Sonic the Hedgehog #254 (December 2013)

Ben Bates cover, continued: Antoine, Sonic, and Rotor. Honestly, am I the only one creeped out by Sonic’s grin? It looks really wrong, like he knows this whole thing is crazy and he’s decided to go crazy himself. Even the weird foregrounding of his shoe soles isn’t as big of a distraction.

“Countdown to Chaos Part 2: The Soldier”

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; Science Fair Judge: Mike Pellerito; Sega Licensing reps: Anthony Gaccione and Cindy Chau.

And you thought you were having a bad day. Eggman and his two henchbots have entered Avalon airspace and they’re getting shot at by GUN aircraft. But even without a starboard engine he’s still close enough to Hood’s home base to manage a landing he can waddle away from. His first order of business is to yell at Hood and ask what happened to his air superiority. That kind of got lost when Hood became preoccupied with Bow and his gang of low-rent Merry Men; next thing he knew, GUN was offshore and establishing a no fly zone. Eggman manages to restrain himself from turning Hood into a belt on the spot and instead decides that the Egg Mobile could stand another patch job.

Meanwhile, Sonic and Tails find themselves in more sylvan surroundings. And who do they run across but Sonic’s Uncle Chuck, in the middle of conducting an experiment with a piece of equipment that resembles a prop from an Ed Wood movie: it looks like a shoe box with three light bulbs stuck on top. That doesn’t stop Sonic from giving Uncle Chuck a teary-eyed power hug. Now I know this is an alt-Mobius.

Turns out Uncle Chuck is using the cartoon gadget to investigating the tremors, which he believes are Eggman’s fault. Before Sonic can say “Yeah, well, I may have had something to do with that as well,” they meet Chuck’s bodyguard, Antoine, sporting a shirtless Masters of the Universe look but without the physique. He also gets a warm reception from Sonic and Tails since this Antoine has both feet in the land of the living and not one in the grave. We also meet Muttski. He used to be Sonic’s non-sentient dog but now he’s playing child assistant to Chuck’s Mr. Wizard. Sonic and Tails exchange looks that say “OK, we’re NOT in Kansas anymore!

Uncle Chuck asks what they’re up to and lets them off easy by assuming they have business with Antoine. Ant would just as soon get back in the fight but knows how important Chuck’s work is; what he doesn’t know is why they’re acting “as if I am ze ghost, here to be haunting you.” Sonic and Tails aren’t in the mood to deliver exposition so they hand off Nicole the hot potato with predictable results. They think Antoine’s shocky expression may be because he’s reliving his trip to the hurt locker, but he interrupts them to ask about his own Priority One: Bunnie. C’est l’amour.

We then cut from love to warcraft as Eggman is seen at the controls of the Egg Mobile, mecha edition. His plan could only work in a comic book: hop on board a GUN aircraft carrier, have the henchbots hijack a plane while he abandons the Egg Mobile and has it run into the control tower of the ship and blow itself up, and then board the plane and take off. Like I said, only in a comic book. Bear with me because I’ll explain everything wrong with this plan in the HEAD section.

Back in the woods, Nicole explains that she’s feeling the effect of the genesis wave to a lesser extent and can maybe blow the minds of 2 or 3 more Mobians, tops. Nicole also states that Bunnie has been late for her check-in with home base. Before Antoine can take off in hot pursuit of his hottie, there’s another earthquake that threatens to swallow up Uncle Chuck and Muttski. So Sonic, Tails and Antoine manage to make the save though Uncle Chuck’s science project gets banged up in the process, which may have had an effect on Sonic of some sort when he inhaled some of the sample or whatever. Uncle Chuck and Muttski head off to Spagonia, which I regret to say sounds way too much like the name of an Italian restaurant to take seriously, while urging Sonic to see a physician; apparently this Mobius has universal health care. Antoine seconds the motion and also has a message they can deliver to Bunnie: “I am well, but I will not be whole until I am with her again.” I know the feels, bro, I know the feels.

And where is Bunnie? In the Metropolis Zone, though how deep her deep cover is remains to be seen.

HEAD: There’s a lot to talk about in this installment, and it’s mostly good news. For starters, there’s no ass-kicking as there was with Rotor and the badniks, Silver Sonic included, in “The Builder” (S253). What we do get is an earthquake, which is as good of a cause for action as your standard good guys vs. bad guys beatdown. Technically, it’s a rescue operation and since one of the characters needing rescuing is Uncle Chuck it’s more than a little personal for Sonic, considering the enthusiastic reunion earlier in the book.

The other spur of action in this story is Eggman’s plan to steal a jet from the deck of an aircraft carrier. I’m no military techie, but I think even the hair and make-up crew on an NCIS episode would take one look at this plan and laugh themselves silly. Let me count the ways.

First there’s the Egg Mobile with legs. This reminds me a lot of the device Eggman was piloting around in Sonic Adventure 2 so I’m willing to give it a pass. What I won’t look past is the Egg Mobile taking a running jump off a cliff and onto the deck of the aircraft carrier. I really have trouble believing he built up the necessary momentum, even with the rocket thrusters used in SA2. So this is not off to a good start.

Then there’s the aircraft carrier itself, one of the worst looking pieces of military hardware to appear in this comic. There’s simply nothing going on above the flight deck; there’s only a single air traffic control tower like you’d find at a small airport. In fact, this looks like someone took a small airport and turned it into an island, chopping off a lot of runway in the process.

As near as I can tell, there are 5 jets and two mecha on deck. The order is given to scramble the fighters and Eggman shoots down a grand total of one plane. I have no idea whether he let the others get away.

Which brings up the issue of personnel. Back in World War 2, for every British Tommie, American flyboy, German Luftwaffe pilot or Japanese samurai in the sky, there were usually like seven guys on the ground taking care of fuel, ammunition and maintenance. And if this is a GUN craft, those support personnel should have had some military training and ought to have been taking pot shots at Eggman. That’s what they do in groups like GUN. I mean, the name says it!

As for the exploding Egg Mobile, it’s OK as far as it goes. Having it blow up the air traffic control tower, however, is not sufficient to send an aircraft carrier to the bottom. I seriously doubt that they store their ammunition in the tower; hitting the ammo storage room is how at least one kamikaze pilot accomplished his mission and sunk the aircraft carrier St. Lo during the Battle for Leyte Gulf. Like everything else, this is made to look ridiculously easy.

Worst of all is the theft of the plane itself, which demonstrates absolutely no knowledge of how jets take off from aircraft carriers. Herewith, a short lesson:

In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince [the book], Arthur Weasley comes up with a security question: How do Muggles keep their airplanes up in the air without magic? It’s based on two principles of physics: lift and acceleration. Lift is why the wings of aircraft are designed the way they are: once the air passes across the wings negative air pressure is created that lifts the plane off the ground. Of course that takes a lot of acceleration so planes taxi down the runways while the plane gets up to speeds of several hundred miles an hour.

Military aircraft on an aircraft carrier, however, do not have the luxury of runways hundreds of yards long. So they rely on steam-driven catapults at deck level to grab the plane and give it a shove once the engines get up to speed. Until that happens, aircraft don’t “move” as Orbot puts it. Not enough momentum and an aircraft will dribble off the runway into the drink; too much and the nose could snap off.

That’s why one man could have stopped Eggman’s entire plan, and I’m sorry to disappoint some of you but it isn’t Jethro Gibbs. It’s the Catapult Officer. It’s the job of the Catapult Officer to engage the catapult once the pilot has everything ready; it’s one of the things that the pilot has to trust to someone else. With all those AWOOOGA klaxons going off, any Catapult Officer would have shut down the system or at least powered down the one for the plane that the two comic relief bots commandeered. Then it would just sit on the flight deck like a $30 million paperweight; it’s not going anywhere.

In short, there’s no way anything as complex as stealing a fighter jet could happen this way, and you don’t have to be a fan of Tom Clancy’s novels to realize that. Ian makes it look like a bunch of thugs jacking an Escalade. This is why I insist that even a comic book story has to have some plausibility if not realism. This is why people roll their eyes when someone suggests that comic books are a legitimate form of literature. Not if they keep running stuff like this.

Even though this was a really big rock to trip over, there were still a lot of good things about this story. The reunions with Uncle Chuck and Antoine were handled well. And I was gratified to see Antoine’s trademark syntax back up to form. Ken Penders, back in the day, used to treat Antoine’s French accent much like Geoff’s Oz-speak: after a panel or two he’d forget that they were supposed to be speaking with accents and not even bother. And there’s more to it than remembering his zeesez and zoses; there’s also the over-elaboration of his sentence structure, as in the line “I am so very confused,” with the “confused” pronounced with three syllables if at all possible.

And after too long of an absence, Muttski is back. His has been a tortured path, poor soul. Originally Sonic’s pet in the SatAM series, he had been caught and roboticized by Eggman at some point, made one appearance in a SatAM ep, and was then forgotten. He fared no better in the comic; though eventually deroboticized and fitted with an ability to speak at one point, nobody seemed to know what to do with him on a regular basis and he was once more forgotten. His last major appearance was S134’s “Say You Will” which appeared almost 10 years ago. The fact that he’s now sentient is one more indication that this is an alt-Mobius.

Still, this is a good story in the service of what may very well be an uncanonical diversion. Don’t ask me why they can’t put the same amount of thought and love into every issue of the book. Head Score: 8, because the plane hijacking sequence was so ridiculous that it cost this story points.

EYE: Yardley! and wells continue doing good work here. The expressions of the characters are very well done and even Muttski makes me wish he’d found a bigger role in the comic. Eye Score: 10.

HEART: At this point, I don’t know if Sonic’s inhaling the sample foreshadows anything or is only filler. Sonic himself doesn’t comment upon it except to dismiss everybody’s concern for his shortness of breath and a facial expression that is highly reminiscent of Sonic Unleashed. Wait until next issue.

The two big Heart moments here are relational: the reunions with Uncle Chuck and Antoine. In each case, they’re an improvement on the models Sonic left behind on Mobius Prime, as are a lot of the players. Antoine’s comments about Bunnie are especially accurate for someone who’s tied the knot. That should make me glad, but old habits die hard so I’m more wary than anything else.

Any time this comic starts getting interesting in terms of how the characters are treated, it’s always in the context of an alt-reality story. The “Mobius: 30 Years Later” arc (SU5-8) is a prime example. Somehow, perhaps because the reality is an alt, there’s a freedom that allows the characters to be more interesting and realistically depicted than usual. Lara-Su babysitting the Royal kids was a revelation, a great character who didn’t deserve to disappear at the end of the arc.

And now that we’re in the midst of a Countdown to who knows what, I can only think of this world as a provisional reality until we get to the next one. I imagine Ian isn’t in too much of a hurry to get back to it because there’s a lot of mess to clean up: Sally roboticized, Antoine comatose, Bunnie on the road, the echidnas gone, Geoff possessed by Naugus. Typical comic book stuff, in other words.

Dealing with all the different plot points mentioned is not that big a problem, except to make it interesting instead of turning it into a deus ex machina hauled in to fix a plot problem. But that’s part of the two-edged sword that is loose continuity. It can allow you to undo a plot hole but it also gives you the elbow room to dig yourself in deeper. I think that’s what happened with Naugus’s schizophrenic triad of nagging ghosts; he’s pretty much out of that corner but now we’re in the realm of demonic possession.

Before plunging into this story arc I wondered if this was going to be the new normal; I think it’s pretty safe to say that it isn’t. In one respect I’m sorry to see that happen. Back in the old continuity, Antoine got put into a soap opera coma and Bunnie made herself scarce. But I like seeing Antoine and Bunnie in love and am looking forward to see if the coosome twosome reunite in the next issue. Not that there’s much chance of that having a happy ending in the Prime continuity. So I’m digging it while it lasts. Heart Score: 9.

FAN ART: Ashton draws Sonic and the cast, Korbin draws Sonic grinding (see my discussion of Soap Shoes in the review of S253), Cara draws Tails and Rachel draws the provisional and probably temporary Sally.

OFF-PANEL: OK, why is a character who spent the last 20 years naked except for shoes and socks and gloves worried about leaving the iron on? I’m sure I can’t be the only person who’s asked this question.

SONIC-GRAMS: Micah gushes, and so does Hayden except to mention that he didn’t get all the When World Collide issues. Neither did I; I still need to get the Mega Man issues. I hope Hayden isn’t waiting for any freebies.