Sonic the Hedgehog #236 (June 2010)

Tracy Yardley! cover: Now THIS is more like it, campers! You have a single character, Sonic, in a simple yet bold design. It recalls any number of classic designs from recruiting posters and propaganda art from various cultures. The upraised arm is a recurring element in many of these.

While that is certainly enough to commend this cover, Tracy Yardley! uses oversized halftone dots to remind the reader of how comics were colored in the old school comic book medium. He especially draws inspiration from the oversized Pop Art comic panels of Roy Lichtenstein dating back to the ‘60s. And all using only 5 colors. It just goes to show that when you start with a strong design, you don’t need to use every crayon in the box. This one rides the bullet to Best Cover Art of 2012, and it would take a miracle to dislodge it.

“Cry Freedom”

Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Tracy Yardley!; Ink: Terry Austin; Color: Matt Herms; Lettering: n/a; Assistant Editor: Vincent Lovallo; Editor: Paul Kaminski; Editor-in-Chief: Victor Gorelick; Asterisk Design: Mike Pellerito; Sega Licensing reps: Anthony Gaccione and Cindy Chau

After a page bringing the reader up to date, we get Eggman demonstrating his chops by supplying two more pages of exposition while launching the conquest of Furville, which based on the mission-style architecture appears to be located south of Los Angeles. Turns out that, despite the reset that started this mess, the baddies need to put in somewhere for some R and R (repair and restocking). The fact that Ian Flynn has to resort to no less than FIVE footnotes is an indication of how deep the snow has gotten since this story started.

While Eggman is complaining about there being too many heroes underfoot, Sonic isn’t getting any traction in light of what’s happened so he’s still in Achilles sulk mode. Just then Amy Rose and Tails barge in and tell him what he and the readers already know. Then they figure out the best way to motivate Sonic is to yell at him about how he hasn’t been a quitter before and they’re not going to let him start now. But while Sonic admits he doesn’t have a Plan B on the drawing board, Rotor shows up to announce his resignation from the Council and Nicole’s off-site storage.

So while they’re still circling the problem, Furville is being overrun and the local resistance isn’t proving to be very effective. So far, the most it’s inspired, other than fear in the populace, is good humor in Eggman.

Back at the Council, Rotor shows up with Sonic singing back-up, to spell out his severance package: he’ll command the B Team (members as yet unnamed) while wearing his Wolverine-yellow suit. Naugus can’t exactly deny the Council a shot at voting on the measure so he plays along.

And now, let’s get a look at the players on Team Fighters. At this point, Fighters consists of Sonic, Amy Rose, Tails and T-Pup. Meanwhile, news of this development reaches Eggman via a bug in the Council chambers. Yes, it’s been 12 issues since the retcon and apparently Sonic and the gang haven’t really let it sink in that Eggman and Naugus are in cahoots. At least until Eggman leaves his microphone open and blurts out his surprise all over Furville. Enough time has passed, BTW, for Mecha Sal to be less impressive and for Sonic to be less intimidated by her presence. And as the tide of battle begins to turn (which says more about Eggman’s army than about Team Fighters), Sal gets recalled and everybody else is abandoned, so it’s left to Sonic and Crew 2 to pick up the pieces.

HEAD: Seriously, you think anyone needs the “Who’s Who” feature to remind them of who the major players are in this comic, especially since these characters have been hanging together for the last two decades? Anybody think we’re getting so many newbies a month that they need something like this? Anybody? One thing I’m afraid of is that the answer could be “Maybe” in a few months’ time. If the plot of this story balloons out of control this may indeed become necessary.

And the second page of this story drives the point home. It’s bad enough, as already stated, that the story needed five text blocks on one page to cover all the back story bases, but squeezing them and dialog onto the page makes the layout look like some punk zine from the Eighties. And it all takes place on a page where nothing else in particular happens.

And when things DO happen, they do so in a way that makes you ask “What just happened?” The pages where Tails and Amy essentially browbeat Sonic into getting off his tail and doing something just didn’t work for me. The actors came in and hit their marks and spoke their lines, and Rotor’s entrance was just as forced and contrived. It’s like nobody fired off one brain cell during the whole segment. I was also going to point out that the emotional content of the scene was also running on fumes, but I’ll save that for the Heart section.

The only halfway-decent segment was where Furville was being overrun and Ian Flynn basically told Tracy Yardley! “You’re on your own.” Call it “Postcards From The Battlefield.”

And of course there are the fight scenes. Sing along if you remember: the Eggbots show up and terrorize the locals, then the heroes show up, then Mecha Sally arrives, then for some reason Eggman calls it all off and moves on to the next venue.

Yes, it fits in with the Action And More Action credo, but it’s beginning to look like the SAME action and more action over and over again. Even the jokes are beginning to sound alike.

The only new development is Rotor and his Look At Me, I’m Dressed Like Wolverine suit. And then there’s the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Council scene where the remaining Council members do their best to ignore Naugus. For his part, the Wiz at least keeps his power trip in check when he could very well have adjourned the Council to the nearest suite of dungeons. I don’t know why this hasn’t happened yet; it certainly would have earned Naugus some serious Badass points.

Again, aside from restructuring the Freedom Fighters you had Eggman threatening a village while the event that should have been the centerpiece of this installment, the rollout of the latest Freedom Fighter incarnation after Sonic decides to get back in the game, was fighting for the reader’s attention with everything else going on. Head Score: 5.

EYE: Tracy Yardley! does good artwork, but it’s just so … OFF when Sonic, Tails and Amy get together. There’s too much jocularity, broad winks to one another, and while it matches up with the repartee supplied by Ian Flynn, the question is whether it should have been there in the first place. Eye Score: 8.

HEART: There’s been some chatter on the Net amongst Sonic fans that the S250 reset will possibly obliterate all remaining traces of the SatAM continuity. Swell, but as I’ve asked each time the subject comes up, what will it be replaced WITH? Sonic rekindling his romance with Elise?

The SatAM continuity worked and people could relate to it; that’s the short answer as to why it’s still on the radar. And’s it’s not as if you had to be a genius to follow it. The original Freedom Fighters were a bunch of teenagers in hiding waging a guerrilla war against a dystopian society under the heel of Dr. Robotnik. Sonic was no superhero battling single-handedly like Captain America or James Bond. His being partnered with Sally wasn’t just a romance of convenience. The writers for the show recognized that while Sonic was speed and snark, his being paired with the level-headed Sally balanced him out and made the fight more effective. I got the same vibe when Silver shared screen time with Blaze. Some couples just work so well that they should be left alone.

I mention this because if this story is any kind of forecast of what’s to come with Team Freedom and Team Fighters (not an inspired choice of names IMO), it’s going to be pathetic.

It feels as if Ian took the concepts of the Sonic Heroes video game, tossed them in a bag, then drew at random. Thus we have Sonic, Tails and Amy pretty much re-enacting their Sonic Heroes dialog and shtick, except that there’s more weird interplay between Sonic and Amy:

Amy: “Less banter, more saving folks.”

Sonic: “Will you quit nagging?”

Amy: “I’m NOT nagging!”

I don’t know whether Archie Editorial was afraid that Sonic and Sally’s romance would overshadow other aspects of the comic, but I’m not sure that having Sonic and Amy go into Old Married Couple mode is any improvement. This is especially true if Amy’s physical shtick is almost totally defined by her pico hammer.

Emotionally, this should have been an issue to consolidate all of the loss, the sorrow, to ball it up into such intense feeling that it bleeds off the page, and which then moves the heroes to their next action. Instead we waste Sonic on a Scourge flashback, waste Tails and Amy on favoring Sonic with their Captain Obvious imitations, and fill up the page with as little genuine emotion as possible before moving on to the next battle. Man, this just didn’t work at all! Heart Score: 3, and I’m being generous.

“Leader of the Band”

Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Tracy Yardley!; Ink: Terry Austin; Color: Matt Herms; Lettering: John E. Workman

Rotor is in the middle of a recruitment drive speech but seems to have dropped one of his 3x5 cards: “After considering all of the volunteers call two of them), I present….” Oh, wait, that left parenthesis looks like a lower case C. If the parenthetical expression had been “both of them” we wouldn’t have this problem. What we DO have is a LOT of banter from Vanilla and Rosie in the audience. At which point Naugus shows up and we get even MORE dialog between Rotor and Naugus concerning his recruitment of Heavy and Bomb, along with Team Cute veterans Cream, Cheese and Big. But just as the argument between the two hits maximum tedium, the Tails Doll disintegrates the corner of a building to keep from being bored to death. This gives Team Freedom a chance to … well, to blow up the building on their own though they never use the term controlled demolition while Naugus is distracted by his inner wizards. Naugus tries saving his image by blaming Nicole or the Armada or somebody.

HEAD: Well, there are 5 pages I’ll never get back. We have lots of exposition punctuated by the kind of superhero action you can get anywhere: Airlift those extras! Blow up that building! There’s no time to check to see if anybody might actually be inside; good things the building’s empty or we’d need one more page!

The provocateur, in this case, is the Tails Doll, making its first real appearance outside the Off-Panel section. And not wanting to be bored to death is as much of a motive in this case as anything else. The problem with injecting the Tails Doll into this story line is that he can make things happen with no rhyme or reason required.

This isn’t the first time a villain has been brought in to add some arbitrary weirdness. I’ve seen this happen with Mxyzptlk in Superman and Discord in “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.” But at least when Discord puts in an appearance we’re talking about serious entertainment value (two words: chocolate rain). Now I can appreciate civic destruction via arbitrary disintegration as much as the next guy, but it worked way better in “Eureka 7” than it did here. All that happened here was it gave Rotor an excuse to put his people to work.

And Naugus isn’t much use, either. His dialogue with Rotor just barely rouses the threat level when the Tails Doll steals what’s left of the show. And without Tracy Yardley! stepping in to help during Naugus’s arguments with his alter egos, the gimmick loses steam. Head Score: 1.

EYE: If the art in this story could be described in one word, that word would be “claustrophobia.” There’s so little room to draw breath between the characters it’s a wonder they get off as much dialog as they do. And even when Tails Doll does wreck a building to goose up the action, the frames still suffer from overcrowding. Eye Score: 7.

HEART: It all belongs to the scene where the Tails Doll threatens to drop a building on the extras. There’s a lot of pointless dashing about, and Naugus is no help.

And Naugus’s political act begins to lose its luster. That’s easy enough to see when he runs out of answers and starts looking for scapegoats instead. I suppose his next step will be to impose more authoritarian control; it wouldn’t surprise me, anyway. And it would mean that he actually DOES something rather than play the psych card and manipulate the resultant popular mood. Only now the popular mood is, as James Joyce described the weather in Dublin, “changeable as a child’s bottom.” This works as set-up but that’s ALL that it is. Heart Score: 5.

Sonic Spin: What Paul Kaminski hails as “a new era of Freedom Fighters” feels more like a repetition of Indiana Jones’s famous line, “I don’t know, I’m making this up as I go.” Probably the worst thing about the column is the line “when you step back and think about what Sonic and company have been through over the past year….” What I think about is how little emotional capital the comic has spent unless they were willing to channel it into exposition (viz. Bunnie addressing Francois’s corpse-like coma set-up). We can only hope that re-forming the Freedom Fighters in this case doesn’t end up being an exercise in watering down the punch.

Fan Art: While Rosie gives us Sonic out for a run in the country and Eve does a collection of portraits from “A Day In The Life of Sonic,” top honors go to Brittany for her angsty portrayal of the characters showing some genuine emotion. It also occurs to me that this would make perfect cover art for an Antoine memorial issue, which leads me to ask: “Would anything about this story be different it Antoine had been killed rather than put into a phony coma?” Just reminds me of how gutless that plot device was.

Fan Funnies: And now, for a special commentary: “Heh heh heh … he said ‘bra’ … heh heh heh heh.” Thank you, Butt-head.

Off-Panel: OK, the Tails Doll is creepy, we GET it! Now have Cream leave that thing in her closet and let’s think about something else.

Sonic-Grams: Devin voices the concerns of the fans … well, of THIS fan anyway: that Geoff is dirty, that Antoine is maybe dying (THANK YOU for having a stronger stomach than Editorial), and that the fans haven’t given up on Sally. Just saying. The appropriately-named Hope also wants Bunnie and Antoine to come through this. And Ciaomhin (that’s Gaelic, BTW) is also pulling for Sally to be deroboticized and for Antoine to pull through. But ignore all that smoke that Editorial is blowing: it’s not like they’re actually listening to the fans here.