Sonic the Hedgehog #267 (February 2015)

Evan Stanley/Terry Austin/Ben Hunzeker cover: a study of Sonic the Wolfhog by moonlight, flanked by portraits of Sally, Eggman and a bot. Sonic’s freakishly-big claw in the foreground looks like an example of bad 3D. The cover declares “Sonic the Hedgehog must contain the BEAST within…” thereby beating the Sonic = Hulk drum even louder. I guess until the planet gets its Gaia rebalanced the comic won’t let Sonic be Sonic.

“Ambushed!: Part 2”

Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Jamal Peppers and Evan Stanley; Ink: Terry Austin; Color: Gabriel Cassata; Lettering: John Workman; Assistant Editor: Vincent Lovallo; Editor: Paul Kaminski; Editor-in-Chief: Victor Gorelick; Suits: Mike Pellerito and Jon Goldwater; Sega Licensing reps: Tyler Ham and Anthony Gaccione.

Sonic is still swinging and running with Moss as Ray and Mighty look on. It seems that Sonic has internalized Moss’s philosophy, which in military parlance is “Embrace the suck.” After a whole page of talk, Ian decides it’s time for Sonic to do more with his new attitude than stay in game practice mode. So he sends in a “flying dynamo” mobile battery. Sonic, with Ray and Mighty as back-up, prepares to take it on…

As we cut away to Sally, Bunnie and Antoine who are still having bot problems of their own left over from the previous issue. Rotor, meanwhile, has been playing guardian angel and decides it’s time to do something worthwhile in this comic. He decides to take Tails and Amy with him to help bail out the others while Nicole holds down the office. Meanwhile, Sky Patrol is being ridiculously infiltrated by an appropriately ridiculous threat: the Tails Doll, in all its schlurpy glory.

Back on the ground, Bunnie tries to cover Sally’s attempt to get the Chaos Emerald (Remember?) but that isn’t working out too well, either. Rotor and the others show up but their attempt at rescue and evac is thwarted by what appears to be a fishnet force field. Eggman then gets a page spreading exposition and exuding overconfidence.

As for Sonic, he takes advantage of his newly-elastic bone structure to slingshot himself Luffy-style into the battery bot, but after wailing on it, it’s Mighty who gets to deliver the coup de grace. That gets Thunderbolt’s attention, though she only gets one panel’s worth of appearance. In silhouette. With no word balloon. Blink and you’ll miss her; Heaven knows I haven’t missed her a bit.

Back on Sky Patrol we see Team Useless: Cream, Cheese and Big. Cream decides that she wants to make her bones in this hero comic so she takes the others, along with T-Pup and Omochao, to rescue the rescuers. They do this by (and if you have trouble believing me, rest assured I don’t much believe it myself) flying through the holes in the fishnet force field. I don’t often use the term “half-assed” but it seems to be the most appropriate description for this. With everyone on board, Sky Patrol retreats and Sally treats herself to a good cry.

The next morning, a slimmed-down and less-hairy Sonic hitches a ride back to Sky Patrol with Tails, who warns him that everybody is pretty bummed about the mission. Sonic assures everyone that despite his moonlight hairiness he’s back in the game. Speaking of games, Nicole informs the crew that there’s a Chaos Emerald being offered as a prize at a gladiatorial … er, fight tournament in the Casino Zone hosted by a hedgehog subsequently named Breezie, about whom more below.

HEAD: Breezie may be new to the comic, but not to the Sonic fandom. She made her debut in the animated “Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog.” According to Mobius Encyclopedia, she’s a cold-hearted media mogul … or is that a redundancy? The article says she’s apparently taking the role of Mammoth Mogul in the pre-retcon comic, which means we don’t have to put up with ol’ Fuzz Butt anymore, which is a plus. Her look has been upgraded and she makes a better use of her curves than Thunderbolt, who basically only has one overall curve. Archie has elected to hang on to her old name, despite the fact that it reminds me of the insect-like beings mentioned in “My Little Pony.”

We now go from Breezie to cheesy, as in Swiss cheese which has holes (or “eyes” as they’re technically known). Sally and her partners are in trouble, their rescuers are in trouble, and Sonic is in no position to help. So Team Useless pulls everyone to relative safety through the holes in the fishnet force field. It only takes one page, encouraging the reader not to linger and contemplate the holes, plot or otherwise.

OK, I honestly don’t think force fields work that way. I’m no physicist but I’m pretty sure that if there are holes in a force field they’d be so miniscule you couldn’t fit bodies through them. The logical approach to the problem would have involved powering down the force field but this is a comic book after all, so logic doesn’t necessarily apply. I haven’t seen anything this stupid in the comic since the cockeyed physics of the floating jail in the Inside Job story arc (SU29-32).

Sonic’s dealing with his Hulk-werewolf tendencies is just as ridiculous. Bruce Banner basically had no choice about Hulking out, and neither do werewolves. Sonic has no choice either but has learned to embrace his inner whatever-it-is. It’s not so much that Sonic has learned how to contain the beast within, as the cover art breathlessly declared, but to roll with it when the occasion arises, which is like when the sun goes down. In “Sonic Unleashed” the game decides which mode Sonic will be in: run-and-gun or smash-and-smash. Taking this back to Uncle Chuck’s Larry Lightbulb experiment which led to Sonic’s huffing Dark Gaia and getting into this mess in the first place, it seems like the comic has traveled a needlessly long road to get Sonic to where he’s OK with the changes which are supposed to last until … well, until the next retcon, probably.

This story, if not the two-part arc, screams out a certain level of desperation to move along, if not just to get it over with. When you have a story arc titled “Ambushed!”, with the all-important exclamation point, you pretty well know what the ride is going to feel like before it even starts moving. The sheer stupidity of the holes-in-the-force-field plot point is just icing on this particularly lopsided cake. And do NOT get me started on the return of Tails Doll! Head Score: 3.

EYE: The Peppers-Stanley artwork is good, and I was particularly impressed by Gabriel Cassata’s use of a brick red background for the page featuring Eggman while blues and greens dominate the Moss sequence. Eye Score: 9.

HEART: As thin as the narrative soup is in this story, Ian had two Heart moments; unfortunately, he glossed over one and totally missed the other.

The scene where Sally let herself break down after everybody was rescued is nothing new to Sonic veterans; such a moment helped set up the plot of the epic SatAM two-parter “Blast To The Past.” Here, the main take-away for Sally is that Eggman suckered her into trusting too much in the intel swiped from him a few issues back. She’s taking it really hard, especially considering how close her friends came to buying the farm.

Unfortunately, despite the writing and the artwork, the “feels” as they say on the Internet don’t come through. It feels too much like exposition rather than emotion. Its only purpose seems to be to elicit another helping of exposition from Sonic.

And to really seal the uselessness of the rescue, once Cream and friends get everyone back on board, she and the plot point just about disappear. And in a way, that’s a shame.

Mind you, I find Cream to be incredibly annoying. I have a pretty strong stomach for kidvid even at its most cloying, but Cream isn’t simply annoying, she’s Dora The Explorer annoying. She showed the same tendency in Sonic Heroes.

Yet in this story she actually accomplished something! Despite the stupidity of the plot device, she still rounded up the remaining members of Team Useless and pulled off the rescue.

So how do the others repay her for the effort? Quite simply, they don’t. The rescue plot device itself is forgotten while Sally’s fit of “I could have been the death of you” pity party is front and center.

The end of this story needed an editorial rethink. It should have been natural for Sally’s team, no matter how banged up they were, to show some love to Cream, to have the writer fit in a “Thanks, li’l darlin’” here and a “petit cher” there. Even if it meant ending the story with Nicole’s “I do have a lead” and holding off on the Breezie reveal until next issue, it would have been a workable feel-good ending. Heart Score: 4.

FAN ART: Wolfhog Sonic takes over the feature, with artistic contributions from Mindy, Aurora, Evelyn and Jackie.

OFF-PANEL: Ray has a lot to learn about aerodynamics. A lot. A WHOLE lot!

SONIC-GRAMS: Shane from Northern Ireland checks in to show appreciation for their very loose adaptation of Sonic Unleashed, and wants to see more of Mighty, Ray and Razor. Sulla learns that Nicole will be the focus of an upcoming Sonic Universe arc, that said arc will include a heaping helping of her back story, and that they get “about a room full of fan mail every month.” I wonder if Ian will give a nod to the first coverage of Nicole’s back story: the “Princess Sally’s Crusade” story arc by Mike Kantrovich and Ken Penders that dates back to Sonic #17-18 and culminates in the In Your Face Special. I’m afraid that, since this is still a retcon reality, all bets are off.