Seems Naugus wants to pass along some intel on Sonic and the gang, but in short order it turns into a backstory duet:

When Robotnik first entered the Zone instead of being a mere spectator, he ran into Feist, which caused him to exclaim “Great balls of cholesterol!” OK, I think if this story serves no other purpose, it HAS given us the Worst Line of Dialogue for 2012. To date, anyway. But I digress.

Despite Naugus’s toying with Robotnik, the fat man still managed to have Snively haul his sizable butt out of the Zone which eventually was taken over by Feist. And in Eggman’s own words, “… and blah blah blah, you know the rest.” It then takes all of one panel for Naugus to tell Eggy about the Royals heading out of town and for them to agree on an ambush. So the two of them were in on the plan. Like we couldn’t have figured that out for ourselves.

HEAD: I figured we were heading for trouble because of Paul Kaminski’s text box: “This occurs before the main story.” That means BOTH stories in this issue took place out of sequence; this story takes place before “Unthinkable” which in turn sets up “Scrambled: Part 1.” I don’t know if Ian planned for all this chronological revisionism or if someone in Editorial sniffed out the plot holes and figured that something had to be done about them.

I can only assume that Ian either had a pretty good idea where the story was going overall and how the narrative would be parceled out between “Sonic the Hedgehog” and “Sonic Universe,” or he’s been working closely with Vince Lovallo and Paul Kaminski. That’s what editors do, especially when it comes to serialized fiction, the narrative precursor of comic books.

The form’s greatest practitioner during the 19^th century, at the time of its development, was Charles Dickens. Many of his novels appeared in monthly (and in some cases, weekly) installments, later collected in finished editions. Like comic books, the installments cost only a fraction of the price of a finished book; this did wonders for marketing and distribution. I haven’t found out whether the magazines in which Dickens’s stories appeared, with titles such as Master Humphrey’s Clock and Household Words, included summations of the plot up to that installment (c.f. the “Previously” page for “Unthinkable” in this issue). I also don’t know whether the chapters might have been rearranged by an editor before being published as a novel.

That said, I have to wonder whether this 5-pager is all that necessary to the story arc as a whole. It’s essentially a flashback sandwich with 2.5 pages of back story between two slices of doughy dialog. It may be entertaining, but is it necessary?

As I mentioned above, only one panel on one page is really tied into the story. The fact that Naugus and Eggman were in collusion with regard to the ambush in “Unthinkable” could just have easily been tucked into a panel or two of the lead story in the form of a thought balloon by Naugus, perhaps in the form of an ironic counterpoint to a public “fond farewell.” The cold truth of the matter is that this story could be dropped from any compilations and it wouldn’t be missed. The fact that it mainly uses dialog instead of text boxes (c.f. Karl Bollers’s “The Last Robian”) is an improvement, but the entire enterprise remains of questionable value. Head Score: 2.

EYE: With no real ground to cover and an unnecessary back story taking up half the page budget, it’s really up to Ben Bates, Terry Austin, and Matt Herms to do the heavy lifting. And they do deliver. We get a chance to see some SatAM Robotnik where he still had that proto-Klingon ridge on his skull, a jazzy BEV of Naugus in the opening panel, and a sweet next-to-last panel where Geoff’s face is in shadow due to the kind of atmospheric back-lighting Orson Welles used in “Citizen Kane.” It’s great art in the service of weak filler. Eye Score: 10.

HEART: “And blah blah blah.” Yeah, that pretty much sums it up. Heart Score: 1.

Sonic Spin: “The road to #250 has begun.” I TOLD you Paul Kaminski is looking down the road to where the entire story arc may very well be negated, when he’s not selling something.

Fan Art: We now have to start calling this “Classic Bunnie” (by Katherine), and a very cute Classic Bunnie it is, but Trisha gives us Modern Amy because, well, because now it’s too easy to mistake Classic Amy for Crazy Rosy. And Cindy draws an ageless Metal Sonic.

Fan Funnies: Sonic At The Beach means Tails working his tail off to keep Sonic cool and Knuckles using his head as a footstool. I suppose the licensing reps from Sega could have told you the same thing.

Off-Panel: No doubt about it, Tails needs another hat. A new set of magic words wouldn’t hurt, either. Maybe “Azarath metrion zinthos!” Archie should be able to have SOMETHING to show for their ill-fated cross-promotion deal with DC from a few years back.

Sonic-Grams: Lonerli has good things to say about the writing for S233 and for Antoine’s development as “a strong and solid character.” So naturally he gets blown up in THIS issue. Jon Gray gets a well-deserved shout-out, as do the Knothole Royals. Evan’s letter deals with the Tails doll, Bivalve, Editorial self-referencing, and the fact that Eggman is annoying and egg-shaped. You know, the important stuff.