Sonic Universe #31 (Oct 2011)

Yardley!/Amash/Herms cover: Scourge, Fiona, and the supposed comic relief. Despite the impression left by the cover art, they aren’t out of the woods yet. Or the slammer.

“Inside Job Part 3: Setting the Stage”

Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Tracy Yardley!; Ink: Jim Amash; Color: Steve Downer; Lettering: Phil Felix; Editor: Paul Kaminski; Editor-in-Chief: Victor Gorelick: Parole Board Chairman: Mike Pellerito: Sega Licensing rep: Cindy Chau.

After a one-page recap, we wade into this month’s installment and immediately get a sinking feeling. Thanks to Tracy Yardley!, the Anti-Geoff’s DA hairdo makes him look more like Auntie Jennie. Whatever his gender, Scourge rescues Al and Cal from getting a beat-down while the four characters throw around a lot of pointless tough talk. But the storyline calls for Action and More Action, so despite the inhibitor collar he’s wearing Scourge puts Geoff in a choke hold. That gets broken when Fiona shows up and gives Scourge a boot to the head and a kneecap to the gut, declaiming all the while about how this has to look good. But just as Fiona drops the L-word, Scourge remembers that he’s the Destructix Recruitment Officer so he goes off to do some recruiting.

We catch up with him in group therapy, chaired by the anti-Rouge who’s there to teach the troops how to sing “Kumbaya.” Instead, we get Lightning Lynx spilling his guts as follows:

His career path follows that of Predator Hawk, except that he was the #1-ranked ninja of the Raiju Clan. This was complicated by his falling in love with the Clan Bride, Conquering Storm. In accordance with Clan rules, they fought over it, which probably discourages long engagements. Lightning lost and was expelled from the Clan, which is a pretty senseless way to treat your best fighter, when you stop and think about it; I mean, even Scourge could figure that much out. But stopping to think about what happens in this comic really isn’t a good idea, so let’s move on.

Lightning’s resume gets kind of spotty at this point; he admits to having served He Who Must Not Be Named … OK, it was Mogul again … but we have no idea what he did or for how long. Presumably it was long enough to meet the demands of the plot. When the Irons took over the Four Houses as a prelude to the Dominion arc he was recalled and served Conquering Storm, now reduced to being the figurehead Bride, as her ninja gofer until he made another play for her and was defeated again, this time by Sonic (c.f. SU15), whereupon he was once again booted out of the clan. Memo to Lightning: “No means no!”

At this point, Scourge jumps in and starts pressing Lightning’s buttons and manages to whip the group into a frenzy. That’s when Lynx signs on, and we realize that casting Rouge against type was a complete waste of time and trees.

That just leaves Flying Frog, who visits Scourge’s cell and, without any real reaction from Scourge, walks through a gap in the bars like it was nothing. Mercifully, Ian wants to make short work of this so we only get a 1-page flashback while frog-face spouts a lot of third-rate James Joyce that would never even have made it into the first draft of “Finnegan’s Wake.” Apparently, he had been court jester in Mercia until he let his job go to his head. Either that, or he’d been sucking mercury at the hatter’s. He makes no mention of Mogul, but I’m sure he worked for ol’ Fuzz Butt too at some point (Ian has been at great pains to make him the common denominator in the lives of the Destructix) and it just slipped what’s left of his mind. Long scene short, he’s in.

And now we come to the centerpiece of this entire arc: the jailbreak scene. Their plan is as follows:

Step 1: Lightning Lynx, Flying Frog, and Fiona escape from their cells by … well, Lightning is a ninja and has all kind of mystical powers such as being able to squeeze between incredibly huge gaps between the bars of his cell door. We’ve already seen Frog-Face do the same thing. Fiona manages to slip through as well, though her head looks way too big. The three of them then scuttle past the extremely un-attentive guards toward the conveniently located “Control Room.” Because every prison keeps all control functions conveniently adjacent to the prison population.

Step 2: Overpower the unarmed guards. Given their general ineffectiveness in this arc, you have to wonder if they’d know which end of a firearm was the business end.

Step 3: Open the cell doors. When this happens, the anti-Abby yells “JAIL BREAK!!” for the benefit of those Archie comic readers who have gotten through life without developing a firm grasp of the obvious.

Step 4: “We only turn off the collars of our gang.” You mean those collars that haven’t managed to inhibit anybody’s movements throughout this story arc other than Scourge’s? Seems like a wasted step.

And Step 5: Scourge decides to forget about breaking out in favor of settling some scores. He begins by spin-dashing into Smalls’s bunk from below, in what has to be the closest approximation to a prison rape scene likely to appear in an Archie comic.

HEAD: When I was writing my review of the previous chapter, I asked myself whether I wasn’t being too critical, too hard on what is after all a comic book story arc. Maybe I was being too demanding of a story like this.

Then I read this thing.

As I’ve said before, the heart of a prison story like this is the business of getting OUT of prison. The precision timing, the hair’s-breadth proximity to the guards, the ingenious planning, are all at the heart of a good jail break story. One of the first such stories that I encountered is still worth a read: “The Problem of Cell 13” featuring Jacques Futrelle’s Augustus Van Dusen, aka The Thinking Machine. “Lock me in any cell in any prison anywhere at any time, wearing only what is necessary, and I’ll escape in a week.” And he does. The text is available on the Internet, and you should give it a read.

Ian has paid no attention whatsoever to the staples of the genre and has given us instead a jail break appropriate for … well, for an Archie Comic book. A good jailbreak story should be a feat; this isn’t even junk food, it’s an empty wrapper.

That Fiona and company are able to simply squeeze through the cell bars is an insult to the readers’ intelligence, as well as an indication that the prison must have been built by the low bidder on the project. Honestly, I’ve seen better security at petting zoos. We also get a glimpse of one of Tracy Yardley!’s ideas for the design of the prison arranged in a circle with an open bay in the center. That struck me as an interesting concept, especially if it were a space prison, but the scene was undercut by the incredibly inattentive guards who enabled the whole thing to happen. And the inhibitor collar business should never have gotten past the rough draft stage; it brought nothing to the story so far except a reason for Scourge to get pounded, and it’s now being tossed away like a gum wrapper.

In this sorry mess, the Lightning Lynx back story was the only part of any interest, and anyone who’d read the Journey To The East arc knew what was coming. Even so, Ian pretty much dashed through it. More about that in the Heart section.

In the character of Flying Frog, Ian once again demonstrates that he can only do one flavor of crazy. Never mind that there are characters in various media that run the gamut from slightly eccentric to Visitor From Another Planet. They can be functionally heroic while not otherwise having all their oars in the water. Examples include Edward Wong Hau Pepelu Tivruski IV aka Radical Ed from the anime “Cowboy Bebop,” nebbish Stanley Ipkiss when he puts on “The Mask,” Dexter Douglas’s alter ego Freakazoid, Abby the tattooed techie from “NCIS,” Howling Mad Murdoch from “The A-Team,” and most recently, Pinky Pie from “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.”

Ian, however, insists on making his psychotics creepy and menacing, which is starting to read like an insult to the emotionally disturbed. Scourge says at one point that Frog makes Rosy look cuddly. News flash: basically, Frog IS Rosy with a few minor tweaks. I fear the real reason for Ian to do crazy for Rosy and Frog, however, is that it’s a quick-and-dirty way to give them a personality. If it is a substitute, it’s a very poor one.

I find myself hoping and praying that Ian will find a way to redeem this entire stinking arc. My choice would be to have the warden pull something clever and unexpected at the last minute which leaves everybody back in their cells with Scourge in a BEV splash page screaming “NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” Yeah, it’s a cliché, but it’s better than the security situation in that stupid prison. Head Score: 2.

EYE: Tracy Yardley!’s sneaky little character cameos are getting so old, Paul Kaminski uses them as fodder for his Sonic Spin column in this issue. The only thing really worth looking at is the Lightning Lynx fighting the Bride of Conquering Storm sequence, and that’s only good for two pages. Otherwise, Tracy does his usual good job and provides artistic accompaniment to this travesty. Eye Score: 6, because the weight of a bad story always brings down the artwork. Great art can NEVER redeem a weak story, and they don’t come any weaker than this.

HEART: “The course of true love never did run smooth” according to Shakespeare. Especially if you’re a character in this comic.

I’ve complained again and again that Ian has done little or nothing to depict the characters, married or not, in anything like stable family situations. The one exception was outside of the Sonic canon (the Mobius 30 Years Later arc, SU5-8). And in this story we have two, yes TWO, lovelorn characters.

I’ve already touched on Lightning Lynx, who seems unable to extinguish the torch he still carries for the Bride of Conquering Storm (heck, I’m going back to calling her “Connie” for short). She’s kicked his butt once already, and the look on Connie’s face when Lightning was readmitted to the Clan hints that his absence did not necessarily make her heart grow fonder. Then he gets his butt handed to him by Sonic in the Journey To The East arc, which is basically his ticket back into the Destructix, where they give him the “You’ll always have a home with us” routine. Small consolation.

Is lightning’s situation any better off than that of Predator Hawk? P.H. wants prey, Lightning wants Connie. Lightning’s affections, however, remain seriously unrequited. I’m surprised that getting the girl wasn’t part of Mogul’s deal with Lightning, the same kind of deal we’ve already seen him make to Sarge and Hawk. It’s very much in the mode of the old Faustian bargain with the devil, or at least it should be. Still, there was only room to hint at the Mogul deal with Lightning in this issue, because Ian needed the pages for his cockamamie jailbreak.

Lightning’s one-sided love affair is matched by a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it declaration of love for Scourge by Fiona. This is an upgrade of her otherwise one-dimensional character who simply “likes the bad boys” as Ian declared in the last issue. And like Connie, Scourge doesn’t return the sentiment. In this story, it apparently doesn’t even register with him. Of course, this comes just after Fiona finished putting on a convincing show of giving Shadow a smackdown. With that in mind, Scourge may not have been in the mood for hearts and flowers, unless they’re in the form of prison tattoos.

And let’s not forget that this is all happening with Sally’s existence sort of kind of hanging in the balance. The one stable relationship that the fans WANT to see, and it gets manipulated for numerological reasons: because the story lasted until issue #225. Why the creative can’t grasp the concept that the fans want to see Sonic and Sally together AND happy escapes me.

Despite Fiona’s back story and long tenure in this book in one form or another (including her bot form in the infamous “Growing Pains,” S28-29), her repeated heel turns have effectively undercut the ability of the readers to care about what happens to her. You lose that opportunity, you lose the audience and that’s dangerous. Ian has had Fiona shoehorn in a declaration of love for Scourge; now he has to work to make us believe it. Otherwise, it’s just one more throwaway, a tease that falls off the character and leaves no trace. Heart Score: 2.

Sonic Spin: I’ve already spoiled it for you.

Fan Art: Aside from Monzy’s Scourge portrait, we also get Dustin’s Scourge doll … excuse me, action figure. And Eric’s reprise of the Supers, Sonic and Scourge, mixing it up.

Fan Funnies: According to Dooter, Scourge discovers that his anti-Mom is in the next cell. That’s gotta do wonders for keeping order.

Off-Panel: makes me wonder what Feist could be charged with. How about Character Lameness in the first degree.

Letters: Mark sucks up shamelessly. Krissie brings the questions to the party. We learn that the anti-Tails won’t be getting his own arc any time soon, Editorial blows off any questions about the anti-Knuckles and Hershey and thinks Silver and Shadow make a good comedy act (better than Al and Cal, IMO), and Krissie is one reader who’s confused by the Genesis arc. There’s also a gratuitous reference to the one-hit wonder “Rock Me, Amadeus,” though the artiste, Johann Holzel aka Falco, was also a co-composer of “Der Kommissar.” I presume Editorial is aware that Falco died in 1998. I mention this because it’s what I do as an indexer: making note of the birth and death dates of authors who have passed on. You do this often enough, you wonder what 4-digit number someone will be attaching to YOUR name when the time comes.