Sonic the Hedgehog #247 (May 2013)

Lamar Wells/Terry Austin/John E. Workman/Matt Herms cover: You know that old saying about the number of cooks determining the quality of the broth? That’s what we have here. This is a bad cover. The layout makes about as much sense at that of a supermarket tabloid. It’s so bad I found myself making up alternative captions:

“TIME TRAVELING HEDGEHOG SEEN STALKING OUR CHILDREN”

“SONIC TO STOP RUNNING AND TAKE UP MIXED MARTIAL ARTS”

SALLY: “FORGET ABOUT PLASTIC SURGERY, I’M HAVING METALWORK DONE!”

Seriously, I don’t know if Editorial felt that they had to wring cover work from the four creative responsible for this before handing the keys to Pat Spaziante for the duration of the Mega Man business, but in all honesty, this sucks. It’s like they got together, threw images on the cover, and hoped it would work. It didn’t. This makes my job a lot easier, though, because now I don’t have to look for a Worst Cover for 2013.

“At All Costs Part 1: Fate Interrupted”

Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Evan Stanley; Ink: Terry Austin; Color: Matt Herms; Lettering: John E. Workman; Assistant Editor: Vincent Lovallo; Editor: Paul Kaminski; Editor-in-Chief: Victor Gorelick; Flux Capacitor Salesman: Mike Pellerito; Sega Licensing reps: Anthony Gaccione and Cindy Chau

Sonic and his crew finally catch up with the Death Egg in the Arctic Tundra, and even then Eggy got there a few days ahead of Sonic. One of the Arctic Freedom Fighters says that Eggman is acting “cautiously;” how he can tell that just from looking at the Death Egg in its parking space is beyond me. One page in and I already get the impression that everybody has pretty much checked out of this story before the Mega Man arc begins. Let’s see if they can prove me wrong, shall we?

So they wait until Erma the ermine takes down the security grid, exemplified by the exterior light changing from red to green. But being freedom fighters they don’t use the door and bust through a wall instead, right into the EGG Bot’s locker room. But before they can get beyond one panel of fighting, Silver crashes the party. He receives a reception from Sonic that’s frostier than the weather outside, and even Guntiver of the AFF isn’t too crazy about Silver’s reputation. Tails is up for giving him one last hearing, and when they do he announces after some massive exposition that the traitor is … let’s have the envelope, please … SALLY ACORN. Sonic and Amy both run out of patience with Silver and look like they want to disembowel him, but before Silver can explain his way out of this one…

It’s back to Mobitropolis where Nicole is cutting the ribbon on the restored castle. Meanwhile, some expository small talk reveals that neither the ailing Naugus nor Geoff are present at the ceremony. This falls under the category “Who Cares?” Then we get some kind of bad stuff happening to the nanites, which Nicole works to stabilize just as Cheese arrives with the Tails Doll. Cream then has some more exposition wherein she realizes that it had also gone missing at Mina’s concert … as the last horse crosses the finish line in a cloud of word balloons [insert slow clap here].

Back up in the Great White North, Silver launches into his exposition as to why he thinks Sally got a bad rap from future generations; he thinks the problem is that they weren’t clear on the concept of her having been roboticized. To me this is the equivalent of writing a history of Barack Obama and somehow forgetting to mention that he’s African American. Instead of loosening any of Silver’s teeth, Sonic lets him tag along. But Silver’s knack for screwing things up strikes again as he gives away their position to Akhlut and his killer whale posse. BTW, he gives away their position while they’re walking through a transparent underwater troop tunnel; how convenient.

Then comes a two-page sequence that, honestly, is a mess. I can only assume that Sonic busted through the wall of the tunnel; the artwork isn’t clear on this point. By all rights, Akhlut should have chomped on somebody, especially Sonic the non-swimmer, but everybody ends up improbably beyond his reach, so all he can do is sound an alarm as our heroes move on.

As for Eggman, he’s pitching a fit because Sonic got into his clubhouse just when he’s ready to go into crossover mode. So he orders Sally into action, stipulating that Asimov’s First Law of Robotics has been repealed. She shows up and, after introducing her kneecap to Amy’s nose, gets pinned to the wall by Sonic, while she prepares to be a firin’ her lazor.

Meanwhile, Cream comes up with a sophisticated plan to catch the Tails Doll red-gloved. It involves a lot of stage whispering that would embarrass a Barrymore to get it to crawl (not float, you’ll notice) back to the power station. Once she and her friends confront the Doll, it morphs for no good reason into a massive veggie monster that sort of looks like the Ultimate Chaos from the first Sonic Adventure game crossed with Audrey II. It also has tentacles and, to heighten that hentai feeling, an orifice that can only be described as a vagina dentata. In an Archie comic, yet!

Back up north, Tails knocks Sonic out of the way just in time, and Silver deactivates Mecha Sally for good measure. But then we find ourselves segueing into Mega Man territory by the same kind of cheesy temporal shift that happened in S225.

I knew that the book had to do something to shift narrative lines, but in all honestly when I saw the temporal shift my reaction was “Oh, you’ve got to be KIDDING!!”

HEAD: Of all the offences committed by this story, the absolute worst has to be the way Ian disposes of the long-running Who’s The Traitor? Question. This has theoretically convulsed the fandom, if letters to the editor are to be believed. Since Editorial chooses what runs and what doesn’t in that space, we can only assume that it’s been important. So it looks like we’ve finally cleared that up … in the worst manner possible. Future historians record that Sally was the problem without mentioning that she was a Mecha at the time. Seriously? And the comic jumps into the Mega Man crossover to put off the What Are They Going To Do About It question. Congratulations to all those who invested time and effort in trying to answer the mystery; that’s time you’ll never get back.

And don’t get me started on the Tails Doll … oh, too late for that. What the hell is that thing it morphed into? It looks impressive but makes no sense whatsoever, which kind of takes the edge off of the impressiveness. Archie had a perfectly good OMG moment teed up but it turns into a WTF moment.

When he first showed up in the comic, I thought Akhlut had potential if, true to Inuit legend, he could change back and forth from a wolf like Guntiver to an orca. But the comic settled on making him a cyborg orca, which leaves a lot to be desired in the imagination department. And all his yelling and declaiming like someone auditioning for the lead in “Springtime For Hitler” doesn’t help one bit.

Silver comes out of this looking better than he has up until this point. He may be technically right but you’d think he would have been a little quicker to put 2 and 2 together concerning Sally’s mech status. In fact, this comes dangerously close to Idiot Plot territory. Not supplying Silver with the fact that she’s been roboticized is frankly unforgivable and only prolongs the agony.

So yeah, it really feels like everybody checked out early on this one, to clear the stage for the next Big Fat Hairy Deal of a story arc. Why does Archie keep grinding out this junk food? It’s cheesy doodles for the brain, with the accent on cheesy. Head Score: 3.

EYE: Evan Stanley’s character modeling is spot-on. She also demonstrates an ability to give the characters’ facial expressions some variety. On the other hand, I think she could take a lesson or two from Tracy Yardley! when it comes to page layouts. Things are kind of jumbled, though not hopelessly so. And whose idea was it to morph the Tails Doll into nightmare juice? Isn’t the doll creepy enough by itself without turning it into a fugitive from a rape horror comic? Wouldn’t a simple series of close-ups of those dead doll’s eyes have been just as unsettling? Eye Score: 7.

HEART: The last time they tried the time travel segue they were working with a hugely compelling question: did Sally die or not? You know what’s compelling about this story arc? NOTHING! It’s been a lot of sound and fury in the service of teeing up the impending Mega Man arc and making a show of tying up loose ends as if they mattered. Instead the traitor question ended up a moot point, the business with the Tails Doll crashed and burned, and Sally herself gets ingloriously knocked into the narrative gutter. It’s abundantly clear that nobody connected with this comic cares about what’s happening, they’re so busy waiting for the first coming of Mega Man. Well, thanks for selling out the comic continuity in the process, you dipwads! Heart Score: 2.

SONIC-GRAMS: One lousy letter, and they get it out of the way in short order. Walter dates his involvement with the fandom to about 3 years ago. And he wished Sonic Comics a happy 20^th and gets on the editor’s good side by gushing about the Mega Man arc, which can’t be over too soon for me already.

FAN ART: Canil sent a work which doesn’t reduce well but appears to be a group shot; Drew sends in a Tails doll modified to look like a Tails Doll, if you know what I mean; Brittany draws Scourge; and in what appears to be a nod to Sonic’s appearance in Wreck-It Ralph Bryce submits an 8-bit tribute.

Editorial takes up over half a page pimping the impending you-know-what which they insist on calling “amazing” before it’s even published. We’ll be the judge of that!

OFF-PANEL: I can totally relate, Sonic. I can totally relate.