Sonic the Hedgehog #250 (August 2013)

Spaz/Hunzeker cover: This is one of those big deal covers so it’s a wrap-around back-to-front. There’s no denying that 250 issues is a milestone for just about any recent comic; I don’t know how many comic titles have bitten the dust since Sonic bowed, but even the creatives thought that Sonic wouldn’t go the distance. Ken Penders, for one, fully expected the title to fold by the conclusion of “Endgame” and wrote the final installment as a 48-page special instead of the 32-pager it turned out to be, which may explain a lot about that story arc as well as the fairly weak writing immediately following. That’s what happens when you fail to read the fan love.

Anyway, basking in said fan love is the Blue Blur on the front with the Blue Back-up on the back. Amy Rose takes the slot that would have gone to Sally if Editorial hadn’t messed with the continuity. Eggman looks disgruntled; maybe he wanted to dress up as El Gran Gordo one more time and Editorial axed that as well. Mega Man, looking as mega-boyish as ever, appears to be pretty nervous. That’s no surprise, since Dr. Wily is right behind him looking more like a child molester than a mad scientist. Tails checks out some of the baddies sprinkled around like the rest of the confetti.

“When Worlds Collide Part 9: All-Out War”

Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Ben Bates; Ink: Gary Martin; Color: Matt Herms; Lettering: John E. Workman; Assistant Editor: Vincent Lovallo; Editor: Paul Kaminski; Editor-in-Chief: Victor Gorelick; Robot Census Taker: Mike Pellerito; Game Boys and Girl: Anthony Gaccione and Cindy Chau (Sega) and Brian Oliveira (Capcom).

Sonic, Mega, and their respective posses arrive at Mount Ego, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that the Doctors are throwing every robot in the Mega Man franchise, as well as Mecha Rouge, at our heroes. Sonic tactlessly reminds Mecha that “We made out career out of trashing robots” forgetting that he’s talking to a robot himself. Unlike previous installments, where it’s few against few, this is a full-blown melee so it might help if you had Attention Deficit Disorder. Since everybody is going to fight everybody for a while, I’ll just hit the highlights:

If, like myself, you came of age politically during the Vietnam War, you may not think much of Napalm Man, and may get a perverse satisfaction when Omega outguns him, though I wish Editorial had had the guts to have him say “Bitch, please!” in true Internet meme style.

Sonic tries to get Shadow to talk about why he came back after ducking out in the last issue or two and predictably gets nowhere.

Inside the base, despite Sonic’s optimism, Dr. Light is about to be attacked by a couple of drone bots. The attack never comes off as the bots crash into each other. Light is like “I don’t need this” and walks away from the Robot Battle rejects, while Wily braces himself for “another ‘insightful’ lecture;” this must be a standing routine with those two. Wily tries to intimidate Light but his rave-out is interrupted by Light saying the name of one of his past failures and intimating that both Wily and Eggman have a habit of getting in over their heads and needing their respective blue bothers to pull their butts out of the fire. The villains, predictably, aren’t programmed to receive and leave in a huff.

Back on the playing field, Shadow is all attitude so Sonic must’ve struck a nerve. A number of fire-shooting robots make the mistake of ganging up on Blaze, who then demonstrates what happens when you throw Brer Rabbit into the briar patch.

Espio and Shadow Man, who’s got a ninja thing going himself, exchange formalities before throwing sharp pointy things at each other. Stone Man makes an off-hand reference to “Guts Man” which sounds like he should be making guest appearances on “The Walking Dead.” Shadow is distracted by a bat-like bot named Shade Man, which is the best Capcom could do since the name “Batman” has been in use for close to a century now. Amy Rose battles Splash Woman but when a couple other water type Pokemon … excuse me, robots … join the pool party, Tails pulls the plug on the fight since he’s on the run from some air type Pokemon himself. I’m sorry, but it’s just too easy.

Four robots take off after Sonic, but since this is his comic book they’ve got no shot. He then teams up with Mega to deroboticize Rouge and Mega picks up yet another mojo. But Sonic gets a 2-page spread to show everyone else how it’s done.

Back at the lab, while Wily watches the battle and Treble the robo wolf looks like he REALLY needs to have an anti-distemper treatment uploaded, Eggy does some pondering and then leaves the room.

Blues, meanwhile, decides that this story needs to cut to the chase. So Sonic, Tails, Mega and Rush head for the egg-shaped thing in the sky while the battle continues.

Eggman discovers Light trying to use parts from the dunderhead droids to contact anybody. This is fairly obvious to anyone reading this comic but Eggman just has to recap it for any reader too dense to figure it out. Borrowing a move from the opening cut scene of “Sonic Unleashed,” he opens the floor hatch and dumps Light out of the ship. Rush picks up on it, Mega zooms in on the image, and utters a D-word we don’t hear often enough in this comic: “DAD!!!” Now it’s personal.

HEAD: The battle royal probably originated at the Roman Coliseum as part of the gladiatorial games where it cheesed off members of an up-and-coming religion, Christianity. It took a few centuries but eventually the whole gladiator thing fell by the wayside.

Fast-forward to America in the 19^th century where the battle royal became a feature of boxing matches. The combatants were usually African Americans, fighting both as slaves and later as freemen. Eventually boxing became a man-on-man sport and the battle royal was relegated to the world of professional wrestling.

Technically, this wasn’t a classic battle royal because it wasn’t everybody against everybody so much as a few against a whole bunch. But even though numerically the odds are not in their favor to borrow a line from “The Hunger Games,” Sonic and Mega are the heroes so it really doesn’t matter.

It’s gotten to the point that the fights now have to include some bits of business to make them more entertaining. It worked pretty well with Blaze and the fire bots, and with Espio and Shadow Man. With Charmy and Hornet Man, not so much. And why did Editorial have Amy Rose going up against Splash Woman, especially since when it comes to bots gender differences are pretty much cosmetic anyway? Maybe that’s the problem with android characters: they’re made to resemble humans as opposed to something like Omega so we take their humanity too seriously. On the plus side, there are some encounters where there’s little or no dialogue, which makes more sense than having each fight turn into a gabfest.

Speaking of gabfests, that’s what the reunion of Wily and Light turns into despite the silent opening as the two bots square off and then collide into each other. I’ll admit I don’t know anything about Ra Moon (which sounds like a cross between Yu-Gi—Oh and Sailor Moon) or any of the other names dropped by Light, but it doesn’t matter because he’s soon preaching to the unconverted in the form of Wily. Once again, this story is about exposition when it isn’t about ass-kicking, and vice versa.

Eggan’s discovery of Light trying to communicate with either somebody or anybody is a dramatic turning point, despite the tendency to belabor the obvious, and it does a good job of setting up Eggman’s dumping Light overboard. Now that was pretty gutsy writing and it might never have seen the light of day had the Comic Code Authority not voted itself out of business. Every now and then, it’s good to remember how far the medium has come to get to where it is today. More about Dr. Light in the Heart section. Head Score: 5.

EYE: The artistic highlight of this story, other than the splash of Light freefalling, is the backlighting of Eggman and Metal Sonic. The way their shadows are thrown forward is very dramatic and helps set up the toss. The battles have become by-the-book exercises at this point. Eye Score: 8.

HEART: One of the problems with this story arc is its equating of Sonic and Mega Man. Up until this installment, the differences between the two of them have been downplayed, especially the fact that as far as Sega is concerned Sonic has no real back story and no family.

Not so with Mega Man. While his inspiration Astroboy eventually acquired a family (he was given an origin story when he debuted as a manga), Mega Man is the younger sibling of Proto Man (short for “Prototype”) and older brother of Roll. Dr. Light is the paterfamilias and a more stable one than Dr. Tenma who created Astroboy to take the place of his son who was killed in a traffic accident.

It wasn’t really until the Archie comic that Sonic acquired a family background, though the SatAM series gave him an uncle, a distant enough relative and useful when the plot demanded. Sonic’s ‘rents, Bernie and Jules, were created by Ken Penders who did the same for Knuckles, but that’s another story.

Because the Sonic parental units didn’t have the blessing of Sega, unlike Light who had the blessing of Capcom, the Sonic games lacked an emotional foundation that was part of the Mega Man story from early on. As a result, Sonic’s games came to be defined by his ability to thread his way through obstacles in classic side-scroll mode. Sega and/or Team Sonic never thought to expand Sonic’s back story or provide him with a family, and given the reception of the 2006 Sonic the Hedgehog game (a misbegotten attempt to meld classic Sonic with Final Fantasy-style RPG gameplay and storyline), it’s probably just as well.

Sonic’s fanbase, on the other hand, has never showed any such hesitation. No matter how much criticism was aimed at the comic for giving Sonic a family, the fans accepted their existence without a blink. It especially showed up in the thousands of Sonic fanfics posted on the Internet, to which Sega and Archie were ethically required to turn a blind eye. And let’s not forget that thanks to the SatAM animated series, Sonic also has a girlfriend: Princess Sally, whom Archie accepted without hesitation when the comic launched. And if anyone wonders about her level of acceptance among the fanbase, ask anyone in Archie Editorial how many responses they got when they asked for Sonic/Sally fanart. They never went public with the amount but I’m willing to bet it was embarrassingly large.

The point of this digression is that after 20 years, Sonic knows what Mega Man already did: there has to be an emotional connection in the life of a character you care about. Sure, Archie Editorial has messed with the Sonic/Sally relationship in the same way they messed with the Sally redesign which will be unveiled as soon as this crossover arc ends. But even after putting up with the Mega Man story, Archie chose to pad out this issue (in the name of celebrating the 20^th anniversary of the Sonic franchise) by running the final 8 pages of the Sonic Genesis story arc, pages that feature a shout-out to the Sonic/Sally relationship. Of all the excerpts they could have run of all the stories that have run since this comic came to be, they made a good pick: a story with a good amount of action that is characteristic of Sonic without being lame, and with more Heart than this comic usually has on display. I won’t re-review the except; you can read what I wrote the first time around at http://www.andrews.edu/~drazen/S229.htm .

This time around, Mega Man is carrying the Heart factor when he realizes that Dr. Light is freefallin’. The good news is, it’s a tremendous Heart moment. The bad news is, it’ll have to be carried over to Mega Man #27 for any kind of resolution of this cliffhanger. I’ve learned as a Sonic reader that it’s not so much that Archie has an aversion to Heart, but they do have a maddening habit of using it sparingly when it occurs to them to use it at all. That’s the sort of thing that propelled me into writing fanfiction. Heart Score: 10.

FAN MAIL: Paul Castiglia moved the fan mail to his Sonic Spin op-ed. The letters from Carly, Kristy and Hunter have been edited down to next to nothing. Amelia, for her part, says that the Sonic games are “inspirational” because they make her feel “happy and confident” because the characters never give up. The way I play, I’M the one who wants to give up.

YEARBOOK AUTOGRAPHS: The current creative and Editorial staff sign in yearbook-style. Ian just writes his name, which says volumes in itself. Since they left space for the fans to get in on the fun, I signed in myself:

2 Sonic

2 Sally

4 Ever

FAN ART: Tavion draws Knuckles, Sonic and Shadow counterpointing Proto, Mega and Bass. Duncan draws Metal Sonic, while Truman draws not-metal Sonic. And While Tristan’s cast picture shows both Sonic and Mega in Super mode, I wonder why he didn’t color in anyone else. But, on second thought, the simplicity of it is nice.

OFF-PANEL: “The fans make it happen,” indeed, sometimes despite the comic rather than because of it.