Sonic the Hedgehog #235 (May 2012)

Yardley!/Austin/Herms cover: Meet Silver the Hedgehog, art critic. By turning his mystic mojo on an ancient painting, done by the school of Yardley!/Austin/Herms, he thinks he can learn whatever he’s trying to learn this time around. It’s a decent cover, especially the light reflection in his eyes.

“Remember the Fallen”

Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Tracy Yardley!; Ink: Terry Austin; Color: Matt Herms; Lettering: John E. Workman; Assistant Editor: Vince Lovallo; Editor: Paul Kaminski; Editor-in-Chief: Victor Gorelick; Apprentice Mortician: Mike Pellerito; Sega Licensing reps: Anthony Gaccione and Cindy Chau

As we rejoin “Extreme Makeover: Onyx Island Edition,” Silver has just discovered a hidden room behind the sliding bookcase. While that may be an architectural cliché left over from every horror movie made in the 1930s, the hidden room turns out to be a library conveniently stocked with all kinds of material on “the old freedom fighters.” So, does Silver apply for a stipend and settle down for the next few years to assimilate all this new-found data? Nah, because that would sound too much like work. What he does instead is to snap up a copy of “Antoine’s Journal.” OK, seriously, do people still write their names on the front of their diaries anymore? I can expect to see a person’s name on a Facebook page, because they WANT other people to read it. But the Journal appears to Silver to be the answer to everything.

Meanwhile, in the relative present, Bunnie’s bringing Antoine and the readers up to speed. Rather than try what worked for King Max back in the day, they’ve got Ant hooked up to a Power Ring … somehow or other. In any event, she decides a bunny’s gotta do what a bunny’s gotta do and after a one-sided farewell she goes rogue.

It’s Back to the Future for the plot as Silver meets with his thesis advisor to explain the significance of his findings. Mogul lets us know that while Naugus was re-establishing himself on the throne and Eggman was up to his usual shtick, he himself preferred to sit back on his wooly haunches. But by the time the “traitor” had acted, it was too late. Yet despite the fact that the journal is fragmentary at best, Silver believes it supports the theory that Antoine was the one who helped Naugus take the throne, and he wants to check it out. As a precaution, Mogul keeps custody of the Time Stone and replaces it with a set of instructions on bailing out of the past before shooting Silver back in time.

He arrives just as Commander Prower checks in on Tails. Amadeus Prower hasn’t really acted like it before, but he’s still Tails’s father. Turns out Tails has been burning the midnight whatever in the hangar looking to set things right in his own way and under his own power. But the Commander gets a field promotion to Dad as Tails breaks down completely. It seems everybody expects Antoine to take a turns for the worst; if he was going to pull through, they wouldn’t be talking as if he’s already dead and gone.

The Council, meanwhile, meets with Naugus literally looming over them, and pushing for a vote on exiling Nicole, who at least is present for the hearing so that this doesn’t become a star chamber. A star chamber, BTW, is a hearing where one’s guilt or innocence (but usually guilt) is determined in secret and the subject only finds out about it when they’re arrested pending execution. So at least Naugus is making a show of playing by the rules. Nicole affirms that the nanites are pretty much self-sustaining and that she’d only be needed for new work. Naugus hints that he’d rather rely on old school construction techniques, which I’ll bet includes slave labor. Nicole would be quarantined off-site and pretty much only able to communicate via a remote hook-up. The trump card, apparently, is that the citizenry are still freaked out about her. You think they’d update their Stuff We Really Got To Worry About file.

The vote in favor of quarantining Nicole is 6-1, with Rotor the lone objector. Uncle Chuck tries to give Rotor a lesson in Political Expediency 101, but instead the big guy sings a chorus of “Take This Job And Shove It” and walks out, stating that the Council has betrayed the Mobians, though Silver isn’t present to hear him use the B-word.

While Uncle Chuck seems oddly satisfied that Rotor showed some moxie, Nicole chases after him to talk him out of quitting. He says he’s doing it because he couldn’t help Ant or Sally either. It turns out that Silver IS present, as something of a stalker, taking all this in. This tells him that his Boomer Theory was a little off. Ya think?

Meanwhile, Sonic has secluded himself in his room as his way of coping. Amy tries to get through to him, but he stays in his room. Amy then breaks down herself in the presence of Sonic’s ‘rents, and Sonic decides that maybe he should come up for air. It’s only then that he notices Silver skulking about. Silver tries to get a couple of words in edgewise; unfortunately, the two words are “Antoine” and “traitor,” the worst possible combination at this point. Sonic then drags Silver by the dreads into Antoine’s hospital room. While there, Sonic discovers Bunnie’s farewell letter. When Silver then tries to turn his theory on a dime and blame Bunnie, Sonic REALLY gets mad and tells him to hit the inter-dimensional highway. Then, just what we need, Geoff drops in to salute Antoine in a way that’s so guarded and disconnected it can’t help but sound phony. Somebody needs to put him on intravenous veritaserum.

As Sonic bemoans the fact that the freedom fighters have come undone, Who runs into Silver? Exactly. He then recruits the hapless hedgehog for the Freedom Fighters Tribute Band.

HEAD: Why do I get the sense that Who and Silver are cut from the same cloth? They each seem to have a measure of self-assurance that I really don’t trust. If these two don’t land themselves or each other in some seriously hot water, I’ll be greatly surprised.

Speaking of surprises, it doesn’t seem like that big of a surprise that Silver turns up a small library full of stuff on the freedom fighters but it’s like he loses interest in all else when he discovers Antoine’s journal. This tells me that, whatever Silver’s credentials as a hero, he’d never make a good historian. And it’s not like he has a train to catch; being in the future, he could take another year or two analyzing the journal and still land in the same bit of space-time he was aiming for anyway.

Speaking of Antoine’s journal, we realize that putting it in this story after its clumsy introduction in the last issue only makes things worse. One thing is for certain: As much as the journal device failed to pump up last month’s story, it must be a total facepalm for the audience to put up with yet another Silver dead end. Do we really need to sit and watch Silver make a yutz of himself yet again?

I was frankly shocked to learn the extent to which Archie had built on Silver’s first appearance and his first blunder [mistaking Sonic for the Iblis trigger in the ill-fated Sonic 2006 game]. BTW, “iblis” in a real word: it’s Arabic for “devil” and you can find it in the Qur’an. More important for Archie’s purposes, they treat the continuity as if Sonic 2006 never happened. This in part is consistent with the game itself since the future gets altered. I’m not worried about spoilers here; that game was spoiled when it hit the shelves.

But by the kind of perverse reasoning known to comic book writers and editors, Silver’s cluelessness has become his personality trait, in much the same way that Cubot’s morphing dialect chip defines him. He keeps popping in from the future, which somehow never takes a turn for the better despite his trips to past times, to get it wrong in the past. This time around, it’s the labeling of Antoine as the Traitor that’s the goof du jour.

The most obvious thing that can be said about Silver at this point is that he’s in serious danger of getting in a rut. That’s something the writer and Editorial have to deal with at some point; the longer Silver acts like a one-trick pony, the less interesting he gets no matter how many lines he has or how many buildings land on top of him. More on how this can be turned around in the Heart section.

You’d think that, as long as the Council has been in existence, they’d put up more resistance to Naugus’s hijacking the agenda. The Council, I’m sorry to say, is the weakest link in this story. They appear, let themselves get bossed around by Naugus, and then adjourn. As it stands they’re so one-dimensional that they’re teetering on the edge of a black hole. I suppose that helps make Rotor look good by comparison, but it’s not really that helpful.

While the previous story’s plot was simplicity itself (the escort to the Acorns come under attack and Antoine gets blowed up real good), this installment has way more moving parts. Small wonder that the 5-page lead-off involving Silver, Edmund and Mogul spewing great gobs of exposition onto the page gets broken up in the middle by the two-page scene in Antoine’s hospital room where Bunnie is given a monologue. And then we get a collection of characters grieving for Antoine, and the business with the Council and Nicole, and Rotor’s resignation, and Sonic encountering Silver and by that point the story is ready to spin into the wall! Maybe if we cared about some of the characters it might have worked better; the Geoffrey scene was particularly bad in that Sonic passes up several opportunities to finally separate Geoff from some of his teeth. Ian needs to get this orange crate of a story back on the ground and into the shop for some much-needed tightening. Head Score: 4.

EYE: Technically, Tracy Yardley! does good work. But this story does NOT let him play to one of his major strengths: page layout. On any other project, he could have done some major artwork. Here, unfortunately, between the speech boxes (and there are a LOT of them) and the sheer amount of story Ian tries to pack into one issue, many of the pages are overpacked and the feeling is one of claustrophobia. Even the sequences that would demand more attention (Tails breaking down, Amy breaking down, the whole business with Geoff in Antoine’s hospital room – any of these moments would have been depicted by a splash page of a conventional manga) disappear into the layout after having been shoehorned into a panel here and a panel there and then tucked into a page wherever there’s an opening. If only Editorial wasn’t being led around by their devotion to the sacred number 250, the story at this point might have had a chance to breathe and Tracy would have had a chance to let the illustrations carry the story off the page. Eye Score: 6.

HEART: For a story where Antoine isn’t dead yet, everybody else sure acts as if he were already gone.

Having seen enough of both in my life, there is a palpable difference between worry and grief. In the case of the former, there is a sense of frustration caused by the waiting for an unresolved situation to resolve itself. This is where Antoine is supposed to be now.

But when the outcome is obvious even before the fact, as in the case of the terminal ill, or when a death happens which nobody saw coming, the overwhelming emotional base is loss. That leads not to insecurity or anxiety, but grief, the kind on display in this story.

Despite the fact that Antoine is unresponsive, Bunnie’s reciting an exposition to him is not as goofy as it might seem. In fact, it’s emotionally pitch-perfect for one marriage partner to address the other in this manner, because Bunnie is in a complex emotional state where her own sorrow and sense of loss are tinged with … guilt.

It’s pretty hard to miss Ian’s signals from here. Bunnie drops broad hints about how she feels responsible for being unable to help Antoine and her friends because, she implies, of her being unroboticized. Let me put it this way: if she isn’t going out to look for Uncle Beau to risk getting herself legionized/re-roboticized in order to double-cross Unc and return to help her friends, Ian’s wasting a perfectly good plot point.

Tails’s sequence, too, was achingly realistic as he tries and fails to lose himself in his work. He’s young enough, though, that the mask falls and breaks quickly, and we FINALLY get to see an honest father-son moment between Amadeus and Miles. And it only took practically killing one of the characters to do it.

As for Amy Rose, she elects Sonic’s parents as the recipients of her getting in touch with her own grief. Again, it’s a good sequence in that since we know nothing about Amy Rose’s family (well, I don’t anyway), Sonic’s people are presumably safe enough for her to emotionally open up. They seem to be her surrogate family, providing a level of emotional support. In the flagship Archie comic, the character of Kevin Keller comes out of the closet to Jughead as they bond at the buffet. Likewise, in the famous story arc of the For Better or For Worse comic strip, Michael Patterson’s friend Lawrence comes out to him; when he later tried talking to his parents about it, it was a disaster. In fact, cartoonist Lynn Johnston was partly inspired by the fact that her brother-in-law trusted her enough when he came out himself. In a comic that trumpets its credo of Action And More Action, this kind of emotionality is exceedingly rare.

And then there’s Sonic. Unable to shake the memory of the times he punk’d Ant (whether he deserved to be punk’d or not is beside the point), Sonic lets the music wash over him, if only to forestall the inevitable. It’s interesting that he never wishes he could take anything back.

Archie, however, wants to have its death and cheat it, too. So Antoine’s fate is left frustratingly up in the air. None of the cast members, however, appear ready to shift gears if his condition improves; emotionally, they’re simply too invested in mourning his loss.

Props to Ian for one piece of psychological insight: when Bunnie, Tails, and Amy Rose are able to pour out their grief, it’s always in the presence of another Mobian. Sonic isn’t seen grieving, and Muttski isn’t much of a companion. So he’s essentially stuck emotionally until Silver gives him something else to think about. The closest he comes is near the end of the story where he declares the old Freedom Fighters finished due to attrition. Short lesson: everybody needs somebody.

That’s especially true of Silver. I’ve said once before that in this comic he’s little more than a purveyor of weapons-grade cluelessness, and this issue is no exception. He essentially has the same problem that Sonic has always had since the beginning of the comic: he simply can’t carry a story by himself because he just doesn’t have enough personality. He either has to play off someone else or be teamed up with someone else. And if Archie expects Silver to see more face time in this book, he’ll have to be paired with someone other than the two old farts he left behind in the future. That probably explains his hooking up with Jani-Ca in the return of Enerjak arc from Sonic Universe. The natural and obvious choice: Blaze.

For all the problems of that misbegotten game, Sonic 2006, the interplay between Blaze and Silver was especially noteworthy. It was low-keyed and, in the manner of tragic love stories, ended with the two forced to part. This is pretty much the same way the Metarex saga ended in Sonic X, with Tails and Cosmo forcibly separated. Yet the story arc ends on a hopeful note as we see a pot with a young plant in it in Tails’s workshop.

One of the reasons that the pairing of Sonic and Sally works in this comic is that it worked in the SatAM TV series. Sonic was cool and reckless, Sally controlled and rational. It’s not like they were arbitrarily paired; they complimented each other. The more I think of it, the more I think that a Silver and Blaze relationship has the same potential to go the distance. Seriously, Ian should get those two together.

Heart Score: I was really prepared to give this story a Heart score of 10 not only for its intensity but its reality. But I can go no higher than 9 because Archie insisted on NOT letting Antoine die in the attack and thus adding “honesty” to the list.

Sonic Spin: Assistant Editor Vincent Lovallo gets to write the Spin column this month. My guess is that it’s something to hang on the new guy in the office. At the library where I work, the newbs usually end up serving on the Social Committee as a rite of passage. Too bad the sequence of sketches of how the Yardley! cover design came together requires the purchase of a magnifying glass.

Fan Art: Maya gives us Antoine, dead or alive, Kameron gives us Sonic, and Sidney gives us Super Sonic.

Fan Funnies: Ash demonstrates that the most exercise Amy Rose engages in is jumping to conclusions. Apparently this was executed during happier (pre-S225) times.

Off Panel: It’s time not only for Silver to scrape the bottom of the barrel looking for suspected traitors, but to invest in a new barrel. The sign on the back, which is something of an homage to “The Shining,” might as well say “All shtick and no development makes Silver a dull character.”

Sonic-Grams: Mark mostly talks about collecting the comics and not about the contents thereof; Maya asks whether Editorial is willing to reassure her that Antoine will pull through, and Editorial takes 29 words to say “No comment;” Josh just wants back issue trade paperbacks of older stories, and management is happy to oblige.