Sonic the Hedgehog #255 (January 2014)

Ben Bates cover the third: Sonic upside-down, Bunnie in fight mode, Nicole playing Tetris, Axel standing on one foot, and (Spoiler alert) bits of Sonic and Sally.

“Countdown to Chaos Part 3: The Rabbot”

Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Jerry Gaylord; Ink: Kent Archer; Color: Matt Herms; Lettering: John E. Workman; Assistant Editor: Vincent Lovallo; Editor: Paul Kaminski; Editor-in-Chief: Victor Gorelick; Westside Story-Teller: Mike Pellerito; Sega Licensing reps: Anthony Gaccione and Cindy Chau

With Bunnie still overdue for check-in, Tails quickly deduces that she’s been captured. Sonic, who lost out on the chance to kick major ass last issue, is all for dropping into the belly of the beast to get her back, said belly being Westside Island somewhere in the Metropolis Zone from Sonic 2. I tried looking at the zone map and it was like looking at a circuit board. Suffice it to say there are a lot of tall weaponized buildings; same old same old. Sonic and Tails drop in with Sonic spinning through the first line of defense as they head for the “command tower” which looks, in this case, like it has a giant core from Portal 2 perched on top. At this point, even though Sonic’s done this enough times, he’s beginning to lose track of how many times he has done this. Still, he’ll worry about that tomorrow.

Speaking of Scarlett the hare, Bunnie and a superior officer who looks way too much like Big confront Sonic and, after some small talk, he orders the soldier with rabbit ears (nudge nudge, wink wink) to attack without specifying whom. So Bunnie punches him in his considerable gut and knocks him out. Then she gets on the intercom and orders everyone to stay in place and stand by, at which point we get the official reveal, with a heavy side order of exposition concerning Sally and Amy Rose and why Bunnie was late checking in. She was looking for a shield generator that was being developed at this location, and security isn’t going to cut them slack for very much longer. Only now does Sonic notice that Bunnie is still kickin’ it old school with a partially-roboticized bunny bod. Nobody thinks to mention exactly how she was restored by Naugus, only that Uncle Chuck helped her once upon a time with no text box cross-reference. Nicole decides she can skip blowing Bunnie’s mind until after they bust out of there, a point underscored by the arrival of Egg Reinforcements.

While we leave the good guys-and-a-gal to ponder their situation, we shift to Artika where the newly-arrived Eggman checks in with a walrus named Tundra who’s provided him with transportation which resembles a high-tech sled with a couple of robo-reindeer. Yeah, right! There follows a lot of in-flight chatter about the shifting timelines with the comic relief robots as Eggman suspects that things could be going downhill pretty soon.

But all this palaver is not why the kids buy this book so we get a couple pages of Sonic and Bunnie busting loose and heading for the “research vault.” They get there and notice that the “door” is a giant cog wheel, again something reminiscent of a feature from Portal 2 but not quite. Just as they’re surrounded and told to surrender, the door opens thanks to Tails who stayed behind to monitor the situation. Their plan, however, goes wrong when a poorly-timed earthquake shakes things up (sorry about that). Bunnie captures the shield generator and escape is provided when the roof falls in on them in such a way that they’re not hurt; what are the odds? Everyone flies up to the Tornado and it’s Mission Accomplished, so far.

Sonic has a mild déjà vu and wonders out loud whether the earthquake is Eggman up to his tricks again. Bunnie tells him that it isn’t and then Sonic has the major déjà vu of Eggman screwing up his Chaos Control during the “When World Collide” finale.

Back at HQ, Bunnie and Antoine are reunited and she takes the opportunity to ask for some explanations. With Antoine as moral support it’s now Bunnie’s turn to get her mind blown in a bravura performance with Antoine there for her, for better or for weirder. Study that page well, kids; there may not be too many moments like that left in the story budget. As for Nicole, she could use a little defragging but is otherwise concerned as to whether she’s got enough juice to fix both Sally and Amy Rose, which in this story passes as a cliff-hanger. Sonic’s priority one is … Sally.

As for Eggman, he’s getting bad news by the bushel on board the Death Egg: he learns about the earthquake in the Metropolis Zone, the boosting of the shield generator, and learns that Sally jacked an escape pod hours ago. Well, he may be late but he’s still vindictive, ordering Metal Sonic to make like Boba Fett and hunt down Sally.

HEAD: This is part 3 of a 4-parter, so we’re deep in the development phase of the story. A lot happens here: you have Sonic and Tails impregnating the impregnable fortress (admittedly it’s not too difficult with most of the guards on hold), Bunnie clobbering the guard with one clobber, and making the break-out for the shield generator and getting back to the Tornado, all the while slapping on the exposition with a trowel in the middle of an earthquake. And that doesn’t take into account what’s up with the Doc and the Bunnie trip down memory lane.

In the previous issue the earthquake had a real effect on the story as it swallowed Uncle Chuck and Muttski and caused Sonic to get a lungful of sample; that plot point seems to have gotten lost in the ozone this time around. In fact, the earthquake in this story is more helpful than anything else, shaking up the guards and making a way of escape for the good guys; getting conked by debris isn’t even an issue here. It’s understandable because the Bunnie brain blast is the heart of this story, and I’ll deal with it in the Heart section.

Aside from the three pages devoted to exposition between Sonic, Tails and Bunnie, the pacing is good in a hurry-up-and-wait kind of way. Ian is saving the big stuff for the next and transitional story. I hope. Head Score: 7.

EYE: I had a serious Ron Lim déjà vu when I saw the artwork here. Lim, who supplied art for Sonic for numerous issues between 2000 and 2003 (I could be off in my reckoning) was a Marvel veteran before doing work for Sonic, particularly his work on the Silver Surfer series. Lim’s artwork taught me a profound lesson about who should not contribute art to this book.

Since superhero stories are the bread and butter of the American comic book industry, it’s come to the point where comic book artists have to have a firm grasp of human anatomy, especially the musculature. This is what I’ve come to call steroid-and-spandex artwork. Lim’s superhero work, on display at ronlimart.com is impressive.

His work for Sonic, however, not so much. The facial expressions were not all that expressive. The backgrounds on frames could be maddeningly simple, appearing as if they had been drawn with a straight edge.

My own theory is that it takes so much discipline to draw convincing steroid-and-spandex art that it tends to knock any other way of drawing out of an artist’s head. In short, I’ve come to the conclusion that you can be a superhero artist or a furry artist but you have to be a genius to do both well.

Jerry Gaylord, whose work can be seen at his deviantArt page where he goes by the handle “thefranchize,” is a superhero artist. And as I suspected even before I surfed over there, there is no furry art on display. The closest is a superhero group shot that included the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and they’re not even front and center.

It’s not for want of trying. But there’s something consistently off about his drawing. The commanding officer with the epaulets at the beginning of the story is a real mess, like a downsized Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon. The buildings aren’t much better. While the facial expressions of Sonic and Tails are OK, there’s something off about Bunnie in some of the panels. She has this wide-eyed open-mouthed look that says “What the hoo-ha am Ah doin’ here?” Frankly the background Bunnies in the memory sequence look more convincing than the foreground Bunnie on other pages. It’s a sure sign that an artist is fighting every instinct and everything he’s ever learned about drawing superheroes, his superhero superego if you will, in order to get the job done, and it keeps pounding against his frontal lobes trying to get out and screaming “NO NO NO, she’s supposed to be SEVEN HEADS HIGH!!!”

Gaylord is just the latest in a string of artists, including Lim and Jim Valentino, who’ve stumbled into this particular minefield. I know Tracy Yardley! has been shouldering the load turning out work for two Sonic books but I had thought Archie Comics had learned its lesson to stick with bona fide furry artists instead of steroid-and-spandex specialists. The art here isn’t bad, but it’s just wrong enough to throw off the story. Eye Score: 5.

HEART: I shouldn’t be surprised that in this story arc the male characters who have had their minds blown to date need less than a page to recover and then Bunnie gets an entire page of emotional collapse. Don’t get me wrong, it’s the highlight of the story as far as I’m concerned in a book where they usually dole out character development with an eyedropper.

Because that’s what’s happening here: comic book action is about doing, character development is about feeling, sometimes in the form of recitation of a back story and sometimes because of something happening to the character. Here it’s sort of a one-two rabbot punch, where Bunnie has her back story downloaded in one shot. She, and the rest of the alt-Sonic characters, should be glad that they don’t succumb to what was referred to in “Total Recall” as a schizoid embolism, though that may be what happened to Naugus and what caused him to abandon the story line.

Still, limiting an extravagant emotional response to the first female character to undergo the mind blow would seem to be a bit sexist were it not for the fact that, as I said earlier, the comic doesn’t often wander into emo territory, except for humor, snark and determination (for the heroes) and malicious humor and rage (for the villains). To what do we owe such a divergence here? The existence of an emotional support system.

I’ve complained before that this comic has really failed to depict the few married couples in this comic acting, well, married. This is a key exception: Bunnie gets her mind blown and Antoine, who’s been there and done that, being there for her. This tracks well with the scenes back in S241’s “Unraveling” where both Sally’s parents and Sonic’s tell Naugus to take a hike rather than have him possess the men folk.

This is about as married as it gets in this comic; even when Antoine and Bunnie were on their honeymoon in the Trouble in Paradise arc (SU17-20), they didn’t act like it. Remember, this is an Archie comic and the characters are supposed to be “as chaste as ice, as pure as snow” (Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1).

I’d like to think that Sally, Bunnie, Antoine, and Rotor, who are all SatAM veterans who don’t owe their existence to any Archie creative, will survive the impending reset. But if they don’t, let page [18] of this issue stand as mute testimony to what this comic could be in its better moments. Heart Score: 10.

FAN ART: Sonic art by Kobe, Cooper and Marshal, but the prize for Outside The Box Art goes to Marisol for her Antoine and Bunnie dolls.

OFF-PANEL: RHIP: rank has its privileges. Since the punchline doesn’t exactly mesh with the image, that’s about all I can say about this strip.

SONIC GRAMS: Trevor wants to know if Honey the Cat (an Xbox Live and Play Station Network fighter) will appear in the comic; being a Sega creation with no personality whatsoever I dare say she’d fit right in. He also wanted to know the basis for Nicole’s design; let’s cut through the PR gobbledygook that passes for an answer in the comic: props go to Renae de Liz who debuted her in “Stargazing” and who is now working on a crowdfunded graphic novel version of J. M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan” which from what she’s posted on Facebooks is going to be extraordinary. And he points out that some of the comic characters have been sporting Sonic Rider Extreme Gear, another sign of creeping Segaism afflicting the comic. Joey gives a shout out to lamar wells’s artwork, wants to work for the comic, and he gets stiffed when he asks for tips. I think that tells you something about the kind of bosses you’d be working for, Joey.