Sonic the Hedgehog #244 (February 2013)

Yardley!/Austin/Herms cover: “Thrash the Devil is back.” And you can have him. We get a lot of noise from a character whose main purpose is to irritate our heroes and the fans, and nothing gets accomplished.

“Endangered Species Part 2: Extinction Event”

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; Echidna Anti-Defamation League Executive Officer: Mike Pellerito; SEGA Licensing reps: Anthony Gaccione and Cindy Chau.

Note: I came down with a mild case of whiplash trying to follow the temporal shifts from the present to the past and back numerous times. So as a service to my readers I’m going to cut up this ungainly Frankenstein’s monster of a story and sew it back together in a way that makes chronological sense. You’re welcome.

Let’s backtrack to where the previous story left off: with Metal Knuckles showing up to beat the snot out of Sonic. And he starts out doing a pretty good job of it until Amy tries giving him a few love taps with the old Piko hammer. Tails, meanwhile, is trying to cross the wires on the stun traps and manages to fry Metal Knuckles, Sonic, himself, and Amy Rose. Better stick to making cute robot foxes, kid.

While that’s happening, or somewhere around there – Ian’s grasp of time seems to have seriously failed him even in a reconstituted version of this narrative – Thrash and a couple of demon dogs come out of nowhere and land in Dr. Fin’s office. The good mad doctor isn’t in but rather than make an appointment with the receptionist he ransacks the office until he happens to fins a warp ring owner’s manual. How convenient!

Sometime after pimping his ride, Thrash arrives and examines Tails’s handiwork. On the plus side he acts rather solicitously toward the unconscious good guys; on the minus side his feelings for echidnas in general pretty much parallels those of a Klansman for President Obama. After making a show of solicitude for the incapacitated heroes, he then – and this is the biggest gaping hole in the narrative – somehow gets the echidna population to drink his version of kool-aid and hop through the warp ring into Loose Continuity Limbo.

While that’s going on, Knuckles arrives but is distracted by the demon dogs and the general carnage but not to the point that he fails to find our unconscious heroes (Remember them?) who come to and make with the exposition.

After communicating with Nicole via T-Pup acting as an iFox (well, he’s closer to an android, really), they finally find Thrash, who then tells Knuckles “Thanks for helping me commit genocide against your peeps.” Knuckles tries to fight back but is repelled by Thrash’s vocal gimmick (aren’t we all). And just as Sonic gets into the act and has no better luck against Thrash, Metal Knuckles reboots thanks to another dubious plot device, krudzu.

HEAD: I don’t know which is worse: the possibility that Ian deliberately jazzed with the story’s timeline in order to obstruct the genocide of the echidnas by Thrash and thus minimize whatever criticism he might catch for it, or whether the jazzing is part of an elaborate “Gotcha!” he plans to pull on the readers. Either way it’s pretty poor storytelling.

The worst part of the story, of course, is how he obscured the disappearance of the echidnas. What kind of a story did Thrash tell them to get them to jump through the hoop? How many echidnas are we talking about, anyway? This part of the story would have needed a lot more work and thought if it were being written for anything other than a comic book. But because it was written for a comic book, Ian can let Loose Continuity pull his chestnuts out of the fire and, I hate to say this, get away with the worst kind of hack writing to explain a critical plot point.

To me, this explains why Ian has the timeline for the story go berserk with all the back-and-forthing. Even given the abysmally low standards for writing for comics, if Ian had tried a straight ahead chronological version of this story, the gaping plot hole concerning Thrash and the echidnas would have been unmistakable. But by jazzing with the time line, it’s camouflaged because the reader is so confused by story’s end that it lessens the impact of the event. And at that point, Ian slips into What The Hell, Let’s Have A Fight mode and Thrash gets to trot out his gimmick.

There really isn’t a whole lot more to this story. It may be necessary in terms of plot development but even without the time gimmick the fight scenes are old and so is the character shtick. This could easily have been replaced by a “Previously…” page and it would have made just as much sense. Head Score: 1.

EYE: Ordinarily the artwork helps to (sort of) rescue a weak story but in this case the dismal weather, which is supposed to set up the atmosphere for the story, reinforces the overall downer vibe of this installment. I suppose that’s what Steven Butler was aiming for, in which case he succeeded. Eye Score: 9.

HEART: Between the apparent genocide of the echidnas and our heroes getting the short end of the stick this time around, this is a serious downer of a story. The only thing that saves it is the same Loose Continuity that lets Ian get away with one of the biggest plot holes I’ve ever seen.

Seriously, does anybody out there think that the echidnas are really gone? I’m just cynical enough and experienced enough in reading this comic to know that if the vanished echidnas are needed, they can easily be pulled back into the story. We don’t even know what Thrash planned to do with them in the first place; it’s no accident that Ian’s dialogue for Thrash is vague on this point.

As for whether this is all tied in with the legal situation involving Ken Penders and Archie comics, I don’t even want to go there. The situation, from what I understand through a thread on the subject on Scott Shaw!’s Facebook page, is just about hopelessly byzantine, and if Ian thought it could be exploited for the sake of the story … well, actually I wouldn’t put it past him (in case you want to look it up yourselves, look for Scott Shaw’s name without the trademark exclamation point on Facebook). Still, there are better stories to tell and better stories than this one is shaping up to be. “Repellant” is the word that comes to mind. Heart Score: 4.

SONIC SPIN: I’d kind of like to know how many message board threads were indeed devoted to the question of what happened to Knuckles’s people, as Paul Kaminski mentions. I don’t hang around any message boards much; maybe I’ll have more time after I retire. But honestly, did the readers even care? If not, Editorial has some serious thinking to do.

Paul also mentions that this is Steven Butler’s 15^th year drawing Sonic. I don’t know whether that’s continuous or not; at one point, he decamped to Nickelodeon for a while.

FAN ART: Marisol’s rendering of Tails is about the happiest thing in this woeful issue. There’s another drawing of Tails, this one by Meredith, Sonic and Knuckles by Amelia, and Ben draws the good guys even though Amy Rose might take exception to the gender designation.

OFF-PANEL: Uh, Thrash, the reason Sonic and Knuckles are having trouble remembering your name is a simple one: nobody likes you.

SONIC-GRAMS: Claudia turns out to be a gushy fangirl. Drew wants to know how many times Eggman has built and rebuilt Metal Sonic; I think he’s made a career out of it. Jeffrey wants to know about Harry Who and Editorial blows him off. And Kathlynn Lee is another gushy fangirl.