Sonic the Hedgehog #253 (November 2013)

Ben Bates cover: this is a keeper, mainly because it’s one of those 4-parters meant to be viewed side-by-side-by-side-by-side. This explains its rather chaotic composition, especially since the finished work will feature 4 Sonics because this is a 4-part story arc. Sonic, looking like an Olympic speed skater, with Tails, Uncle Chuck, Silver Sonic, and one of Antoine’s boots.

“Countdown to Chaos Part 1: The Builder”

Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Tracy Yardley! and Lamar Wells; Ink: Terry Austin; Color: Matt Herms; Lettering: John E. Workman; Assistant Editor: Vincent Lovallo; Editor: Paul Kaminski; Editor-in-Chief: Victor Gorelick; Chaos Control Freak: Mike Pellerito; Sega Licensing reps: Anthony Gaccione and Cindy Chau

Giving new meaning to “the daily grind,” Sonic grinds along vines in the Mystic Ruins Jungle with Tails tailing behind him. This gives them a chance to bring us up to speed: they’re closing in on Rotor but don’t have a ping yet. And for her part, Nicole is still not 100 percent. She does remember that Rotor and Tails were working on some kind of secret project, keeping it secret especially from Eggman. Just as they find a cloaked source of help…

Cut to Efrika where the aforementioned Eggman is looking pretty ragged as he trudges along the plains with Orbot and Cubot schlepping the equally ragged Egg Mobile with them. They then get a visit, not from the Auto Club, but from a squad of furries led by a water buffalo named Axel. Eggman may not be as quick as Sonic, but he’s swift enough to exploit the situation, realizing that disrupting Sonic’s Chaos Control in “At All Costs: Part 2” (S252) has altered the timeline. And since it’s also provided him with an army and weaponry, he’s going to make the most of it after attending to his own needs first.

Back in the jungle, we find Sonic and Tails making the acquaintance of Big. Sonic hopes Big can get them where they’re going, but Tails is better able to communicate with the big cat; the trick appears to be using direct sentences and small words and forget about asking questions that require lots of exposition. It’s not too effective with Tails, either, who’s starting to fret about coming down with a split personality from juggling two sets of memories. Fortunately for his mental health and for the plot, a fight breaks out with Rotor taking on a horde of Bat Bots. Sonic, Tails and Big run, fly, and fall into the action, respectively, but the routine battle is interrupted by the arrival of Silver Sonic. Just another day in paradise. The two pages where Silver Sonic ends up getting shot to pieces are pretty routine and mercifully short on word balloons. Rotor then gives Sonic a tour of Sky Patrol, a vehicle to go head gasket-to-head gasket with the Death Egg. Deciding that they need to get this over with, Sonic hands off Nicole to Rotor. Of course Rotor’s mind is blown while Nicole gets better reception. We then get a visual representation of the major players: Sonic, Tails, Nicole and Rotor are accounted for, Antoine is on an unspecified mission with Uncle Chuck, Sally and Bunnie are undercover, and Amy Rose is MIA. So the testosterone is flowing at the boy’s club. Sonic is taking this well because Antoine is with Uncle Chuck and if Sally is on a mission then, Spoiler alert, she hasn’t been roboticized. Not in this Mobius, anyway.

Speaking of spoilers, Eggman has gotten his gloved mitts on a set of tools and some moustache wax and he and his vehicle are looking good and on their way to Mercia to get some help from Lord Hood. Good thing both realities speak fluent bureaucratese. Eggman is also in a hurry because this current reality is starting to look rather fragile after he and Sonic crossed over on their way to Mobius Prime. This plot point will be on the final.

HEAD: I’m now convinced that Countdown to Chaos is NOT the new normal for this comic. If anything, it’s the after-vacation-vacation.

Sonic has just spent 4 months pimping for Mega Man’s comic book. With the end of that arc, Countdown To Chaos feels like the vacation to need to take to get over the vacation from which you just returned. Because not all vacations are restful; some end up being more stress-filled than everyday life.

Not that Ian is being very coy about the temporary nature of this story arc. The very title and its use of the word “Countdown” implies that something is coming up and this is just a preliminary stage. Then there’s the final panel with its electric crackle and Eggman’s sort-of kind-of apology for interfering with Sonic’s Chaos Control. There’s really no missing the fact that the Doc’s interference set up a series of events that will likely destroy this continuity and if he wants to finally rid himself of Sonic he’d better do it sooner rather than later because there won’t be a later.

Mercifully, such action as there is gets handled swiftly and with a minimum of dialogue so the action can give way to the interaction necessary to establish what’s going on here. Even in the case of Eggman, nothing really happens with him until he meets up with the Efrican Korps and he can exploit their regimentation to his own use. Even Big is actually useful in this story, which tells you this is not Mobius Prime.

So the real enemy here, of both Eggman and Sonic, is the clock. This hasn’t been that big of a problem in the comic even going back to the legendary “Endgame” (S47-50) with an apocalyptic ending which really felt as if it had been dragged in from nowhere. This should give the story arc a structural unity amid all the destabilizing elements of Sonic and Eggman being in an alt-Mobius and so far it appears to be working. It’s an encouraging beginning. Head Score: 9.

EYE: Tracy Yardley! may have teed up the shots but Lamar Wells (or “lamar wells” aka “trunks24” on deviantArt) gets to address the ball. He gives the characters a good range of emotions, especially Tails. It may be because this is happening on an alt-Mobius but his Rotor seems to be taking a turn toward morphing into Popeye with oversized forearms. The combo works very well here overall. Eye Score: 10.

HEART: The one thing that kind of galls me about this story is that it’s a reversion to treating the Sonic comic as a boy’s book. And it’s taken to the extent that there aren’t any female characters in this story. Nicole is an exception, but she’s also an AI construct whose gender is a fiction. Yet after all this time the comic has female readers and writers of fan mail and makers of fan art.

Go back to the SatAM series and you find only two female characters in the beginning: Sally and Bunnie. But what characters! Sally is the leader and seems like the perfect foil/counterpart for Sonic’s impulsive nature. Bunnie is an unlikely hybrid of a supporting female character and the “muscle” of the group, a part usually played in popular media by another male (e.g., Ben Grimm of the Fantastic Four). As the show developed into another season, the female population multiplied: Dulcy the dragon, Lupe the wolf, Sally’s former nurse Rosie. There’s been a similar gender explosion in the comic over its two decade run, from Julie-Su to the Cat Queen, from Regina Iron Fan to Hope Kintobor to Mina Mongoose. Granted that one can only do so much in the space of one 22-page story, but it just feels wrong at this point for the Freedom Fighters to be as boy-centric as Eggman’s forces. The only times that Eggman was hooked up with a female were in the “Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog” series where the presence of such characters (Mama Robotnik?) was understood to be a joke. This state of things won’t change until the issue after next, so be patient.

Once again, we see a character (Rotor this time) getting his mind blown by contact with Nicole. And it re-enforces the ongoing notion that Sonic isn’t exactly in Kansas anymore.

It’s not like any other Sonic writers have monkeyed around with time and alt-realities, but as I said Ian isn’t even really trying to disguise that aspects of things here. This is an alt-Mobius, though how Nicole gets the dwellers to see Mobius Prime’s realities isn’t clear as of yet, and the clock is running thanks to Eggman and Sonic’s presence.

If for that reason alone, I can look past the gender dynamic of this story arc, remember the way things used to be on Mobius Prime, and miss it all the more. Because no matter how clever a story is, if you don’t care about the characters and miss them when they’re gone (for whatever reason – in this case, a shift to an alt-reality) the story has failed. The existence of fan groups such as Save-Archie-Sonic on deviantArt tells me that Archie may be pushing the outside of the envelope when it comes to messing with the continuity and one of these days they’re going to punch a hole in that envelope. Heart Score: 7.

FAN ART: Sonic is back front and center, with drawing by Madeline, Elliot and Eric. Jason helps round things out with portraits of Sally, Bunnie, Rotor and Antoine.

OFF-PANEL: The better punchline for this joke should have included one word: “soap.” Soap Shoes, invented in 1997, had an exaggerated arch design for grinding on handrails and piping. Team Sonic USA must’ve known a good thing when they saw it, because they included plenty of Soap Shoe ads in Sonic Adventure 2 and gave Shadow’s shoes the same arch. In 2001, the same year that the game premiered, the company was sold off due to legal problems. Adding insult to injury, the ads were deleted when the game was reissued in HD. So the shoes remain mostly as a part of the inline skating culture and the Sonic fandom.

SONIC-GRAMS: Damon wants to see Sonic and Mega Man reunite, and thinks Esipo is best ninja. Thomas, a fan for eight years and feeling parental pressure to put away childish things as he’s now in high school, falls back on using apps to get his Sonic fix. OK, I have a question for Thomas’s parents: if comics are kid’s stuff, how come it’s the grown-ups who write, edit, illustrate, publish, distribute, and thus profit from them? Good and bad news for sonicfan#1 who asks if Antoine will get out of his coma: the good news is that Antoine will be all over the next issue, but the bad news is that it won’t be Antoine Prime. So put whatever kind of a face you want on that.