Sonic the Hedgehog #245 (March 2013)

Yardley!/Herms cover: this reminds an oldster like me of the infamous double bills of cheapo monster movies from the late 50s/early 60s. The classic pairing was 1957’s “I Was A Teenage Frankenstein” with “I Was A Teenage Werewolf.” Believe me, that billing was way more fun than any two Twilight movies put together. This cover looks like the double bill of “Sonic versus the Krudzu” and “Knuckles versus the Devil Dogs” with special guest appearance by Thrash the Tasmanian Devil. And I’m sorry to say that, while it’s not a bad cover, it looks as cheesy as it sounds. Tracy Yardley! wasn’t able to integrate the two stories into one piece of cover art, and the result was inevitable.

“Endangered Species Part 3: Restoration Efforts”

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; Sayer Of The Law: Mike Pellerito; Sega Licensing reps: Anthony Gaccione and Cindy Chau.

This comic doesn’t waste any time with a setup and proceeds right to the ass-kicking. It starts with Sonic v. Thrash while Amy and Knuckles take on the devil dogs. Thrash tells Sonic he’s got no quarrel with Sonic who says “You’re stuck with me; it’s my book.”

What do you get when you cross a Krudzu with a Crabmeat? No, it’s not a salad at Red Lobster, it’s a Krudzu Hybrid Hydra (try saying that three times fast) that’s so full of itself it ought to run for Congress. In the middle of bemoaning his lot in life, and conveniently supplying some exposition in the process, he/it comes across the remains of Mecha Knuckles, just the kind of fixer-upper he/it was looking for.

After KHH is finished playing “This Old Bot,” we cut back to Knuckles and Thrash trading punches, in the course of which Thrash finally spells out the nature of his vendetta against the echidnas. It seems that when the echidnas arrived in Downunda they took the thriving devil population, did some ill-defined genetic manipulation, and managed to devolve the devils into devil dogs until Thrash is the last devil standing, as it were. Needless to say, Knuckles does not appreciate the irony of the fact that Thrash and he have survivor status in common, but Knux is hopelessly outnumbered by Thrash’s puppy posse. So Sonic calls up Tails and Amy to do the “spinny thing” to isolate the doggies and allow Sonic to corral them all. Meanwhile, Thrash and Knuckles are still kicking each other’s asses. There follows two pages of Thrash unleashing his howl gimmick before Knuckles shuts him up. Then while Tails and Amy try looking for a warp ring, KrudKnux shows up and takes a smack at Sonic using Tails and Amy Rose. That’s Thrash’s cue to hop the next warm ring out of town, but Knuckles is on his purple tail.

KrudKnux thinks he has the upper hand against Sonic and pals, though Sonic thinks that by smashing any residual badniks he’s deprived KrudKnux of something to work with. Well, KrudKnux had gotten used to cobbling together spare parts and thinks that he’s got the edge. That was before Shard showed up saying “Whose ass hasn’t been kicked yet?”

HEAD: This comic pretty much divides its time between exposition and ass-kicking with only one really, really impressive idea shoehorned in during the exposition: the devolution of the devils. It’s a pretty audacious idea, especially for this comic. But it has an interesting pedigree: it’s based on H. G. Wells’s 1896 novel, “The Island of Dr. Moreau.”

In the novel, the narrator finds himself on a remote island populated by the titular doctor and a collection of human-animal hybrids. They came to be thanks to the Doc’s experiments involving vivisection: surgery on animals without the benefit of anesthesia. Having given them sort-of human form, the Doc has been nudging them along the evolutionary path toward humanization, including a list of commandments recited by the Sayer of the Law, whom one source describes as being a “strange deer-like creature” (Friar Buck, take note) with its liturgical refrain “Are we not Men?”. Long story short, the shortcut to humanity doesn’t take.

The fascination with human-animal hybrids is as old as mythology and continues to this day; recently the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration had to officially disavow a belief in mermaids because of a bogus cable TV documentary on the subject. This comic, and the Sonic continuity in general, doesn’t indulge in human-animal hybrids but it does turn ordinary quadrupeds into sorta-kinda humans by equipping them with speech, reason, upright stance, and opposable thumbs. There’s been no question of them becoming any more human, fanfics notwithstanding, but going the other direction is a new one for this continuity unless you count “Sonic Unleashed” which is more of a lateral move for Sonic than a devolution.

Ian hedges his bets and blames the devo on “[messing] with our genes … nobody remembers why.” I’m pretty sure genetic engineering doesn’t work that way. Still, comic book writers are at the same point now concerning genetic engineering that they were 50 to 60 years ago with nuclear energy. And back then it was nuclear energy that allowed comic writers to turn Peter Parker into Spiderman and Bruce Banner into the Incredible Hulk and Reed Richards and associates into the Fantastic Four. So even though the explanation is vague and the science is even moreso, Ian is still firmly adhering to the comic writing conventions.

I’ve gone on at length about this because beyond that one idea, this story is, as I’ve already stated, all about exposition and ass-kicking. And that’s just pathetic. Krudzu, even with his Hybrid Hydra upgrade, is still a one trick pony. Or maybe in this case that should be “one trick peony.” And Thrash is pretty two-dimensional himself; his declaiming about the fate of his homies is straight exposition; more about that in the Heart section. Head Score: 3.

EYE: Once again, it was a dark and stormy Steven Butler night, though the rain lets up once the dogs get kenneled. It’s good Steven Butler art that edges toward routine Steven Butler art. Eye Score: 7.

HEART: If what Thrash says is true, and readers will have to wait for the next installment for confirmation, the devo plot point does give Thrash pretty strong motivation. And the idea of something like devo (as opposed to “robo” which is Eggman’s thing) has “Dr. Fin” written all over it. After all, he taunted Thrash about his species back in SU11’s “Echoes of the Past: Part 3” something like 3 years ago. I’d like to think that after writing “Echoes of the Past” Ian knew exactly what Thrash was hinting at and simply mothballed it until such time as Lose Continuity would let him come clean.

Nobody knows who first said “Revenge is a dish best served cold.” A search for attribution on the Internet turned up nothing definite. Still, Thrash could qualify as a cold customer if his explanation weren’t tucked into a fight scene, which takes the emotional edge off his tale. When you’re laying something this heavy on someone, the dramatic conventional wisdom is that you don’t distract from the dialog with a lot of physical business. In motion pictures and TV dramas, a confession of this sort is accompanied by close-ups of the speaker, solemn music on the soundtrack, and occasional reaction shots; in extreme cases, it’s the cue for a full-blown flashback. Right off the top of my head, I’m thinking of The Last Unicorn and King Haggard’s reminiscence about coming down with a major case of unicorn love and giving the Red Bull the contract to catch ‘em all. They do things like that because it works. Having Thrash blocking punches and tossing Knuckles aside kind of takes away from the moment. The two of them could have stopped mixing it up while Thrash laid it out for Knuckles, who is too busy trying not to look like a chew toy to have a recognizable reaction: guilt, horror, something, anything! This revelation called for something instead of what Flynn and Butler gave it, which is nothing. They lavished more attention on the KHH and the Knuckles/Thrash fight scenes. And that’s sad. Heart: 6, and I’m being generous.

SONIC SPIN: Not even worth it.

FAN ART: Avalon gives us Blaze, Nikolas shows Sonic easily avoiding Shadow’s Chaos Spears, Beau draws Knuckles and Sadie draws Scourge.

OFF-PANEL: Amy Rose trades in her comedy hammer for something more appropriate for cutting a weed down to size.

SONIC-GRAMS: John gives a shout-out to Sonic as an influence on his life, with a digression about chili dogs; Robert does a short gush; Cole asks when Sally will be back (I like his priorities), when Naugus will be back (he’s possessed Geoff so he really never left), what about the traitor (a plot point heading for a date with an anticlimax) and Sonic-Mega Man (that’s going to take half a year – six issues of each comic – to work through the system). But calling it a “crazy-awesome, action-adventure, maple-flavored extravaganza” is a sign of someone trying way too hard to sell something. Like he’s having trouble believing it himself.